MY ART

The idea than Man evolved from monkey-like lower primates doesn’t sit well with me. I think it’s more likely he evolved from some other more caustic and parasitic specie. A malevolent specter, early Man slithered from the primal scum pond -- all teeth and toxin-- spreading full-blown havoc and murderous ruin along the way.

After all, monkeys are fun loving. They enjoy the unbridled thrill of public masturbation, flinging feces for fun, unrestricted random sex and picking insects out of each other’s unsanitary pelt. Kind of like the hippies. Of course the hippies eventually had enough Homo sapienism clubbed into them by the Authorities that they all became registered Republicans and homicidal day-traders.

Man’s inclination to deport himself politically seems to be a primal human impulse. I mean, who among us wouldn’t seize the opportunity to connive and make backroom deals that would enrich us at the expense of our neighbors? Which of us would not endeavor to increase our power base while crushing irritating minorities under foot? This sort of behavior is in our genes and it’s mythic in resolution. Oh sure, there’s the uncommon aberrant, the rare exception to the rule. The occasional sainted anomaly-- full of good cheer and love—is inevitably dispatched, his head routinely piked and conspicuously displayed as an example to those of us who may be inclined to embrace grace and kindness. Or other disgraceful, inhuman notions.

Human nature is a dangerous business. And the way that the mean-spirited human condition interlards with venal politics is an effervescent wellspring of inspiration for my art. It gives me warm fuzzies to speculate upon and corroborate the corrupt dominion and troop movements of the wicked and bombastic criminals who run our lives and steal our money. The treacherous delinquents who wield power like a meat-ax and work their mesmer on the gullible mob, riling it and infusing it with mischievous bloodlust. This is my primary inspiration.

Of course it’s a losing battle. So as I pull on the pervious tin plate of humor, mount the sway- backed steed of sarcasm and wield the blunt-edged sword of ridicule I know that I’m a doomed artisan in clown drag. My fate is inexorably tied to the dark fancy and murderous whim of whatever Pretorian brigade guards the gates of culture. The Art Community --like the Community-at-Large-- is riddled with the bacillus of politics. If I painted graceful landscape, stoic portraiture or perfectly composed still life, I’d be less likely to end up as a pile of bleached bones on the garbage heap of culture outside the garrisoned walls of civilization.

But I prefer flinging feces for fun.

THE RIGHTEOUS ONE

I met 'Righteous' Bob Rudnick in 1970. He was a free-form disc-jockey on WGLD, broadcasting on the FM band "from the heart of honky heaven" (he would intone nightly). His show was Kokaine Karma and was an unconstrained gumbo of Charlie Mingus, John Coltrane and Sun Ra tracks, Captain Beefheart, the MC5 and the Psychedelic Stooges, Commander Cody and the Lost Planet Air Rangers, the Fugs, the Rolling Stones (their street-fighting personas), Lenny Bruce monologues, anarchistic politics and drug advocacy.

Rudnick at one time or another had been a journalist and disc-jockey in New York, New Jersey, Detroit, LA and Chicago. And Minster of Propaganda for the White Panther Party. Bob became known a "Righteous" when one night in 1968 he and partner Dennis Frawley held an on-air revival. As part of the revival Rudnick righteously healed afflicted listeners by having them rub their radios on their afflicted area.

He had been fired from virtually every radio station he'd worked for (a point of pride) and he wouldn't last long at WGLD. But in the meantime I got a call from him asking if I'd be interested in creating a poster for the station. "Hell yes!" I said and I set off to meet Bob at the White Panther commune.

The White Panther commune was a three-story building fronting onto LaSalle around the corner from the Chicago Avenue police station. In those days it was common for the cops to drive by radical enclaves like the Chicago Seed office and the White Panther commune and fire a few rounds into the place. But there was a pecking order. If you were a ghetto dweller and aligned with a radical group espousing self-determination (like the Black Panthers) they were likely to blast through your doorway in the middle of the night and kill your rebellious black ass.

The White Panthers had their building sandbagged just in case. And they were heavily armed. Motherfuckers were going to go out in a blaze of glory when the pigs came blasting. The slogan of the White Panther Party was "Dope, Rock 'n' Roll and Fucking in the Streets!" The romanticism of it all appealed to me.

I sat downstairs and waited for Rudnick. He came down the stairs with a barefooted hippie chick on each arm. The commingled scents of pachouli oil and yeast infection were redolent. I knew I was among friends.

***

SATURDAY, JULY 15, 1995

Rudnick came to me in a dream. We're in a house together and he is very sick. We're with a Sicilian, his hair slicked and his shirt open flaunting gold chains, dangling charms and regalia that are insignia of his malevolence and dominant masculinity. This Italian is the Authority of the house.

Bob sits at a table. He's fragile and indistinct. The Sicilian makes threats.

He demands that Bob balance and twirl a green plate on the end of a dowel -- like a circus performer defying gravity for the amusement of the unwashed to the tune of "Flight of the Bumblebee".

Rudnick tries but is unable to perform this command.

I'm sitting at the table with Bob. I look over toward an open closet door. Now the sinister Italian is standing in the closet, empty except for the grim thug himself and a few wire coathangers.

The Sicilian's back is to us and he has one of the hangers looped around his neck. He's pulling up on the hook of the hanger. The implication is clear. If Bob cannot perform the green plate balancing trick he will be garroted -- murdered by the goon -- and left to hang in the closet like and old suit of clothes.

It's one of those dreams of pending disaster encumbered by anxiety and laced with impotence.

***

MONDAY, JULY 17, 1995

Bob "Righteous" Rudnick, my friend of 25 years, has terminal cancers in his liver and pancreas. He's had a shunt and a surgically implanted pump inserted in his stomach so that fluids will bypass his diseased liver.

Three weeks ago he'd had a procedure that had ravaged his vocal chords leaving his once-resonate voice a raspy whisper. At the same time he was given a death sentence by a team of dour health professionals and ordered out of his bed at Rush Presbyterian St, Luke's Medical Center Chicago. He had been assigned a hospice bed in a nursing home deep in Chicago's predominately Jewish Roger's Park neighborhood.

His deterioration has been swift. I'm told that if I want to be with him for one last time I should hurry -- he has a little as 48-hours to live.

I booked a flight to Chicago that would leave Atlanta at 5pm at get me to O'Hare at 6pm. The weather is bad in the east and my flight is delayed an hour. I arrive in Chicago at 7pm, and I grab a cab.

The cabbie is a foreign national, new to Chicago, and unaware of the location of the Glencrest Nursing Home. He heads off in the opposite direction and I don't catch his error until we're at Lawrence Avenue -- 4800 north and 6500 west. I need to be at Touhy Avenue -- 7200 north, 2400 west. I'm in a race with Death and, like in my dream, I'm frustrated by anxiety and hampered by impotence.

Finally we pull into the parking lot of the Glencrest Nursing Home at a quarter-to-eight. Visiting hours end at 8pm.

I sign in at the register. The receptionist is an unpleasant fat woman with a bad eye who clearly doesn't enjoy her employment and does not possess the people-friendly skills that would benefit one in her position.

The nursing home is a foul and squalid terminal for the destitute and enfeebled. A clearing-house for the dying. The place stinks of urine and is layered in grime. It's a deplorable ghetto -- the final holding tank for the withered and impoverished -- running on the empty fuel tank of Medicaid dollars.

The fat receptionist with the bad eye instructs me that "Stanley" Rudnick is down the hall in a corner room on the first floor. I move down the hallway around a cluster of piss-stained, fluorescent-lit hopeless souls on walkers and in wheelchairs.

Tacked to the door of Bob's room is a canary-yellow 8 1/2" x 11" sheet of paper embellished with bad clip-art of a clown and balloons. "Stanley Rudnick" is scrawled in black magic marker in a vacant area. The door is open and as I approach I can see a moderate-sized room with four beds separated by draw-curtains to provide a modicum of privacy. A black and white television hangs on the wall tuned into a White Sox game.

On the first bed immediately to the left of the open door sits Rudnick, a skeletal apparition. He sees me, grins wide and throws open his bony arms for an embrace, which I accept with relish.

The dream is over and I've beat Death to the finish line. I'm with my friend, locked in a bear hug with a shadow of his former self.

***

LOOKING FOR GOD'S COUNTRY

Herman and Teresa Rudnick,
Hymie and Toots in 1959
With the first heart attack on their back
left Anthracite, Pennsylvania, for Albino Beach, Florida
Now in the balding grey dusk of the eighties
going blind, scared to drive to the grocery,
the pharmacy, their doctor,
or even take a walk after Wheel of Fortune
Their two sons scattered by the superficial wind of maturity
Their baby at 40
dances with Morpheus at midnight
on the wind-chilled street corners of the city that once worked
While the eldest, their first-born
takes out a second mortgage on his only daughter
to find the warmth and sun of God's Country
just like his parents, Hymie and Toots

--Bob Righteous Rudnick
Fall 1987

***

I only have a few minutes with Rudnick before visiting hours are over.

Bob reaches into a drawer beside his bed, pulls out a pack of cigarettes and lights up.

"MY GOD!" bellows an agitated old guy in the bed across from Bob's. "ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR MIND?! THERE'S OXYGEN IN HERE. YOU'LL KILL US ALL!"

"Ironic" rasps Rudnick as he takes another puff and grins.

The guy in the other bed grabs his walker and hobbles out to report fire in the hole.

"I'll see you in the morning" I tell Bob. As I'm heading for the front door the fat lady with the bad eye lumbers past me on her way to Bob's room yelping admonitions along the way.

I walk up the block to the nearest bus stop for transportation to Kate Nolan's, where I'm staying.

As I'm waiting for the bus a black man, around fifty years-old, approaches me.

"Hey man" he says. "I just got stabbed." I can see blood spreading through his shirt at belly level. "Buncha young niggas tried to take my wallet, but I wouldn't give it up, and I chased them off. Don't know what's wrong with young niggas these days. Actin' like thugs! Listenin' to rap music. They picked the wrong nigga to fuck with tonight. I wouldn't give 'em my money so they cut me. It ain't bad, though. I been cut worse than this mo' than once. Stupid young niggas don't even know how to stab people! In my day we knew how to cut somebody!" he says as he moves on down the street.

Suddenly a black Bronco speeds in my direction. I jump back from the curb as the suv lurches and screeches inches from the bus stop sign. Two skinheads in the backseat lean out of the window shaking their fists and shrieking incoherent threats and hateful anger at me as they barrel by. The suv hurtles off in search of other villainous horseplay.

As the black Bronco tears off up the block a couple of young Hispanic girls, who couldn't be more than twelve years-old sashay by in short plaid schoolgirl skirts, high-heels, big hair and too much makeup, like miniature prostitutes trolling for tricks. They give me a look and a wink but continue their nascent promenade rummaging the avenue for depravity, foraging for mortal sin.

A woman pushing a baby stroller approaches me. She says "I'm out of formula for my baby. Do you know if there's a 24-hour grocery around here?"

"I don't know the neighborhood" I say. "I'm from out of town."

She continues down the sidewalk, pushing her fussy hungry baby as sirens howl faintly in the night air.

The siren grows louder. I look back down in the direction of the Glencrest Nursing Home. Red flashing lights careen into view as a fire truck rockets at full throttle up the dark street and into the driveway at the Nursing home.

My bus pulls up to the stop and I climb aboard.

When I get to Kate's I call John Petrie and tell him we have to get Bob back into the hospital. He deserves more than the squalid, urine-stained waiting room where he's been sent to die. We arrange to have an ambulance pick him up the next day and take him to the Emergency Room at Rush Presbyterian St, Luke's. If they can find something wrong with him other than the cancers that are killing him he will be admitted.

***

FOR GAVIN WHOSE NIGHT IT WAS

Walking down Woodward at 1:57 a.m.
when Detroit bars close
and no one is on the street
but me

The wind chilling to the bone like the Hawk,
Chicago's Hawk,
welcomes me to the Murder City
on Devil's Night.

A smell of burning wood in the air
Only a hooker and me witness the burning
pausing paranoid to hear if there are any screams

And from abandoned Victorian townhouses
the cries of copulating cats
echo through the Cass Corridor
bouncing off my consciousness
sounding like the helpless pleas of abused hillbilly children

Tonight is Devil's Night
One thousand nine hundred and eighty-seven years
after the Common Error
even the word Detroit feels cold

And Geraldo Rivera missed an exclusive interview with Jesus
and last call by three minutes and a field goal
Murder in the Motor City is up 10%
Think we we'll pass Hank Aaron's home run record
by Christmas

--Bob Righteous Rudnick

***

TUESDAY, JULY 18, 1995

The next morning I arrive at the Glencrest Nursing home around 10 am. The old guy in the bunk across from Bob's says "Bob don't look so good,"

Bob's trying say something but I can't make it out. I lean in close to hear him and he kisses me. I say "I love you too, Bob." This is some difficult shit, but I keep it together.

Around noon the ambulance arrives. Bob's gurnyed into the back and I climb into the cab with the driver. On the way to the hospital I make small talk with the driver. I tell him I'm trying to find a less abject place for my friend to die. "Good for you, he says."

We arrive at the ER and Bob, now unconscious, is wheeled into the hospital, into an empty bay and hooked up to a Morphine drip. Broken limbs, gunshot wounds and malfunctioning hearts surround us. Screams and moans and anxious clamor gird the room. In the bay next to us is a rape victim. She's a doctor at this hospital and is now a victim and a patient -- and she's enraged and vociferous. Commotion surrounds us but Rudnick sleeps.

After a couple of hours Bob is rolled into X-Ray. The technician takes a couple of pictures and leaves the room. Bob regains consciousness, after a fashion. He gets off the table and pulls out his IV. His eyes are wild and he's hallucinating. I leave the room and tell the technician that the patient is moving around and incoherent. The tech puts Bob back on the gurney, straps him in and reconnects his drip. He fades again and is rolled, unconscious, back into the ER before the X-Rays are complete.

This time he's parked in a bay directly across from a guy who has been beaten with a 2x4. His legs are broken. He's a large man with long gray hair cascading over his shoulders. And flowing gray beard.

Rudnick is awake again. He sits upright and points a trembling bony finger in the direction of the bearded, long-haired guy.

Hallucinating that he's in the afterlife and having a face-to-face with Jehovah, timorous and perplexed he whispers "Who is that?" He slips back into narco-slumber.

After a while a doctor shows up and tells me Bob has pneumonia and will be admitted.

Around 6pm we get a room in the oncology ward. Bob is awake but he doesn't know where he is. He doesn't remember a thing about the day. He drops off again and sleeps with his eyes and mouth open. I try to get some sleep in a chair beside his bed but I have a difficult time at it. Periodically Rudnick wakes out of his coma and waves at me. I finally fall into a fitful sleep brimming with eerie phantoms and ungodly nightmares.

***

UNTITLED

Knocked over a clock
That knocked over a beer
on an almost finished poem
Can always get a new clock
Can maybe write a new poem
But tonight I need this beer

--Bob Righteous Rudnick

***

WEDNESDAY, JULY 19, 1995

Bob is having a pretty good day. He's staying alert, getting to the bathroom by himself.

But he's in the bathroom a bit too long. I can hear him scratching and frenetically scraping around. I go to check on him. He's ferreting under the sink and behind the toilet. He's removed the cardboard core from a roll of toilet paper and is digging into it, tearing it apart. He looks up at me and says "I know I hid some around here somewhere, but I can't find it. I LOVE heroin!" he says hungrily.

After while Jenny shows up. Jenny is Bob's girlfriend. They'd connected when Bob was in his mid-forties and she was twenty-two. Jenny is from Detroit and her parents liked Bob even though he's a radical ne'er-do-well, a penniless poet and an ardent junkie. He was a step in the right direction. Her former boyfriend, "Scary", was doing life for murder. Bob told me he knew it was true love because when she'd leave for work in the morning she'd leave a half-pint of whiskey on her pillow for him to find when he awoke.

The three of us sit side-by-side on the edge of his bed. Jenny, Rudnick and me. Bob leans over and kisses me on the cheek. Jenny yelps "Hey! What about me?!" He turns and lays one on her. It's a pretty good day.

A bit later John Petrie, his wife Jo Jaffee and Paul Karrol join us. John reaches into a paper bag and pulls out a fifth of Jack Daniels and passes it around. Bob sits in a chair beside the bed and hosts the soiree. After a few drinks Jo wants to know why the hospital can't provide Bob with a wheelchair so that he could wander the hospital for diversion. She leaves the room to find a doctor to whom she can issue demands on Bob's behalf. We take turns swigging the whiskey as her heated challenges echo through the hallways.

***

THURSDAY, JULY 20, 1995

Thursday morning I woke up early. Hard to get very much sleep in hospital chairs, even the kind that recline into something bed-like.

Bob's fairly catatonic. He sleeps most of the time, his eyes and mouth open, his breathing shallow and infrequent. The morphine mercifully weaves elaborate dreams for the entertainment of his dying soul. But every now and then he slips the embrace of narco-slumber and he returns to the hospital room.

I'm sitting next to his bed, he shifts his weight and looks at me with a grin and asks "Having fun?"

"Are you uncomfortable?" I ask him.

He nods.

I get one of the nurses to increase his dosage. He slips back into his analgesic doze.

The doctors, as always are imperious and dart in and out of the room self-importantly barking orders. But the nurses are always there and they are angels. On this ward their job is to send off the dying to the Other Side with as little difficulty and pain as possible. They are gentle warmhearted women, compassionate and noble as a matter of course. They stroke Bob's face and hold his hand and kiss his forehead.

One of them asks me "Is he your best buddy?"

"Yeah. Best buddy," I answer.

I'm taking the phone calls and collecting the faxes from those whose lives he's touched. Penny Arcade, Legs McNeal, Steve Paul, Penny Puhl. And a fax from Rich Stoneman. "I remember you running up 4 flights of stairs at 76 Riverside Drive, raspily saying 'Hurry up -- Lou Reed is in the Rambler and we're late for WFMU. Do you have anything to smoke?'"

***

FRIDAY, JULY 21, 1995

Dementia claims Rudnick on Friday.

I help him to the bathroom. After a few minutes I check on him.

He's sitting on the toilet. His hair is tangled and wild, like an unstable current is rampaging through his brain and surging out through his scalp. His eyes are wide and turbulent, full of lunacy. The fleeting illusion of Life is breaking away. The ship is pulling away from the dock.

"You ok, Bob?" I ask. But we're not connecting. He's adrift, lost in his internal turmoil.

I get him back to bed and he slides back into unconsciousness. And I settle in to the chair beside his bed for the duration.

The afternoon crawls by. I find myself counting the minutes between his breaths, each time longer than the previous, until his breathing stops altogether. I touch Bob's hand. It's as cold as ice.

Paul Karroll walks into the hospital room.

"P.K." I say. "I think he's gone."

Paul goes to his knees at the beside, whispering Hassidic prayers for the dead.

Suddenly a bunch of Bob's friends, the ones who arrive every evening to drink whiskey and carouse and lionize Bob, burst boisterously into the room.

John Sinclair wrote "Rudnick was such a beautiful street-level cat from the old school: he knew everybody in every joint in town that was worth a visit, and he reveled in amassing weird groupings of people ... working out vast details of logistics over the phone, wrestling everyone into vehicles and propelling some small mob from place to place, mixing with the inhabitants, regrouping ( "All right,"  he' d whisper in each person's ear, "we'll be leaving in ten minutes and, let's see, it'llake us exactly 24 minutes to get there."), and lurching off into the night, always unbelievably attentive to every social, sexual, recreational drug and musical need of each member of the party."

Bob sits straight up, climbs out of bed and takes the toastmaster's chair amid this confederacy of unruly friends. He always was the consummate host and he isn't about to let a little thing like his imminent death stop him now. He grins and touches his rowdy comrades. When they've all left he crawls into the hospital bed and slips back into the black.

***

SATURDAY, JULY 22, 1995

Today Bob doesn't leave his bed. He remains unconscious and inanimate.

Early in the afternoon a doctor with a retinue of interns visits the room. He tells his students that this patient was an IV drug user. Then the doctor turns to me and asks "Is he HIV positive?"

"No" I answer. But it strikes me as odd that he didn't check the patient's chart and that he's asking a civilian sitting at a patient's bedside for diagnostic information.

***

SUNDAY, JULY 23, 1995

Rudnick dies at around 4pm, when everyone is out of the room.

"They often do that" said the nurse. "They wait until they're alone."

***

In September, 1995, a memorial and a gathering to celebrate the Righteous One's life and influence was held at the Heartland Cafe in Chicago. We were there to commemorate and exalt but also to raise the money needed to provide a tombstone for Bob's grave.

The Heartland cafe, not a small place, was packed shoulder to elbow with Bob's friends, fellow travelers and admirers. The restaurant portaged trays of whiskey sufficient to oil the throng as comrades and henchmen took the stage to spin wild stories of Rudnick's audacity and reckless tenacity. Blues musicians played the blues, jazz musicians jazzed it up, rock 'n' rollers shook the rafters and poets emoted tribute and homage.

Bob's old friend and fellow conspirator from the heady days of the MC5 and the White Panther Party, John Sinclair, recited his poem "Ain't nobody's business if I do".

"we have a right to our bad habits
& if we want to blow our minds
or fuck up our lives, shoot dope
or smoke cocaine,

if we want to eat too much meat,
sit around all day & watch t.v.,
stay up all night listening to music
by charlie parker & screamin' Jay hawkins,

if we want to walk around naked,
fuck our eyes out,
eat some pussy or suck a cock,
take it up the ass, get our nuts off

700 times a day,
lay around & drink whiskey,
bet on games, shoot dice,
sell some pussy on the street,

if we want to gamble in casinos
or spend our money in a whorehouse,
give the president a blow job
in his big chair in the white house,

walk around the streets
with all our belongings in little bags,
sleep in doorways,
piss in the gutter,

if we want to sleep away the day
& never answer the telephone,
take every meal in restaurants & bars
& never exercise,

& if it comes to the end
of the line for us, we have every right
to blow our motherfucking brains out
or jump off the bridge

or take ourselves away from here
any way we might want to, then baby please,
we got a right to our final choices
& it ain't nobody bizness if we do"

The last performers of the evening were a punk band from Detroit who stomped the American flag and played with such ferocity and racket that the neighbors called the cops.

In the end I designed Bob's headstone with the image of a sleeping lion and a quote from Coltrane's "A Love Supreme".

"No road is an easy one, but they all go back to God."

I mentioned to one of my friends that since I was at the age where people around me were beginning to drop off, maybe I should go into the business of designing grave markers. I could call my new enterprise "Stoned Again".

ABBIE HOFFMAN

"Anarchism is not a romantic fable but the hardheaded realization, based on five thousand years of experience, that we cannot entrust the management of our lives to kings, priests, politicians, generals, and county commissioners."--Edward Abbey


Since Runnymede those in a position auger have been doing their black-hearted best to re-establish their Divine Rights. And, if I'm not mistaken, the assholes have just about got the job done. One of the nails in the coffin of Human Rights was hammered home in August, 1968.

Culturally and politically 1968 was one of the most rambunctious years in American history. The War in Vietnam had become the longest conflict in U.S. History. And as American casualties passed 30,000 anti-war protesters spilled out larger, louder and angrier than ever in the streets and on campuses nationwide. The Tet Offensive caught U.S, troops by surprise as coordinated attacks by the Viet Cong peppered South Vietnam. At Columbia University students commandeered the University's president's office and held three hostages to protest the school's ties to the Department of Defense. Phil and Daniel Berrigan, two Jesuit priests, torched draft records with napalm at a Maryland Selective Service center. In March American troops slaughtered scores of civilians at My Lai. In April Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis after which riots erupted in 125 cities (46 dead). Lyndon Johnson, President of the United States, withdrew from the Presidential race. Robert Kennedy entered the race and was shot dead at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles the night he won the California primary.

And it was in 1968 that two quite different groups came together to discuss using the Democratic National Convention in Chicago as a means to highlight their opposition to the war and other social injustice.

One of the groups was MOBE (the National Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam). MOBE was a coalition of old-school communo-socialist lefties (The irony is not lost that a number of the old-style Trotskyites, Maoists and Leninists grew up, shifted sharp right and became the core of the Neo-Conservatives who, to this day, still seem focused on one-world homogeny, but of a more fascist color.).

The other group was the Yippies (the Youth International Party). The Yippies had planned a "Festival of Life" in Chicago during the Democratic Convention. As an announcement of their plan, in January, 1968, the Yippies released a directive.

"Join us in Chicago in August for an international festival of youth, music, and theater. Rise up and abandon the creeping meatball! Come all you rebels, youth spirits, rock minstrels, truth-seekers, peacock-freaks, poets, barricade-jumpers, dancers, lovers and artists!

"It is summer. It is the last week in August, and the NATIONAL DEATH PARTY meets to bless Lyndon Johnson. We are there! There are 50,000 of us dancing in the streets, throbbing with amplifiers and harmony. We are making love in the parks. We are reading, singing, laughing, printing newspapers, groping, and making a mock convention, and celebrating the birth of FREE AMERICA in our own time.

"Everything will be free. Bring blankets, tents, draft-cards, body-paint, Mrs. O'Leary's Cow, food to share, music, eager skin, and happiness. The threats of LBJ, Mayor Daley, and J. Edgar Freako will not stop us. We are coming! We are coming from all over the world!

"The life of the American spirit is being torn asunder by the forces of violence, decay, and the napalm-cancer fiend. We demand the Politics of Ecstasy! We are the delicate spores of the new fierceness that will change America. We will create our own reality, we are Free America! And we will not accept the false theater of the Death Convention.

"We will be in Chicago. Begin preparations now! Chicago is yours! Do it!"

The primary spokespersons for the Yippies were Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, a couple of theatrical looney-tune radicals from New York City. Rubin announced plans to nominate a pig (Pigasus, the Immortal) as the Yippie's candidate for President, and Hoffman began describing the Festival of Life as a "Fuck-In". In a Yippie program distributed in August of 1968 Festival attendees were encouraged to bring "sleeping bags...extra food...bottles of fireflies, cold cream...love beads, extra toothbrushes, see-through blouses, manifestos...and tenacity." The program listed activities such as "political arousal speeches", fly-casting exhibitions, rock music and "a dawn ass-washing ceremony."

"Psychedelic long-haired mutant-jissomed peace leftists will consort with known dope fiends, spilling out onto the sidewalks in porn-ape disarray each afternoon....Two-hundred thirty rebel cocksmen under secret vows are on a 24-hour alert to get the pants off the daughters and wives and kept women of the convention delegates."

In August, 1968, Mayor Richard J. Daley put Chicago's 12,000 cops on twelve hour shifts and their strength was augmented by 7,500 Army troops and 6,000 National Guardsmen locked and loaded. Starting Sunday, August 25th and escalating to a fever pitch on Wednesday, August 28th, uniformed agents of the State kicked hippie butt. But the cops weren't discriminatory in their rage. They savagely attacked not only Lefties, but also innocent bystanders, photographers, a plethora of newsmen, members of the clergy and at least one cripple. Playboy's Hugh Hefner stepped out of the safety of his Playboy Mansion on North State Parkway to see what the ruckus was about and was whacked on the ass by a rampaging cop, and a member of the British Parliament was maced outside the Conrad Hilton hotel and hustled off to the lockup. Monied patrons out for dinner were shoved through plate-glass windows and beaten senseless amid broken glass and delicately seasoned foie gras . Mayor Daley -- who slaughtered the English language nearly as effeciently as George W. Bush -- went on television and explained "The policeman isn't there to create disorder, the policeman is there to preserve disorder."

Eight of the protesters -- Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Tom Hayden, David Dellinger, John Froines, Rennie Davis, Lee Weiner and Black Panther Bobby Seal were charged with conspiring to incite a riot (Bobby Seal, after being bound and gagged in the courtroom, was tried separately after a mistrial was declared and the larger group became known as the "Chicago Seven".)

Abbie Hoffman said of the charges "I don't know if I'm gulity or not. We can't even agree on lunch." Norman Mailer -- rather naively, I think -- said the conspirators "understood that you didn't have to attack the fortress anymore." All they had to do was "surround it, make faces at the people inside and let them have nervous breakdowns and destroy themselves." Would that it had been that simple.

Five of the Seven were found guilty (Froines and Weiner were aquitted). On February 20, 1970, Judge Julius Hoffman sentenced the defendants to five years in prison plus a $5,000 fine. Each defendant was allowed a statement at the time of sentencing. Abbie Hoffman recommended that the judge try LSD. "I know a good dealer in Florida. I could fix you up." Jerry Rubin presented the judge with a copy of his new book, Do It! (which I had done some illustrations for), inscribed: "Julius, you radicalized more young people than we ever could. You're the country's top Yippie."

On November 21, 1972, the Seventh Court of Appeals reversed all of the convictions.

I had developed a friendship with Abbie Hoffman throughout 1967 and 1968. I don't know about you, but the sexy perversity of anarchy has always held more appeal for me than the pedantic priggishness of either the left or the right. And Abbie was the epitome of the anarchistic spirit. He had become the lightening rod of the Movement, an outrageous media personality who simultaneously galvanized the counter-culture and provoked their parents and the Agents of the State. He was perhaps the last great American radical.

Shortly after I'd moved to Chicago in the Spring of 1967, The Seed, Chicago's underground newspaper switched ownership. The original publisher was a heroin addict and operated a headshop called the Molehole. The paper was all peace, love, acid and ornate non sequitur. But that was about to change. There was a lot of vagabondage among the youth in those days. Everyone seemed to be on the road, the herd moving from east to west and, more often than not, setting down roots in the Haight. As a result, it seemed like everybody came through Chicago. A handful of young Jewish radicals from New York City blew into town, decided to stay and took over the publication of the Chicago Seed. The paper rapidly moved out of the sphere of the flowerchildren and became tougher, more streetwise and entrenched in radical politics. Sensing a brotherhood of knaves and outlaws, I began contributing my comix to the paper.

It was at the Seed that I began running into Abbie on a regular basis. In many ways we were brother rats. Our approach to politics was immoderate, puerile, insolent and funny -- unlike the traditional Lefties who were more somber and doctrinaire (I was with Abbie at a feminist rally in Lincoln Park. The women at the podium had their fists raised and were chanting "Right On!". Abbie grinned at me and sniggered "Right In!".) My means of delivery was comic art. Abbie's was himself.

Abbie was an absurdist, a Groucho Marxist. Thomas Paine on windowpane. And the boy really knew how to manipulate the media. The cameras were always on him as he performed surreal feats of Magick on the electronic soapbox. He reveled in Chaos, instigated it, opened Pandora's box and danced naked with the Furies. In Spring 1967 Abbie organized a bunch of friends to throw dollar bills from the visitor's gallery at the New York Stock Exchange, disrupting the trading day as button-down, three-piece suits scrambled and fought for the cash. He organized and led an "Exorcism of the Pentagon". 50,000 people held hands, surrounded the building and chanted "Out demons, out!" as they attempted to levitate the building with their combined psychic energy. He was arrested for wearing a shirt resembling an American flag (Now worn by the conservative fuckwad contingency at any given opportunity,). The police ripped it off of him only to discover a North Vietnamese flag painted on his body. And the radical Lefties were not let off scott-free. In September 1968, Abbie invaded the National SDS conclave, an aggregation of would-be aparatchiks -- Maoists, Marxists, Leninists, Trotskites. Dressed in a cowboy hat, flowered shirt and boots he jumped onto the aspirant commissars' table and turned the somber meeting upside down as he joked, mocked and cajoled the sober Commies while spinning a day-glow yo-yo. He believed in Revolution for the Hell of it, which is title of his (arguably) best book.

Abbie asked me to draw up some chapter illustrations for "Steal This Book" (After publication Abbie said "It's embarrrassing, you try to overthow the government and you wind up on a Best Sellers List."). And invited me down to the courthouse to sit in and sketch the proceedings at the Conspiracy Trial.

The Conspiracy Seven trial was a major media event. In the hallway outside the courtroom reporters and journalists from around the world were there on assignment. The place was jammed. I wandered through the crowd and Jerry Rubin hailed me down, "Hey, Skip. Over here!" He greeted me enthusiastically and introduced me to some of the people around him. "C'mere and meet Jules Feiffer," he said. Feiffer was on assignment for the New York Times or the New Yorker or something. I guess Jerry figured that, since we were both cartoonists, Feiffer would welcome me as a brother. However Feiffer was disdainful and aloof. Clearly I was smear on the good name of cartooning and was not accorded either respect or acknowledgment.

I showed Jerry a sheath of drawings I'd done of the defendants. He giggled earnestly and called out "Hey, Abbie. Get over here and check this out!" Abbie wandered over and looked at my drawings. When he got to the big-nosed, kinky-haired caricature I'd done of him he wasn't pleased. Which made Jerry Rubin giggle even louder. "Hee,hee,hee,hee!" Abbie fumed as Jerry chortled. But there was the business at hand and the distraction of my unflattering drawing was left in the dust as we were funneled toward the courtroom doors.

Because the courtroom was so packed -- and I had no press credentials -- the only way I would be allowed access was if I was a relative of one of the defendants. The bailiff at the door pointed at me and asked "Who is this guy?" Abbie put his arm around my shoulders and said "Dis is my sistah." The bailiff smiled and I was allowed into the courtroom. As I strode past the bailiff I gave him a glance at my drawing of Abbie. "Hee,hee,hee, hee." I could hear the bailiff's laughter trailing off as I found my seat in the gallery. Abbie shot me a dirty look from the defendant's table.

It's been a long haul since the Sixties and lessons of History have not been learned. Liberals still show themselves to be weak-kneed, spineless wimps and compliant stooges of the Ruling Class. Conservatives, as always, are Draconian power brokers, corrupt, mean-spirited liars. It all leads to the destruction of our Rights and Freedom. They'd have us believe that the price of Freedom is Freedom itself.

Abbie Hoffman committed suicide April 12, 1989. At least that's the official story. At the time he had been regularly lecturing audiences about the CIA's covert activities, including assassinations disguised as suicide. His final words: "It's too late. We can't win, they've gotten too powerful."

I GET MY DUCKS IN A ROW

What was the one thing that set it off? To the best of my memory it was always there. It was a rung on my DNA before I knew DNA had rungs, or even what DNA was. But it's always been a major part of me. The motivating force. That intrinsic thing.

But was there a trigger that ignited my unreasoning zeal? What event added the zip?

I have an early memory of sitting at my desk in West End Elementary school in Lynchburg, Virginia. It was around 1952, I was eight years old and perpetually in trouble. I'd tell huge convoluted lies and steal. Poorly, evidently and for no apparent reason. So the chill of trouble, an icy aggregate of deviant thrill, senseless lawlessness and the cool hopeless pallor of certain discovery was attendant on my daily scene.

This time I had been purposefully drawing Mickey Mouse across the pages of my workbook. Decoratively penciling the iconic mouse across the lifeless facade of (as I instinctually saw it) a primer of instructional drivel and arbitrary madness. My days were consumed with thoughts of Uncle Walt's retinue, the mouse and his fellow travelers. Particularly the ducks. But I was drawing Das Ubbermaus.

Since I'd started reading I'd been reading Walt Disney's Comics and Stories, a comic book that each issue featured an Uncle Scrooge/Donald Duck epic followed by a short Mickey Mouse continuing story. The horror comics I preferred weren't allowed. However the more lurid comics were read and hoarded by the teenaged babysitter of my younger brothers and sister. So I could sneak a furtive peak on occasion.

The duck comics featured intelligent adventure, tangled greed, secret organizations bent on World Domination, Inner World theory, raw luck, organized crime and obscene wealth. These were regular mythic masterpieces from a medium intuitively understood. These words and pictures, this hypnotic color, these comical truths, this hallucinogen. These ducks. This was a crisp and exciting world that vaulted from the page directly into my cerebral pleasure core. The other world, the ugly world of West End Elementary School couldn't compete. It was a lifeless place that stank of vomit, sawdust and floor wax, a harrowing empire of authority figures and interminable indoctrination.

I loved the comic world so much that I made blind assumptions based on that love. I had started stealing the latest issue of Walt Disney's Comics and Stories from the newsstand at the drugstore on the way home from school. I was doing this with some regularity and my Mom -- policing my pit -- wanted to know where all the duck comics were coming from. I made up stories about trading valuable possessions for them. But I knew that my explanations were, as always, suspect and weak. I had to come up with something foolproof in order to continue bringing newly purloined duckbooks home.

I'd leave school, walk across the street to the drugstore and over to the comic book rack. If there was new issue of Walt Disney's Comics and Stories I'd excitedly slip it under my shirt or in a schoolbook and head out the door. Then through the woods to my neighborhood, and home. I had no problem with thievery. My cousins, Leroy and Wayne, and I had been swiping shit from the Appomatox five-and-dime for years. We were seasoned shoplifters. Our coffers were lined with cheap "Made in Occupied Japan" toys and gewgaws we'd pilfered. Never been caught. But the problem wasn't the kleptomania. The problem was how to secret the stolen comics from Momma's suspicious scrutiny.

Then I made an incorrect assumption based on my obsessive love of comic books.

I my world it was way beyond human understanding that anyone would have the amoral wherewithal and evil disposition that they could cause intentional harm to a comic book. In my dominion such a concept didn't exist. It was incomprehensible, unfathomable. But I, my holy scheme afoot, would summon the will and power to cut across the grain of judicious proclivity and do the unthinkable. It was for a Greater Good -- that I might own the most current issue of Walt Disney's Comics and Stories without paying for it.

So because I knew it was impossible to deliberately damage a comic book, it was also impossible to understand deliberate damage done to a comic book. Especially a hot-off-the-press current issue featuring a story of Scrooge McDuck's thwarting the thieving Beagle Boys with his ability to dive and swim through gold and wealth and their powerlessness to do the same.

In the drugstore, while leafing through the other comics I tucked the prize into my workbook, strolled righteously past the the proprietor at the register, slipped out the door and across into the dusky woods. Under deciduous cover and on mossy ground I gritted my teeth and, as the air turned noxious and the sun went black, I ripped the cover off the comic book. The sky was roiling, lightening slashed the firmament, rivers ran blood red, women birth monsters and God rolled over and died. Then I rubbed some mud of the pitiable, coverless and hideously ravaged comic book. As I soiled it and stamped a footprint on it for good measure I knew I was going through a grisly epiphany, a barbaric rite of passage. I had stepped from a creatively disturbed childhood across the threshold to a fully articulate lunacy rooted in Comic Art. Clearly my Comicbook Otherworld had become superior to the miserable stuff outside the screen door. Things would never be the same.

My plan was perfect. Every month I'd happen across a discarded and worse-for-wear issue of Walt Disney's Comics and Stories while strolling innocently home from school. What blind luck for an aficionado such as myself to come upon these discarded treasures with providential regularity. However, Momma got hip to the plan pretty early in the scheme. "Hey. Why are these banged up comics you keep finding the latest issues?" After minimal interrogation I admitted my guilt and was made to go to the drugstore, confess my thievery to the proprietor and pay him back for two or three comic books. It was degrading but by that age I was used to degradation. It actually turned out to my advantage because I'd stolen comics for months before my evil scheme imploded.

My first all Skip Williamson comic book was title Skip Williamson's Comix and Stories.

The slam of Miss Maddox's yardstick across the top of my right hand got my full attention. I'd just added the shine to Mickey's nose when her recrimination cracked white-hot onto my drawing hand. Her rage was so over the top that only dogs could hear her shrill reproach and they, for blocks around yelped in pain and dove for cover. I was not so lucky. There was no cover. It was not only that I wasn't paying attention, but that I was frenetically scribbling cartoons -- "Vandalizing!" as she saw it -- across a sainted text. Cartoon mice frolicked where rote answers and empirical formula had resolved tedious conundrum after monotonous learning theory until I couldn't stand it anymore! It needed a mouse. It needed mice! Miss Maddox violently disagreed and wielded the meat-ax of retribution under the cover of Authority.

I spent the rest of the afternoon banished to a cloak room nursing bruised knuckles and reflecting upon the awesome power of comic art.

THE ICE PLANT

When I was in high school and in college I worked at the Canton Ice and Fuel Company, the Ice Plant. It was hard physical labor and of all the jobs I've had in my life it was one of my favorites. My boss was L.C. Baily, my high-school buddy, Rich Baily's, father.

L.C. Baily was a mountain of a man. And a taskmaster. He tolerated no bullshit, allowed no swearing in the workplace and he had a booming infectious laugh. He believed that a person could be harmed by too much book-learnin'.

During the winter months we'd unload coal cars. In those days most of the houses and businesses in Canton were still heated by coal furnaces, including my own. I'd spent nearly all of my teen winters in the basement shoveling coal into the furnace. Now I was unloading it after it rolled into town.

The tracks ran directly alongside the Ice Plant. It was wintery cold work. Billy Childress and I'd share a pint of whiskey to chase off the chill as we worked. We'd open the bay doors under the car and the coal would dump onto a conveyor belt. But usually the coal stayed put because it was frozen into a giant black lump. So one of us would have to climb into the car and jump up and down on the frozen coal until it would break loose. When it did knock loose it spilled out fast, like water down a drain. It was a bit of a trick to avoid being sucked down with the coal when it finally started moving. It was one of those things you'd learn quickly if you valued survival.

During the summer months ice was the primary product -- though it was a year-around item because bars' and restaurants' year-around needs. And there were still customers -- most of them elderly women -- with ice boxes instead of that newfangled contraption, the refrigerator.

I'd drive the delivery truck around town on my regular route, kids chasing behind begging for chunks of ice. I'd throw the ice tongs into a 50 pound block of ice and haul it behind the bar and into an ice bin at taverns and ice pick it into chunks. Or tong a 25-pound block and haul it up the stairs and hoist it into the upper compartment of some elderly widow's icebox. It was a transient moment in time, the pivot point between halcyon Americana and brittle modernity.

Another principal function of the Canton Ice and Fuel Company was to haul water to replenish dry wells, primarily on farms. The trick here was to make sure the truck's water tank was emptied. If the well or reservoir was full the remainder of the water needed to be dumped, because on the way back to the plant any water left in the tank would -- due to Newton's Laws -- slosh back and forth with enough inertia to launch the truck off-road into the ditch or into the path of on-coming traffic.

I was delivering water to a farmer's dry well a few miles outside Canton. I backed the truck into position, hopped out and unrolled the hose. After I got the water flowing I had time to kill. It would take around a half hour for the well to fill so I took a stroll around the property. I walked out behind the farmhouse and across a pasture to the barn. The barn door was partially open so I walked on in. When my eyes got used to the darkness my brain froze up. A teen-aged farmboy, his dungarees down around his ankles was standing on the slats of a stall. He was holding a bovine tail aloft, fucking the holy shit out of a young cow in the pen -- a cow that remained nonchalant and oblivious to the cross-specie carnality in progress.

Suddenly I was startled by a loud and angry voice behind me.

"Goddamnit!"

I turned and saw the farmer silhouetted in the barn doorway. He had grabbed up a stick of wood and was moving on the hapless boy who had jumped down from the stall door and was attempting, with difficulty, to get his overalls back on. "Godammnit!" the farmer howled again. "Thet boy is after thet heifer AGIN'! I'm gonna wail th' tar outa yew, boy!"

The boy took off, pushing past the old man, sprinting at full throttle. The two of them tore off across the pasture toward the horizon, the farmer shrieking and flailing at the boy. The boy hightailing it at a full gallop.

I went back to the truck. The well was full. I dumped the remainder of the water in the truck's tank, rolled up the hose and drove back to the Ice Plant.

All in a days work.

But at the Ice Plant, "pulling" ice was our primary task.

Two huge ammonia compressors squatted like giant toads on the concrete floor at the foot of the deck where ice cans were immersed in salt brine. The ammonia gas was stolidly pungent throughout the Ice Plant and was the means by which the water in the cans was frozen into ice. There were two cans to a bin. The floor of the deck was 10 bins wide and 40 bins long. Each can would produce one 300 pound block of ice. Air was pumped into each can of freezing water to insure clarity in the final product. At one end of the deck was an automatic saw that would score the ice -- so it could be easily ice-picked into 100, 50 or 25-pound blocks -- and then feed the three-hundred pound block through a chute and into the cold storage locker. Above the deck were electrical wires that powered a hoist and pulley that would haul two cans at a time out of the brine. The worker would put his back into it and shove the six-hundred pound load -- electrical sparks sputtering overhead, his feet soaked in salt brine -- across the deck to the scoring machine. This procedure was called "pulling ice". It was several of hours of back-breaking work to pull all of the ice in the deck and to refill the cans so that new ice could be made.

I'd been assigned the overnight shift to pull ice. It was a long and lonely haul working the overnight. During the day there were normally two workers pulling ice. One on the deck and one in the cold storage room. At night it was a solo act.

I asked one of the older Ice Plant workers if he'd work the night shift for me. He agreed.

The next morning he was found dead on the deck. The official cause of death was a heart attack (he had a history of cardiac problems). But I couldn't help but wonder if he hadn't been nudged across to the Other Side by an electric jolt. Feet in salt brine, electrical sparks above.

During the day while one worker was pulling ice, another needed to be in the cold storage room to receive the 300 pound blocks after they were fed through the scoring machine. The blocks would slide in -- one at a time -- on their sides. The cold storage worker would throw his tongs into the block, flip it upright and slide it into tight, even rows until the room was filled.

A seasoned and well-muscled worker, armed with two sets of tongs, could grab and flip up two blocks at once -- six-hundred pounds of weight. The icy lack of friction got the blocks moving. The tongs were the fulcrums, and if the worker heaved and pivoted at just the right moment the two blocks would slide upright together. Of course, if the worker's timing was off -- of if he didn't have the strength for it -- the blocks would fall back and shatter. Or slam into the unfortunate worker, pinning him between ice and ice -- an unpleasant event. By the end of my tenure at the Ice Plant I'd fairly well mastered the six-hundred pound pivot.

Ice was needed at various villages and towns in the area. Places like LaGrange and Monticello and Beardstown ("Whiskersville!" L.C would bellow and laugh his booming laugh.) Ice trucks would back up to the dock at the cold storage room and we'd load and pack the truck-bed tightly with ice. It was important that the ice be packed tight enough so that was no movement. If there was air between the blocks as the driver accelerated the blocks would shift against the tailgate. And if the wheelman had to slam on the brakes, tons of ice would slam forward shearing off the cab at bed level. This actually happened once but the driver had enough savvy to understand his predicament, threw himself onto the floor of the vehicle and escaped decapitation.

All of this was not easy work. L.C. Baily once hired a young man directly out of prison on a work-release program. But the guy only lasted a couple of days on the job and then opted to go back to jail instead on continuing the grueling labor required at the Ice Plant. Richie Baily and I missed him when he decided to be re-incarcerated because he made the time fly by as he would regale us with stories of working in the prison dairy and impishly jerking-off into milk cans -- and other convict hi-jinx.

L.C. had a love for the restoration of antique and unique automobiles. I remember, in particular a 1922 Cadillac, a Jazz-age Studebaker, a Jaguar XKE. There were Packards and Dusenbergs, Model-As and Model-Ts. Roadsters, coupes and convertibles. You name it, he rebuilt it.

He also owned a "Duck", an army-made amphibious vehicle that was particularly handy in Canton, a Mississippi river village prone to seasonal flooding. Many happy hours were spent tooling down Route 61 and then veering off into the Big Muddy for a leisurely traverse from the Missouri side to the Illinois side. However, because official government products tend to be imperfect, the Duck sprang a leak so significant that repairs were impractical. Still, we had fun tearing around Canton's highways and byways in the olive-green monster.

L.C. Baily's fleet of Ice Plant vehicles were all 1950 Dodge trucks, his favorite. And, because all things in L.C.'s purview were also part of the daily work routine, we became quite adapt at the maintenance of his fleet. Everything from signage of the truck doors (Rich Baily was way more proficient at sign painting than I ever was. What took me half a day, he could whip out in a couple of hours. And, in the end, his work was crisp and precise. Whereas mine was a bit lopsided and wobbly.) to mechanical repairs. To this day, if called upon, I could remove and replace the transmission in a 1950 Dodge truck.

Other trades I learned at the Ice Plant were brick-laying, hot-tar roofing, plumbing, construction, pouring concrete for sidewalks and driveways and whatever else needed to be done. Didn't matter that I didn't know what the fuck I was doing. If L.C. needed it done I'd get to work and learn on the job.

***

Rich Baily and I grew up together as friends and schoolmates, feeding each other's artistic centers. I became a cartoonist and he moved to Amsterdam for a number of years where he gleaned technique and influence from the Dutch Masters. He is a vastly talented artist, totally unrecognized and doomed to the impoverished bohemian lifestyle that imprisons those of us who have chosen Art over the Fiduciary .

After the death of L.C., Rich moved back to Canton ostensibly to care for his aging mother and to pursue his artistic proclivity with as little financial burden as life would allow. He became Canton's eccentric town artist. He's (admirably) chosen isolationism. No phone, no cable television, no computer and he doesn't check his mail. He lives incommunicado, a happy libertine painting realistic (often surrealistic) nudes of the many women -- from the town, nearby villages and the local college -- who line up at his door eager to disrobe for him.

Rich took charge of the Ice Plant after his father's death. But, with the advent of the ice making machine and the decline of coal for home heating, there wasn't much of a market for it's services in this grim modern world.

Rich shared his dad's love of restoring automobiles. He retained the name of the Ice Plant but used the facility to rebuild and recover ancient vehicles. Inevitably, Art and Commerce were on a collision course.

One of Rich's nude models was the wife of a local redneck who was not at all pleased that his spouse was showing off her naughty bits to the town's free-spirited iconoclast. Enraged that his wife could possibly be porking this artistic weirdo, he first attempted to burn down Rich Baily's garage -- and failed. Then, with a blowtorch in hand he attempted to set fire to the Ice Plant. This time he didn't fail. The place -- and all the cars in it -- was incinerated by the angry cuckolded arsonist. And Rich, living on a shoestring, had no insurance.

I asked Rich if he was fucking the pyromaniac's wife.

He looked at me an smiled "I wasn't fucking her," he said. "But she may have been fucking me."

SLOUCHING TOWARD BETHLEHEM

"Life is a dead-end street." -- H. L. Mencken

Toward the end of 2005 I'd been in a kind of malaise of pending illness. Not really sick, not really well and not getting better. I assumed that it was diabetic related. Diabetes had been enthusiastically kicking my ass for about six years.

I went to NYC for a show and for the last couple of days in New York I began having breathing difficulties. Nothing serious, but enough to keep me from getting a good night's sleep. My ex-wife, Harriett, joined me in Virginia to spend some time with my Mom and family.

The breathing problem continued. My Mama and brother Joe gave me some xanax, the family drug of choice. And that helped me sleep.

Just before Christmas I was building a dog-pen for Harriett, at her new digs. After we finished the pen I went to dinner with her at one of those theatrical chop-jockey Japanese steak houses. I had some miso soup, some raw tuna over sliced cucumbers in a ponzu sauce and a sushi roll with soft-shell crab. The japanese cook was at the grill acrobatically cooking steak and shrimp and rice and veggies to the delight of a four-year old boy sitting with his Dad immediately to my left.

That's the last thing I remember until I woke up being hauled out the front door of the place by two men. I could hear some woman yelling "Call 911" behind me. The cold night air somewhat brought me back to my senses and the two men set me on a bench outside the restaurant. One of the men was the dad of the four-year old boy -- he went back in to attend to his kid. The other guy stayed with me on the bench while I revived and Harriett went back in to settle the bill and to get our food to take out. So what if the guy is dying? Get that food you paid for!

I told them I was ok, only partially a lie. No reason for an ambulance. I didn't feel like a trip to the emergency room or an overnight in the hospital, where a guy could really get sick. I've tried to stay away from the medical profession as much as possible but it's a losing battle.

I'd passed out. I'd gone face down at the table and I hadn't even been drinking or taking drugs. One second I was there and the next minute I wasn't. Like someone had shut off the switch.

After recuperating for an hour or so at Harriett's I drove home. I felt a bit like I was high on acid and I made a couple of wrong turns and ended way the fuck off course. I had difficulty understanding exactly where I was. I had some concern about losing consciousness at highway speed but I finally got to Interstate 75 and made my way home. I was out-of-body directing my body to do what it had to do.

Then on Christmas day I was joining Harriett, the girls and their boyfriends at Harriett's place. Walking up the driveway wiped me out. I felt like I'd run a marathon out of shape. I told Harriett that I was going to check into an emergency room after I left her and the kids.

I packed a bag and drove myself to the St. Joseph's Hospital emergency room where blood was drawn, I was injected with drugs, x-rayed, shot up with iodine, imaged by a CT scanner and harangued by a hostile ER physician who treated me as if I had ruined an otherwise pleasant evening.

The hostile ER doc -- with some satisfaction -- told me I had all the signs of congestive heart failure. I already knew this. I'd recognized the symptoms. My Dad had them before he died of congestive heart failure twenty-five years earlier.

***

Death comes to me like smoke under a door. It's becoming difficult to breathe and I'm thinking that maybe I should just open the door and welcome the beast in for a few beers and a little convivial conversation.

I envy the Living but they don't seem to want to have very much to do with me. Maybe it's the stench. Or maybe it's because I'm no longer a member of their club. I can hear their weak laughter, the pounding reverb from their Techo/Industrial soundtrack and the noisy business of their continuum. But I'm outside and the weather sucks.

"I'm sorry, sir. We don't serve the dead. You're not on the list."

"Oh, yeah? Well I've been thrown out of better joints than this!"

This hasn't been a religious experience. No epiphany. Organized Faith means less now I think. This in a world where I'd already not given a shit. Metaphysics, however, may sustain. But the World's religions -- from Hekate Wicca to Sunni Muslim -- are really just a means of crowd control. As are political systems, Corporatism and HDTV.

Compliant humanity can burn in Hell. I'll be working the door. Everyone gets in.

***

After the new year I checked into the hospital for a little deep probing and catheterization. They sent a tv camera up an artery in my groin and into my heart. I watched it on the monitor. The Doctor leaned over and said "You're all clogged up. You need surgery".

My twins, Nikki and Rita had just turned 21. So I postponed my surgery until we could celebrate that auspicious event at the surreal Cleremont Lounge, my favorite stripclub.

Harriett, my daughters Molly and the birthday girls Nikki and Rita and I were there, as well as a flock of their friends. We took up a substantial corner of the bar. The only other group flying its colors that night was an entourage of Yuppie lesbians. But around the bar, a variety of singular slimeballs of every stripe drank while Blondie stripped down to her naked brown flesh and platinum bleached pussy. The Cleremont is where your mother strips. And maybe your grandmother. Blondie said "Hi, baby" to me and made lewd comments about Harriett's broad ass. Everyone was drunk and boisterous. And the birthday girls got a lapdance from "Carla's Mom"

My kids called her "Carla's Mom" because she looked like Molly's highschool pal, Carla's, mom. She was dressed in a skimpy Little Red Ridinghood outfit and danced to "Little Red Ridinghood" (Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs). She'd quickly flash her titties and her cute little shaved vulva as she pranced for dollars.

Better to go out with fresh and pleasant memories of mortal fun than not.

The morning of my bypass the surgeon strolled into the waiting area. He looked like a movie star, perfectly coifed, manicured, composed and spotless. He'd already performed five surgeries and it wasn't even noon. Not a spot of blood anywhere on him.

I was put on a gurney and attached to an IV. My body was shaved from my ankles to my neck, leaving only the cutest little landing strip. A catheter was rammed up my urethra and a breathing tube was jammed down my throat.

Then they sent me off to Nod.

The next thing I know I'm in a very fucked-up fog. Not much color in my fisheyed vision. My hearing was asymmetrical, distorted. There was a masked nurse was in my face.

"Your surgery went very well" she said. "You had a quadruple bypass. Dr. Langford says your heart is strong and healthy." I was clogged up with unprocessed sugar and hog fat.

The day after he'd sawed through my sternum Dr. Langford, immaculate and infallible, was expounding on the red-hot trends in heart surgery game with Diane Sawyer on "Good Morning America".

Since my recovery I've discovered my scar is an object of curiousity. A chick magnet. "I'll show you my gash if you show me yours."

***

In my dream I'm at my grandparent's farmhouse in the rolling hills outside Appomattox, Virginia. The barn, off in the pasture, explodes into flames. It's consumed immediately and fiery embers, floating on the wind, are all around me. The embers ignite the house and I run to connect a water hose. I start hosing down the house -- it's enkindled here and there. I extinguish the fire on the porch and in the living room but there's a new fire on the roof. I smother the flames there and I notice a yellowed Sunday paper smoldering under the eaves. Thrown there, I suppose, by an errant paper-boy long ago. So I extinguish the paper.

At once there are children all around the house. They are excited and laughing. The fire is their entertainment. They dance around the house and squeal. They yip and shriek.

I seem to have put out the flames when a back-building becomes engulfed and ablaze. I run around back with the water hose, attempting to douse the fire. The children are shrill and full of furious and playful agitation. They are as volatile as the flames with their clamor and frolic.

Suddenly the water flow stops. The hose dribbles impotently and I shout "Water! Water!" to some men in the front of the house but no one can hear me because of the howling kids. As I look frantically toward the house I see that it has re-ignited and there's nothing I can do. I yell "Water!" but I'm drowned out by the voices of happy children. I turn to the kids and scream "SHUTUP!"

I wake myself up with the shout. And Harriett too.

I'm back to sleep and I'm dreaming again. I'm talking to someone. Maybe my Father, but I'm not sure. I'm explaining the meaning of the earlier dream.

"The house is my life and the fire is my disease. I'm being consumed by the illness but I'm having some small success controlling my sickness, the water representing my deliverance. The newspaper is an accounting of my life. I'm yesterday's news. After awhile it's plain that mine is a losing battle. I can't be heard over the jubilant play of the children. The children represent the the living and the healthy. They will continue their play while all that I am and was is burnt to ash. I hate them for that. If only they would shut up their capricious dancing on my grave. I'm jealous of their good health and I covet their survival."

***

I had a doctor's appointment and I brought along my copy of "Septuagenarian Stew" to piss away the long hours of waiting built into the system. I was reading when Iris, my fifty-something doctor walked in. She's an affable woman. I liked her the first time I met her. A hopeless Liberal, she's always bitching about the corporate and bureaucratic nature of the hospital. And she talks about having a fondness for the rock 'n' roll. I suspect she has some hippie in her curriculum vitae. Probably knows my comix. But I'm not going to talk to her about that stuff. Antiquity belongs to the historians. I'm there for the medical care. I'll get some, if I'm lucky

"What are you reading?" she asked.

"Bukowski" I said.

"He wrote Factotum" she said. "I just saw the movie."

"I didn't" I said. "I read the book."

"He wrote about drinking and womanizing" she said -- almost like a question.

"And about Life and Death and all the shit in between." I said.

She was surprised to hear he was as literarily erudite as he was. I told her "He didn't care much for the beat writers -- the group he's most closely associated with. Didn't like Burroughs or Ginsberg. He thought Keroac was a Mama's boy. He liked Celine and Dostoevski and Huxley. Dos Passos and Steinbeck. Didn't care much for Robert Frost or Mailer and considered Dreiser a complete fool."

We drifted into a conversation about Flannery O'Conner and her dark and horrific stories.

I guess I like a Doctor with an interest outside the test-tube. She said she'd pick up some Bukowski and check it out.

***

In my dream I'm standing on a hill looking down at my life nestled in the valley below me.

I hear a familiar voice coming from the middle. She asks "Where are you now?"

"I'm with the ghosts."

I'm holding the heart of her and she whispers again "Where are you now?"

"I'm 17 with Chips, my first real Love. I'm with Cecilia -- my first wife and mother of Megan -- for six years. I'm with Francy for five passionate, combustible years. I'm with Harriett and our three babies for twenty-five years. Now it's just me."

"What do you want?" she asks.

"I want to keep what I already have. You ask too many questions. Life is all about losing what's dear to you. Harriett taught me that truth."

"How do you feel?" she asks.

"I'm not at peace. Maybe I'm hungry for what I'm becoming."

"What will you do?" she asks.

"I will continue on course, slouching toward Bethlehem."

DENTAL HYGIENE

I was at the supermarket shopping for toothpaste. The array was remarkable and confusing. Clearly the world had changed, and not for the better. There was a time when a couple of brands were pretty much all that was available. And those brands each had one kind of paste. Tooth. Colgate was still there but now there were forty-nine varieties. And a hundred brand names. Crest Extra Whitening with Tarter Control, Arm and Hammer Baking Soda, Biotene Dry Mouth with Calcium, Listerine Essential Care Powerful Mint Gel, Rembrant Intense Stain Removal, Tom's of Maine Silly Strawberry for Children, Thera Breath Oxygenating, AloeDyne Triple Action, Crest Spiderman Liquid Gel, Plus White Coffee Drinkers, Colgate Luminous Crystal, Fructodent Lemon & Sage. Just the tip of the iceberg. Capitalism gone mad. At the battle of Armageddon we'll all have winning smiles.

I was considering cavities as an act of rage against the Machine when, out of the corner of my eye I spied a shopping cart lumbering down the aisle in my direction.

An elderly woman, clearly in need of two hip replacements was zig-zagging her shopping cart toward me. She stopped her cart at mine and looked me in the eye and said " Hey! Your pants are unzipped!"

"Uh...thanks" I said as I checked and discovered that I was properly zipped up.

"HAW!" she crowed. "I Got'cha!"

She was timeworn old thing. An antique woman hunched, short and broad. Her wrinkled face was teeming with tattoos of curlicues, flower-pods and filigree. She had Charlie Brown and Lucy inked on one arm. And Snoopy and Woodstock on the other.

She reached between withered breasts with boney fingers and pulled out an amulet on a silver chain around her neck. It was a small black cock and balls. She dangled the phallic trinket and said, "They gave this to me when I retired. It NEVER lets me down. TEN INCHES EVERY TIME!"

"I can't compete with that," I said quietly.

She went careening on up the aisle and around the corner, cackling "TEN INCHES EVERY TIME! I'VE GOT A HAPPY OLD PUSSY!"

I selected Crest with Double-Acting Whitener.

WITH CHRISTINA

"Everyone has talent.
What is rare is the courage to follow that talent
to the dark place where it leads."
-- Erica Jong



I was doing some work at an Atlanta art gallery where Christina Gusek, an artist/transplant from western Massachusetts would gallery-sit every other Saturday. Chris was starved for artistic perspicacity and was trying to find a place to show her disquieting work. Her sense of humor is willfully scatological and morbidly uncivilized. She's obsessive/compulsive, a fan of Heavy Metal and her art is like Yellow Submarine meets Charles Manson if Charles Manson were female. She has a keen interest in forensic pathology and is more than happy to explain the various stages of decomposition of the human eyeball. All of these attributes have my attention.

We became confidants, the best of friends, co-conspirators and fellow running dogs on the road to artistic oblivion. We both exalt creative impropriety. She tolerated my abundant personalities (somewhat) and she said we were best friend lesbians in a previous life. This from a girl who doesn't even believe in reincarnation.

I assisted Chris in assembling Deceased, an exhibit of her art that was shown in Eyedrum's small gallery. The space was set up as a livingroom where someone had just gotten his or her brains bashed out with a hammer. Brain and skull fragments on the floor, blood everywhere, video carnage on the TV, preternatural music on the stereo and Christina's unhinged images on the walls. Her art is like sitting on a uterus-shaped Whoopie Cushion studded with razorblades. Her message is "You'd better get busy because you never know when the hammer's coming down".

Christina has an intuitive hilarious perversity that dovetails nicely into the core of my own. When we were setting up the Deceased environment it was necessary to splatter blood and fabricated viscera around the room. Chris was wearing protective gear. Her hair was stuffed into a gallon-sized zip-lock Glad bag on her head, surgical gloves on her hands, sandwich bags on her feet and a 50 -gallon dark green Hefty bag (arm and head holes cut out) over her torso. And a pair of safety glasses. Armed with a hammer she gleefully bashed stageblood-filled balloons until the room was sufficiently sanguinated. And when the bloodstorm had passed she stood backlit and flush in the bloodied landscape, in her bloodied garbage bag workclothes with a bloody hammer clutched in her tight bloodied fist. Breathing deeply she lewdly rasped "This really turns me on!"

As artists we are happily improper, lost in our mutual and instinctual incommodious -- and often loud -- behavior. And she's my very intimate art friend. I love her imagination. We have no secrets, and one drunken night at the Euclid Avenue Yacht Club we sealed the deal in blood. It was our ceremony, an affirmation to the Metaphysical that the two of us exist in unity despite Chaos. We pricked our pinkies, squoze out a little blood, clamped our little fingers and mingled our dna, forever bonded by blood and alcohol. It was a stupid human trick flirting the fringes of Shamanism.

There came a time when, like a dog, I knew instinctually that my chi was seriously skewed. My life-force was at 5 watts and sputtering. I wasn't feeling at all well. The day before I left for NYC for a show at the Art-at-Large Gallery I felt so bad that I thought I might not make it. I felt sick enough that I sat at my computer and left her a message...just in case: "In times of darkness you've been my go-to girl, my twin dervish. You've showed me that Art survives Death. That the continuum continues. There you were in the dark, a pretty Polish girl lighting my way by lighting her farts."

BABYLUST

When I was 5 years-old my family lived the the Breckinridge Apartments in Lynchburg, Virginia. My Dad was a teacher at Lynchburg college. One of his students was Jerry Falwell, who flunked his class. Falwell has whined about the liberal college professors who spit him out and propelled him down the road to reactionary proto-Christianity.

My Mom worked at the Craddock Terry shoe factory in downtown Lynchburg. And she took in laundry, mending and ironing to help make ends meet. 1949 was a rough year for us, one of many to come. The post WW II economy was booming but there really wasn't a place for fledgling intellectuals and their broods. Intellectual idealism is a rough playing field.

The Breckinridge apartments were not exactly palatial. Yet it was a step up for us. Previously we'd lived in slapped together Army barracks. Rat traps that were converted for civilian use after the war.

But when you're a child you know only what you know. Because it was a constant topic in the household I was aware that we had no money, but that really didn't matter. The seeds had been planted that would grow into an anarchistic philosophy that would eventually gel into a mind-set that without politics, religion and money the world would be a better place. But for right now all I really cared about was running with my gang. We were ragamuffins tearing around the apartment complex -- usually in just our underpants -- in search of adventure and simple child-like pleasures. We were young savages not yet corrupted by those with the Power.

When I first met Mary Polk we connected immediately. We became constant companions. There was a unique bond between the two of us. Not that thing between a child and his family or a boy and his dog, but the intrinsic primordial heart-stopping and genital-engorging chemistry that happens between consenting horndogs, no matter how unfledged.

Lynchburg was -- and still is to this day -- a town of old money and power that had antecedents back to the pre-Revolutionary War lace-curtain carriage trade. Versus the lowborn and disenfranchised who came over on slave ships. Or the hill people who originally shipped over in the 16th and 17th centuries to escape hard-scrabble poverty and persecution only to find hard-scrabble poverty and persecution, especially after the Civil War. The groups didn't mix. It was a caste system, even after the decedents of the poor had found wealth. Position trumps income.

Mary Polk's parents were the direct decedents of President James K. Polk, the eleventh President of the United States. As such it was anathema that they associate with rabble. But they were building a new house and had taken temporary residence amid the unwashed. They could do little but hold their noses and endure. And they were really not at all pleased that their 5-year old daughter was spending all her time with a little boy whose family had no standing, and whose mother was pigmented darker than was permitted in polite circles.

But Mary Polk and I were anchored at the primal level. There was no reasoning with us. Societal structure couldn't compete with two baby monkey hearts beating as one.

Mary Polk's older sister was getting married and a new apartment was being constructed for her at the Breckinrige complex. Mary Polk and I would often poke around in the unfinished place. We were always looking for some private place where we could enjoy a little naked play and investigate each other's genitalia. Of course there was always the fear of discovery so even in the unfinished apartment we felt vulnerable to detection.

Ever the enterprising boy, one afternoon I suggested that we conceal our activities in the cabinets under the kitchen sink. The plumbing wasn't in yet so there were no pipes to crowd the fun. It was just the right size for a couple of 5-year-olds and seemed to be the perfect hideaway for a little pre-pubescent makeout session.

So we clamored into the cabinets, removed what little clothing we had on and began earnestly fondling, exploring and caressing each other. I felt a new warmth in my little penis. It was as hard as a twig. I had Mary Polk lie on her back and climbed on top of her. I rubbed my twig against her soft little groove and we began rocking back and forth. Neither one of us knew anything about sex, but we knew it felt good. Following primal instinct, we were doing what comes naturally.

Suddenly the doors to the cabinet swung open and peering in at us, eyes afire and making unintelligible guttural squawks and sub-human yelps was Mary Polk's mother. Like a enraged Chimera she grabbed Mary Polk, yanked her out from under me and hauled her off and out.

It caused quite a commotion. Mary Polk's mother called my parent's and, in full conniption, unleashed a tirade about what vulgarian degenerates they must be to sire a deviant imp such as me.

After a few days I reconnected with Mary Polk. We managed to sneak around and meet on the sly as her mother had forbidden her to ever see me again.

I asked her "Did you get a spankin'?"

She said "Yes. Did you?"

"No" I said.

Actually I think my Daddy was quite proud of my budding lechery.

It was one of the few times in my life when he didn't wail the holy shit out of me.

BUSHWHACKED

During late summer in 1978 I was in a bar with Anneliese. We'd known each other since we were kids but it was only recently that we'd started having sex. She was a German girl, naturally light blonde with large blue eyes. And, because of her ethnic disposition, a voracious beer drinker.

We'd been throwing back all day. Now it was after dark and we were at the tavern continuing to get hammered and enjoying each other's company.

The joint was crowded, smoky and dark. Over by the bar a drunk guy was having a heated exchange with his drunk date, a pretty dark-haired woman. He went off to the toilet as I made my way to the bar for a couple of more drinks for me and Anneliese. As I passed by the dark-haired woman she made eye-contact with me, and it stopped me dead in my tracks. Her lips were slightly parted, her tongue tracing indecently across her teeth. She was fucking me with her eyes. We started circling each other slowly. Then her boyfriend was back. He looked at me, then at her. He grabbed her arm and pulled her toward the door. "Good luck, brother" I said. "You're gonna need it."

I brought our fresh beers back to the table. We polished them off and decided to call it a night. We were only a couple of blocks from Anneliese's house. I'd walk her home but I wouldn't go in. Her husband was home. He didn't enjoy sex very much so she would seek it out where she could. But still, it would be an awkward situation. So we'd say our goodnights and save it for another time.

We were walking though a dark residential neighborhood about a block from her place when she stopped and put her arms around me and pulled me in close and started kissing me. She pressed her mound hard against my thigh. I could feel the heat of it through her overalls. She grabbed my dick and started squeezing.

I took her hand and led her across the street to an apartment building surrounded by a wrought-iron fence. There was a light at the doorway of the building but the shrubs on either side of the doorway were in the dark. The gate was locked so I climbed the fence taking care around the ornamental spear-heads at the top and lowering myself into the yard. Anneliese was right behind me.

We lay together in the dirt at the edge of the building hidden by the privet hedge. I unbuttoned the straps of her bib overalls and pulled them off. She was wearing a white cotton t-shirt and white cotton panties. I pulled off her unassuming underwear, pressed my lips onto her pussy and inhaled her spirited hospitality. That kiss was all we really needed. The whole day had been foreplay. I slipped into her and we fucked hard in the dirt, kicking up dust-clouds in the dark as mosquitos and other insects fed on our naked hides.

When we'd finished we pulled on our dirty clothes and headed back over the fence the way we'd come in. In our drunkenness it didn't occur to us that we could have simply opened the gate from the inside, so we hoisted ourselves up and over. I went first, and Anneliese followed. I heard a ripping sound and a small yelp. She had snagged herself on one of the spear-heads at the top of the fence.

"You ok?" I asked. "I'm fine" she said but I could see the tear on the upper thigh of her overalls. The white flesh underneath was bleeding.

So she went home -- serene and content -- to her husband that night, her clothes dirty and ripped, covered in insect bites and bleeding from a wound near her ass.

I wonder what he thought of all that. I never did find out.

INTERVIEW FROM LITTLE LADIES, A FANZINE PUBLISHED BY JANE LYNCH, DISTRIBUTED TO "THE WIVES AND SWEETHEARTS OF AMERICA'S TOP CARTOONISTS" (1969)

We are privileged this month to have a very special interview with cartoonin' Mervin (sic) Wilton (Skip) Williamson, Jr. The interviewer is another favorite cartoonist with whom we are all familiar, Jay Lynch, who was prompted to ask Skip some questions about the birth of Megan Marsh Williamson.

JAY: Skip, when you first got married, many years ago, I thought your cartoons would eventually become Blondie and Dagwood Bumstead type comic strips. Time has proven me to have been in error, however. How do you feel the birth of your first child will affect the basic concept of your work in the future?

SKIP: That's the question? (Coughs)

JAY: What's the question?

SKIP: Well, uh, well I suppose the birth of the tot will give me considerable insight into the minds and working of those wee folks. Um, tee-hee, snicker.

JAY: Do you feel any analogy between the reproduction of a child and the creation of a comic strip?

SKIP: I think having children is just like making pancakes. Ask another question.

JAY: What do you think of the modern toys and games on the market? They seem to me to be very sterile and obvious and uncreative and all that kind of stuff.

SKIP: It is the duty of a revolutionary parent to form cultural alternatives to the sterility and the impotence of the fascist big-money toy moguls of today's workaday world.

JAY: Would you make toys for your child?

SKIP: Making my child was work enough.

JAY: What do you think about this new feminine independence?

SKIP: I can draw a parallel between the great revolutionary women's liberation struggles of today and making flapjacks. After all, don't we all agree that the great mother figure, Aunt Jemima, was the grandmother of all the feminist struggle?

JAY: Come on Skip. We're trying to conduct a serious interview for the edification of Little Ladies all over this fine country of ours. How do you feel about the fact that when your daughter reaches the age of five that she will be required by law to attend a public school?

SKIP: Considering the fascist bourgeois education system in the United States in these trying times, and the insane coercion on the part of that system, now thrashing in the frantic death throes, I would say in regards to your question, Probably.

JAY: You're aware that in the sex education programs for school children, the kids are required to memorize Ann Landers-type morality precepts as well as the physical facts of reproduction...

SKIP: Let me interject at this point that I am broad-minded in regard to the sexual education of today's toddlers. However, I find myself drawing the line at the preoccupation in some of our schools with showing the impressionable children photographs and drawings of dog penises and chicken vulvas.

JAY: What do you think of American women?

SKIP: It is the moral responsibility of American women to toe the line.

JAY: Righto!

IF YOU COME FOR THE KISSES YOU MUST STAY FOR THE FARTS

"Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra
and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath.
At night, the ice weasels come."
-- Matt Groening


I was approaching sixty years old and it was a little odd rejoining the dating game at such a late date. But it didn't take me long to get back into the jungle-monkey swing of it. And the experience has been multi-layered, painful and fascinating. A learning experience with benefits.

***

Sonia is a stunningly lovely, angry witch. I'm not being pejorative when I say "witch". That's the good part, her spiritual side.

She collected men who fell in love with her like butterflies. I was pinned through the thorax, under glass, a memento.

"What you vocalize, what you bring into the Universe will be." she would say. Then she would say "You and I are like fire and gasoline."

What she brought into my Universe was: Enchantment, anger, excitement, abusive behavior, passion, pain, music, sex, no sex, alcoholism, rancor and jail time.

I loved her very much, so she left my worthless carcass in the ditch.

But we had our moments.

I'd told her that she was the only woman I'd gone out with that, at the end of the evening, it would not be unreasonable that I could end up dead. It would piss her off for me to say that, but it was the truth. Besides, pretty much everything about me pissed her off.

I only have scattered memory of our first date. I showed up in the morning with a fifth of frozen Vodka and some smoked salmon. By early afternoon much was lost in an alcoholic fog. I remember getting back to her place after dark and her roommates were watching a porno. I went home with rugburns on my knees and I don't remember how I got them. The next day Sonia called and said "Wow! That was excessive. Even by my standards."

On our second date she said goodnight to me by lighting my pubic hair on fire.

We were at her front door saying our goodnights, canoodling, kissing and fondling. She rubbed my dick through my jeans. Then she brought out a Bic lighter, flicked it on and slowly drew the flame across the length of my cock through my jeans. And back again. She ripped open the front of my shirt scattering buttons around the vestibule and lit my chest hair on fire. She put out the fire with her mouth and licked my chest, extinguishing stray embers. She unbuckled my belt, unzipped my pants and lit my pubic hair on fire. It went up in a great melodramatic "Poof!" while her mouth was on mine kissing me goodnight. Since that night I've found the reek of burnt hair especially provocative.

Late the night of her birthday I was returning from the bathroom at her house, preparing to leave. Sonia lunged at me from around the corner and hauled me into the foyer. Immediately I was her heavy bag. She punched me rapid-fire and closed-fist all over my torso. I was very encouraging, demanding harder punches and taunting her that she hit like a girl. "Hit me harder, you bitch! I can't feel a thing!" She played me like a drum and I was loving it. She punched me in the face, in the stomach, in the chest, on my legs. Even a couple of blows to the genitals. I was hoping that she'd hit me hard in the nuts and send me retching, doubled over in excruciating pain, to the floor. And there, in the fetal position and in sweet agony, that she would kick the Holy shit out of me. But such tenderness was not to be. "Maybe next time" I said to myself.

She jumped me, legs wrapped around my knees and skinnied up me like a monkey up a palm tree until we were crotch to crotch. She kissed me, open-mouthed, swabbing at me with her tongue. She jerked me off-balance with some creative humping and I fell with her under me. On the floor, with her legs spread I sucked at her pussy through her jeans. She ground herself into my face.

We were back on our feet. She vaulted into my arms like a deranged dancer, one leg stretched out, the other tucked under, my right arm under her back, my left hand supporting and exploring her ass. I carried her and twirled her around the room. She rapidly shifted positions bringing the tucked leg out, throwing out her arms and changing the center of gravity with each twist and turn. But I carried her swirling and whirling like a crazed Dervisher. I didn't lose balance, I didn't drop my cargo. I told her what a great workout it was and if she truly cared about my health she would let me come over three times a week and really get in shape.

She got on her knees and presented her ass to me. I accepted it graciously. Then more pounding on me with her fists and kicking on my back and legs. Suddenly we were out the door, her legs wrapped around my waist and her arms around my neck. She was pulling on my hair and I was pulling on hers. I was drenched in sweat, growling and grunting. I was licking and biting her soft, white neck and superb ears down to the velvety naked flesh of her stomach and to her bare feet. I love her crazy dancer's feet. They're like a Cubist painting, splendidly angled and gorgeous.

Then we were in the yard rolling in the wet grass and mud. I was telling her how beautiful she was. Suddenly she's going all coy and blushing at the compliment. We were up against the garage door, sitting crushed together on the concrete and I said "I love you and nothing else matters." She said "Are you sure nothing else matters?" and I said "No. I meant to say I love you and everything else matters". She liked that. Abruptly we were back in the doorway again. We must have been in and out of the door four or five times. I was trying to say goodbye. She kept pulling me back, throwing punches, encouraging me to explore her body, kissing me passionately. I wanted her to bust my lip. I wanted to taste my blood. I wanted her to leave marks, scars and bruises-- tangible evidence of her excitable self. She whispered in my ear "I love you." I was the happiest man on the planet. "HIT ME AGAIN, YOU FUCKING CUNT!"

It was the best sex I've ever had with my clothes on. Maybe even with them off.

***

Kelly called around 1 am. Clearly irritated and ablaze with pique she launched into a diatribe about how difficult I am to get ahold of. And why don't I have a cellphone? Or call waiting?"You're lucky I have a phone at all." I said. "I think phones are a technological nuisance.

I drifted off to sleep with her peevish admonishments still singing in my ears.

I woke up suddenly and looked at the clock. It was 7 am exactly. And I wasn't alone. Kelly was all over me, a tangible miasma. An erotic protoplasmic amoeboid. Her soul and mine were locked mouth-to-mouth and I was suckling at her sum and substance as her multitude of luminant arms and vaporous legs snaked around me snarling us into an impossible tangle. I was out-of-body, watching it from above while experiencing it from within. The bouquet of enthusiastic passion filled the room. She rolled under me and over me like corporeal smoke, spiraling down my belly and around my happy cock. She was an angelique demonette feeding on my compliant spirit, roiling through my guts, tearing her way to my heart. Where I invite her into the chamber. And the bitch just tears up the place!

I open my eyes. It's 9:30. I'm alone in my bed and this time I really am awake. Still buzzing from my Kellydream, I stumble into the kitchen and get the coffee going, my dick softening.

***

I was with Kelly at the bar.

She said "I got a new phone. I got 1600 anytime hours. And this cool case. "

"And it's a camera" she said.

"With my phone I got nothin'" I grumbled. " You got all that extra shit because you're a cute girl."

Kelly took a picture of me with her new phone. She looked at the picture and said "You look like Bukowski in this photo."

One of the things that had attracted me to Kelly was the bumper sticker on her car that reads "I'd rather be reading Bukowski!" It was a signal to me that a noteworthy and free-spirited brain lived here.

"Bukowski was the only person I would have had sex with because of who he was" said Kelly.

"He probably would have been a lousy fuck" she added.

"At least he would have written about you" I said.

The thought made her smile.

Kelly's beautiful. She's a pale-skinned, long-legged blonde. She's intelligent, exotic, flirtatious and observant. She has icy-blue extraterrestrial eyes and a lavish high-octane laugh. She's one-quarter Lakota Sioux and she wears an animal tail pinned on as her own. Her body is covered with ink -- illustrated with images of conjoined death-heads alive with cute spiders. And carnival freaks -- and studded with ornaments and baubles. She finds the the stink of decay beguiling and her avocation is genetic deformity and forensic pathology. Femme Fatale incarnate. Part critter, part ethereal lovecake, she is -- like Death -- unavoidable.

Of course, a lot of that stuff is superficial beauty, only skin-deep. But, like most monkeyboys, I swim and breed in the superficial skin-deep swale.

Like the rest of us who've survived a destructive relationship or two, she's a fairly torn-up piece of property, a broken doll. Persistent catastrophe convulses and squalls in her orbit.

I get a little overheated the way Kelly's lacy bra-strap falls down her illustrated arm behind the strap of her dungarees.

Todd and I were sitting at the bar in the Euclid Avenue Yacht Club. Kelly was bartending, an Olympic event was on TV and the female gymnasts were performing.

"It's not that I lust after fourteen-year-olds" Todd whispered, huskily.

"Get real" I said. "Of course you lust after fourteen-year-olds on pummel horses. Who doesn't?"

"Yeah. You're right" he said staring at Kelly's tit.

"Are you looking at my boob?" Kelly yelped.

"Uh, no" said Todd, quick on his feet. "I was looking at your bra strap. Nice underwear."

"I may look like shit on the outside." she said. "But underneath it's all Victoria's Secret."

"I might have let Skip have a good look one night." she smiled at me -- all coquettish and slightly deranged -- from her heart. Or maybe from her pants.

"I take Xanax and Prosac. Valuim does nothing for me." she said to me as she popped a Xanax. "I'm all messed up. Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and a bunch of other stuff."

"Why don't you have a little Merot with that," I suggested, looking to influence her chemistry as much as she would allow.

As she poured herself a glass I locked onto her ambiguous blue eyes.

"You're fucked up, girl. I think that's one of the reasons I like you so much

Our first date was a make-out session on my floor in front of my TV.

We made a second date to hang out at her place. She called me late on the day of the date and told me she'd just found out she was pregnant, but I could still come by if I wanted to. By the time I got to her place she was having a miscarriage. We watched a movie while she spotted and expelled bloody clumps.

On our third date we drank whiskey and snorted cocaine for nine hours. The drugs and alcohol wiped away the thin veneer of civilized behavior. So I grabbed her and flung her onto her bed demanding that she admit she was in love with me. And the next thing I know it's six am and she's screaming "GET THE FUCK OUTTA HERE AND DON'T COME BACK!". Blind-drunk I wrecked my car twice getting home.

After her miscarriage she kept "Clumpy", her aborted fetus, in a jar on her bedside table next to her pistol. Around this time -- because of a faulty furnace -- her house blew up and burned to the ground, sending her little Chihuahua, Wheezer, to doggie heaven.

I had bonded with Wheezer, and he with me. When I was at Kelly's on her couch watching TV Wheezer would put his tiny paw in my hand and keep it there for my stay. Or splay himself across my chest so that our hearts would beat together. Wheezer made it clear that he didn't care that we were different species. He'd cry like a little girl when I'd enter the room. He'd slather me with doggie kisses. He didn't care that we were both male. He knew we were cosmic soulmates.

I'm pretty sure I loved that little dog more than loved Kelly.


***


I'd stopped by Flora's classroom to return a pink thermal coffee cup she'd left at my place.

She was chiding one of her students, a retarded nine-year-old named Avery.

It was after school and she had her charges until Mom or Dad picked them up, around 6pm. Natasha, a little girl with Down Syndrome took an immediate liking to me. She stroked my beard and fed me "chicken soup" with a little yellow plastic shovel out of an empty red plastic cup. Avery dogged me demanding that I read the Three Little Pigs, which I did twice. The story had captivated Avery, the pigs, their houses, the wolf and their intertwined fates. He was excited and giggly but his mood became guilty and heavy-hearted when Flora reminded him that his behavior earlier in the day had been less than proper. That he had hit one of his female classmates. He had hit Natasha.

Flora was sitting across from me, her knees high, in a chair made to accommodate children. Avery was next to me, his expression collapsed and The Three Little Pigs a fading memory lost in his personal remorse.

Flora was wearing a mid-thigh skirt and long wool stockings. Black, dotted with colorful little flowers. As she berated Avery for his misbehavior my eyes fell to the pink, freckled flesh of her legs where her stockings ended. Her knees were parted. My gaze wandered up her thighs. And between to her crotch, a succulent mound of secular heaven.

"My friend Skip might get mad at me," Flora scolded Avery. " He might raise his voice. But he never hits me!"

My mind filled with the memory of Flora's naked white ass in my face, my red hand-print fresh and hot on it's surface. And Flora's compliant moans and queefs.

***

There are going to be a lot of gorgeous women at my funeral. It'll be a great place to pick up chicks.

LOVE CONNECTION

Several years ago, during the Clinton administration, a friend of mine said "Well, at least I never had sex in my office."

"I did" I said. "But it was Playboy and workplace sex was expected. It was in the job description."

Bonnie was an Editorial assistant and one of her duties was to flit around the tenth floor delivering manuscripts from editorial to the art department. She had become very flirtatious with me.

"Uh Oh" said Barb Hoffman. Bonnie's discovered Skip."

I'd been working late on a Friday. It was a warm summer Chicago night. John Petrie worked just down Michigan Avenue at an ad agency. He stopped by my office to see if I wanted to slam back a few drinks in celebration of the end of the work week. I really didn't need a reason to tank up other than the intrinsic joy of intoxication. So I joined John at a little outdoor cafe on the Near North Side.

We ran into Bonnie at the bistro where we'd chosen to swill. Wearing a short pastel sundress she was a slim woman with a full, heart-shaped ass. Her skin was a naturally dark Mediterranean complexion and, because of the season she was also tanned to the max. She'd have tan tan-lines. She said hello, and plopped into my lap, grinding into it. I put my arms around her waist and my hand low on her stomach. She wasn't wearing underwear. I could feel her pubic hair through the thin fabric of her summer dress.

Bonnie says "Why don't we head back to my apartment?" So I looked at John and asked him if he's ready to go. Bonnie yipped "Hey! I ain't taking both of you guys on!" "No." I reassured her. "I'll be dropping John off on the way to your place. It'll just be me and you."

Back at her place and she handed me a Perrier. I was sitting on the couch and she was standing in front of me. I ran my hand up the front of her legs. I grazed her cunt and her whole body spasmed in an electrical whiplash jerk. I pulled her dress over her head. Naked, she joined me on the couch as I got undressed. I spent a long time at her pussy. Looking at it, stroking it, prying it open, licking it, inhaling it. "Every one's different" I tell her "Like snowflakes. Yours is beautiful, long, folded in on itself and nicely pinkened. I slipped a finger in and she electrically whiplashed again. We fucked on the couch and on the floor. She took my hand and led me to her bedroom, her naked heart-shaped ass leading the way.

On her bed she got on her knees a presented her valentine to me. I was on her doggie-style and we were pounding away for awhile. She grabbed a vibrator from beside her bed, switched it on and reaching around behind me she applied the oscillator to my fulminating huevos. She must have thrown off a spark that ignited our volatile fluids because we exploded together, screaming, thrashing, mutually whiplashing, throwing off shards of energy and essence, electrically discharging goo and pneumatically regurgitating our messy stinking protonic souls in a greedy self-sacrifice to the Intergalactic Pork Goddess!

We collapsed unconscious into a disarrayed heap of soaking sheets, human sweat and carnal viscosity. As still as the dead, but with our hearts pounding loud enough to disturb the neighbors. We were melded into a fragrant aggregate of catatonic mutualism. Two people fused into one, spent and depleted from dancing in the Tabernacle. We fell into the deeply-entwined dark narcotic sleep of the sexed-out.

The following Monday at work she delivered me a manuscript and I asked her "So...what else did you do this weekend?"

"Nothing nearly as interesting as at the beginning" she laughed.

Then one day Bonnie quit her job at Playboy and moved to the West Coast.

In 1983 I was flipping through the tv channels in search of featherbrained entertainment when I happened upon a new game show called "Love Connection".

It was hosted by Chuck Woolery, a toothy doofus. A contestant was set up on a blind date and interviewed about the particulars -- whether or not things went well or disastrously.

The camera moved tight on the contestant, a slim dark-skinned woman. It was Bonnie.

She hated everything about her date. She told Chuck Woolery that she wouldn't need the game show's help finding dates. She could do just fine on her own.

AN INTERVIEW WITH SKIP WILLIAMSON BY CHRISTINA GUSEK -- 08/12/2005

On Tuesday I had the opportunity to sit with a close friend and mentor of mine, Skip Williamson and ask him about his life as an underground comic artist and the road that led him to his amazing life.
 
Skip and I have been friends for about three years. I have seen his work, heard his crazy stories, and even joined him in an art party. But until this assignment, I have never taken the time to sit with him and ask him, how it all started and what choices he made to become who he is today.
 
Skip Williamson, 61 is a legendary cartoonist and one of the architects of the underground comic’s movement.  In 1968, Skip worked with Jay Lynch and Robert Crumb and created the Bijou Funnies (the first underground comic of its kind). From 1975 to 1985, he was the art director, cartoonist and illustrator for Playboy magazine and created the “Playboy Funnies”. As of late, Skip has been producing large colorful, cartoon canvasses depicting political, moral and artistic capitulation.
 
Skip’s work has been displayed in a number of galleries the Corcoran, The Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Tate. In December, his work will be featured at Art At Large Gallery in New York City, along with H.R. Giger, John John Jesse and a number of other established artists.
 
I decided to create a setting that would fit the mood for the interview, so over lunch we met at Six Feet Under in East Atlanta. In his usual black attire he sat there with both hands cupped around his beer ready for my questions.
 
Chris: Define Success.
 
Skip: Success -- in the most superficial definition of the term -- depends more on energy and drive than it does on intelligence. This explains why we have so many stupid leaders.
 
But real success -- not the superficial stuff that's all about money and power -- has everything to do with self-gratification. What I mean by that is if you're at peace internally, if you're doing what you want to be doing, you're a success. If you get up in the morning and you go to bed at night and in-between you do what you want to be doing, you're successful.
 
On the other hand there's the glamorous, in-the-spotlight adoration that passes for success. The writer Joseph Heller said something like "Success and failure are both difficult. With success come drugs, divorce, fornication, bullying, travel, meditation, medication, depression, neurosis and suicide. With failure comes failure."
 
Chris: Give me some experiences from your life that you feel were the “stepping stones” to get to where you are today.
 
Skip: I realized what I was here for almost immediately. The fire that burned in the mind of the child still blazes. Beyond that, connections were very important, connections to friends and associates who share your drive. Nothing hones skill like a little friendly competition. After that, connection to a mentor is good. An association with someone who's achieved -- in your eyes -- what you'd like to achieve is a good thing. And the understanding that there's always room for improvement has served me well. Audacity is important...not to mention lots of hard work.
 
Every experience of my life was a stepping stone that got me (for better or worse) where I am today.
 
Chris: What drives you?
 
Skip: The voices in my head.
 
Chris: If I were to ask you why I need to continue my education, what would you tell me?
 
Skip: First of all, define "education". I learned more the first six months out of school then I did in four years of college. Formal training has its place, but you learn more rattling around in the world than in cloistered classrooms. The life experience is, by nature, continuing education. You never know what ecstatic wonderment or hideous carnage lies around the bend. Both are educational. If you don't continue, you die.

HOPPIN' DOWN THE BUNNY TRAIL

About five years ago the late great Buck Brown called. Buck was the cartoonist at Playboy who’s best known for his perpetually horny “Granny” character. I hadn’t talked to Buck for 16 or 17 years. He said Barb Hoffman gave him my number. He ran into her at a Playboy old-timers party. He said Kerig Pope wasn’t there. Kerig couldn’t bring himself to attend because he was still feeling bad about being let go.

"They let Kerig Pope go?!"

He was the art department. He was the creative nexus for Playboy’s illustrators and artists. He rode herd over a covey of angels, maniacs, gods and anarchists. He held them to deadlines while engaging their lunacy in the direction of editorial objective. But this is a new day. Who needs a splendid helmsman when you can have a servile geek writing graphic code for pennies on the dollar? Who cares about Art these days anyway? Art is so retro.

“I don’t even go down there anymore”, Buck said. “It costs too much to park. I just mail my shit to the New York office instead of going in. They don’t even know who I am anyway. The receptionist told me deliveries were in the rear.

“Kretchmer’s gonna be leaving at the end of the year.”

It’s the end of an era. It’s the twilight of the ‘boy.

***

When I heard that my defacto boss, Robert Baldi, had been shot dead by Chicago cops one thought crossed my mind. Unemployment.

So I called my friend Bob Post, an art director at Playboy, and arranged to meet him and Roy Moody for lunch. Lunch with these two guys was always a challenging experience. A perilous hike into uncertain territory handicapped only that we are, out of the gate, drunk as skunks. Bouts of drinking that lead to bouts of drinking that lead to heated discourse on the sad state of Art. Followed by slamming back shots of Wild Turkey. Followed by rant and counter-rant, each louder and more obstreperous than the previous. Followed by rounds of Long Island Ice Teas, followed by wracking sobs and guilt-laden Jesuit reproach and singing (loudly) along with Merle Haggard and Tammy Wynette on the jukebox. And on and on until the afternoon turns to evenings of abominate self-indulgence, quickly forgotten thanks to benevolent alcoholic stupor and Nature’s protective and thoughtful blackouts. Lunch with these guys tests the mettle of one’s liver and explodes brain cells as quickly as a cigarette carelessly dropped into the M-80s bin at a Mexican fireworks factory. Back from lunch you return stronger for it but with several years shaved off your lifespan.

Before the games began I asked them if there was an opening in Playboy’s art department. Both of the guys nodded yeah, and said the department was a man short. The next day Roy Moody interrupted my hangover with a call and said I should come on down to the office. “Be sure to bring along your portfolio” Roy said. I had an appointment with Arthur Paul, the legendary founding Art Director of Playboy magazine.

Art Paul was the consummate Art Director and he knew print design better than anyone in the business. He believed in white space and clever resolution. He understood type forms and pacing. His job was to take Man’s most salacious instincts and present them elegantly. He had a fetish for women’s feet in high heels and, appropriate to his status in the industry, he was inducted into the Art Director’s Hall of Fame along with Walt Disney and Saul Bass.

***

I waited outside Arthur Paul’s office for about half-an-hour – a short wait I was to find out. Art directors hustled layouts under his nose hoping for his initials but knowing, in their heart-of-hearts, that he would make major changes.

Art Paul’s executive assistant was Barbara Hoffman, a white-blonde efficiency expert in high heels, showed me into the great man’s office. He had the whole corner of the building, paintings by Schnakenberg and Warhol on the walls, a bank of light boxes splayed with hundreds of transparencies (35mm, 4x5s, 8x10s) of naked women gazing provocatively at the lens. He was a tailored man in his shirtsleeves, but his tie remained unloosened. He had an impish face surrounded by white wool. Bearded, balding with curly fringe, a pipe clenched between his teeth. Gold cuff links. Gold Rolex. He pumped my hand, happy to see me. He pulled out an illustration I did for Playboy back in 1972.

“It still holds up”, he said. “The hallmark of a good piece of art is that it holds up over time. I think this piece you did for us still meets the mark.”

He flipped through my portfolio without much comment and asked me how soon I could start work.

“Next Monday”, I bleated.

“Welcome aboard”, he said as he clasped my hand with both of his hands and led me to Tom Stabler’s office, the office next to his. Stabler was second in command in the art department and, as such, it had fallen to him to take me around and introduce me to the staff.

I was hauled around the 10th floor and introduced to editors, copy editors, proofreaders, associate editors and, the most important editorial link, the editorial assistants. In earlier times they would have been called secretaries. They were the glue that held it all together. They knew everything and kept it all straight for their errant and often absent bosses.

I was hustled into Arthur Kretchmer’s office. Kretchmer was the Editorial Director of Playboy. He was where the buck stopped before it went on to Hef. He was in sour spirits and preoccupied. He grunted a “hello” in my general direction. It wouldn’t take me long to learn that sour spirits and preoccupation was Kretchmer on a good day, and that he meant nothing personal. He and Shel Wax were going over some fucked up editorial predicament. Sheldon Wax, the Managing Editor, was smoking a pipe locked between angry clenched teeth. When I was introduced he scowled in my direction, and it was personal. His body language was disdainful and his attitude was contemptuous. I would say he was icy if there hadn’t been so much fire in the presentation. He was not pleased to meet me and he wanted me to know it. To Shel Wax I represented the antithesis of Playboy. The fact that I was actually on staff was a scar on Playboy’s sophisticated urbanity.

The editors who most appreciated my company and glib mockery were not the honchos, but those with subordinate power yet more polymorphous pizzazz. The likes of Bill “Mad Dog” Helmer, Bob Shea, Robert Anton Wilson, & Kate Nolan.

***

The first issue of Playboy hit the newsstands in November 1953. Over 50,000 copies of that issue were sold. At the beginning of 1956 the circulation was up to 500,000. By 1959 it hit 1,000,000 and by 1972 the circulation of Playboy magazine was at 7,012,000.

Playboy was the synergy in the cultural/biological catalyst that facilitated the ripening of goofy post-war schoolboys in the 1950s into the adult male disco-predators that stalked the common-wealth in the 70s -- and everything since.

The glory days of Playboy were in the early to mid sixties when they published fiction by the world’s most celebrated writers lavishly illustrated by artists like Picasso, Richard Stella and Andy Warhol, but despite the lofty guise it was sex that sold the magazine. During my teen years I was certainly motivated not so much by the magazine’s editorial content as much as by the splendid spectacle of Christa Speck and her gravity defying breasts at romp in the Playboy Mansion’s Red Room. And the nude Jayne Mansfield film outtakes that got Hef hauled in on obscenity charges. These were the touchstones, the wellspring of burgeoning pubescence for teen boys of my generation. But the times they were a’changing.

Hefner had unleashed the monster. The Sexual Revolution was destined to leave its patriarch in the dust.

By the time I arrived at Playboy the empire was stretched thin. Ill-conceived corporate ventures such as Playboy casinos, Playboy films and Playboy records were hemorrhaging income provided by the cash cow magazine. And the magazine’s take on sex was rapidly being usurped by the more gynecological approach of rival publications like Penthouse and Hustler. The post-Sexual Revolution adolescent males were not as intrigued by great ideas and lofty philosophy as much as gaping vulvas.

The remains of the empire were still in place when I arrived. Corporate mentality was but a hazy blur on the horizon, but during my tenure it was to achieve sharp focus.

ATLANTA ARTS (AN OXYMORON)

The artist in our time has two chief
responsibilities: (1) art; and (2) sedition.
--Edward Abbey


Shortly after I moved to the Atlanta area the Atlanta-Journal Constitution published a full-page story about me in their Dixie Living section. The publication of this article resulted in a couple phone calls. One was from an ex-mayor of Atlanta who wanted to buy me lunch and talk to me about doing chamber of commerce-type, lightly humorous vingnette comic strips extolling the Buckhead neighborhood, an area that's always appealed to me as particularly tawdry. But not in a good way. I accepted the lunch but rejected the project.

The other call was from the Fine Arts League of Kennesaw, Georgia. An affable woman who identified herself as the director of the League said she'd seen the newspaper piece and asked if I'd be interested in addressing the assembled League. And maybe hang a few pieces in their gallery area the weekend of the presentation. I said, sure I'd do it.

The area was rapidly changing. The affluent transplant noose was tightening around the indigenous rednecks. Many local farmers became instant millionaires as they sold off their acreage to developers who would soon make tens of millions turning their pastures into subdivisions to house upwardly mobile republicans. The less-fortunate couldn't afford the rent increases. So the tide of Commerce washed across the suburbs unhindered by the rustic locals. Inevitably the hayseed population was migrating away from the upscale fascists enclaves in and around Atlanta. Eventually a person speaking with a southern accent would be peculiar.

The director of the Fine Arts League of Kennesaw told me she was a transplant from New York City. And it was her mission to shepherd the provincial art bumpkins into a more urbane direction. I was part of her master plan to glamorize her provincial membership.

I hauled a few small paintings and original comic art panels to the Fine Arts League gallery the Thursday afternoon before the Saturday evening was going to give my presentation. The gallery was a the hallway in the basement. Loitering there was a skin-headed guy in military camouflage clothing and combat boots rambling on about all the cool new warplanes flying in and out of Dobbins Airforce Base, and a slouchy 40ish guy in bib overalls and a John Deere cap. They were smoking cigarettes and having conversation. The camouflage guy was military, stationed at Dobbins . And the guy in the cap and dungarees was and artist who had a couple of his paintings hanging upstairs (poorly rendered farmscapes, old barns and sheds). He lived with his mom.

I told them I was the guy who was speaking Saturday night and I was here to hang a few pieces.

I was hanging the cover art for my anthology, "The Scum Also Rises". It depicts an incubus sitting at a table. Strewn across the table are an array of face masks of iconic bigwigs like Lenin, Nixon, Elvis, Hitler, Mickey Mouse, the Pope and others. The demon holds it's current mask, Ronald Reagan.

The rustic momma's-boy artist in bib overalls peered at the art. He turned to me and poked his finger in my chest "This here cartoon insults President Ronald Reagan! Yew can't insult a President of the You-nited States! 'Specially not Ronald Reagan! We have Laws agin' it!" he barked. He stomped out of the gallery bitching and bellyaching loudly.

The man in the camouflage outfit looked at me and said "They fly the secret stuff at night".

The night of my event 100 people or so showed up. A respectable number for the small quarters.

My thing was titled "True Lies". It was a two-part presentation. A half hour, a short intermission and a second half hour. The first half was all about my wild-eyed, anarchistic, bomb-throwing insurgent artwork complete with indecent graphic images from the underground comix in an accompanying slideshow.

After the intermission the second half was about what a fraud I am because while I was producing firebrand broadsides advocating assassination as a humorous means of political change, I was also designing the Post Raisin Bran box. And drawing full-page newspaper ads for McDonalds. And Billboards for Seven-Up. And print ads for United Airlines Continental Bank of Illinois. And California Raisin trading cards. And illustrations for Encylopaedia Britannica. And Funny Face drink mix packages. Clearly I was an artistic whore. Pay me and I'll give good art. Pay me more and I'll pretend I like it. All of this documented in an accompanying slideshow.

Which is the truth and which is the lie? How can two things occupy the same space at the same time? How can you explain someone like me? It confuses people.

I'd only gotten through the first half of my show. The one where I was an unhinged urban terrorist armed with a Rapidograph and an unbecoming sense of humor.

A figure stood up in the back of the room and bellowed "UNDERGROUND COMIX?! THAT'S WHERE THEY BELONG...BURIED UNDERGROUND!"

It was the bib-overalled artist with the John Deere cap who lived with his mom. He was standing at the back of the room. Railing loudly and shaking his fist in my direction.

"AND YOU, TOO!" he yelled at me, "THAT'S WHERE YOU BELONG! UNDERGROUND! SIX FEET UNDER!"

He stormed out of the room and slammed the door on his way out. You could hear him ranting as he stomped and clamored to his pick-up truck in the parking lot. The door slammed and his truck roared as he threw it into gear and -- throwing back gravel, dust and smoke -- his tires screeched as he squealed out of the parking-lot and down the blacktop, his engine reverberating and popping along the way . Above it all the curses and exhortations of the outraged redneck art patron. For sure, I figured, he was off to fetch his shotgun.

Turns out he was one of the Board of Directors of the club I was addressing. At my first speaking engagement for a league of Georgia art disciples I received a death threat from one of its Officials.



***

NEXUS

"If you're not good enough to be a cartoonist,
maybe you can be an artist." -- S. Clay Wilson

During the years I’d lived in the Atlanta area my daily routine was a bit monastic. Not in the humble religious fashion, but more in the I-didn’t-get-out-very-much fashion. Day-to-day I sequestered myself in my studio painting and writing. I’d kept my distance from the formal Atlanta art scene because shortly after I’d moved to the area I tried connecting with the Nexus Contemporary Art Center.

I’d read in Juxtapoz that Nexus was the most progressive gallery in Atlanta. I made an appointment with Julia Fenton, the gallery director, to propose that I curate a show of cartoonists who were also painters.

When I arrived I was greeted by Ms. Fenton and her gallery manager, Louise Shaw. Julia was friendly, but Louise Shaw was icey, corporate and treated me with contempt. In fact I was taken off-guard by the profound brawn of her distemper. Clearly, this was her jurisdiction and in her fiefdom there would be no miscreant funny-boys leaving behind filthy handprints, bloody bootprints, trailing noxious bodily fluids and wastes through her Annointed Halls of Culture. We have Laws!

Yet here I was. Poking my cartooning stick into the politically-correct hornet's nest.

Intrepid in the face of doom, I outlined my proposal -- I would curate a show of paintings by cartoonists. As a couple of examples I'd brought along a 16-color, museum-quality, signed & numbered serigraph print that was a collaboration between me and Zap Comix pornographer, S. Clay Wilson. The image was an Irish bar full of monstorous inebriates. A pyrotechnical vampire, a Sinn Finn werewolf, a child in a "legalize Cyanide" t-shirt buying beer, a bare-breasted quadroon.)

The other was -- "Magnitude X" -- a signed print by Robert Williams that, with surreal deviant humor, depicted a Southern California earthquake. Mother Nature as a full-blown dominatrix whips the Earth's quivering buttocks with a severed goat's head causing seismic shifts in the tetonic plates under LA.

When I laid these two prints out to view Louise Shaw went ballistic. "THESE ARE SEXIST!" she shrieked and recoiled in indignation. Her ears pinkened and her complexion turned blood red. She had boiled over into delirium and screeched that no sexist cartoon art would sully her gallery walls. And -- psychotically oxymoronic -- she repeatedly asked me " Can you get Robert Crumb to participate in the show?"

Meanwhile Julia was blindsiding me with charm, She congratulated me on being me and told me she especially liked a piece of my art I laid out. Snappy Sammy Smoot all smiles in a world of Edvard Munch's "The Scream" personas.

They were playing Good Cop, Bad Cop on me. But, in order to befuddle my sometimes logical mind, they'd cloaked their behavior in baroque surrealism. "SEXIST CARTOONS WOULD NEVER SHOW AT NEXUS! CAN YOU GET ROBERT CRUMB FOR THIS SHOW? "

I explained that I couldn't verify Crumb on the spot but I'd certainly invite him and I wondered if she'd actually ever seen his work. I apologized that my art had the huevos to offend her delicate feminist sensibilities. But I didn't apologize for my art.

Her eyes narrowed into malevolent slits and she hissed the meeting was over.

Ratcheting it up a notch, she asked if gallery could keep a piece of my original art to hang in their intern's cubicle, because -- as an ignorant neophyte -- he enjoyed cartoons. I snatched up the art as I was shepherded out, tucked it back in my portfolio case and zipped it closed.

She briskly escorted me out the door while inviting me to leave a donation for the gallery. She spit "Let me know if you can get Robert Crumb" as the door hit me in the ass as I was exiting.

Her mean-spirited disrespect left me embittered and skittish. So I retreated back into my protective shell in order to paint the canvasses the voices in my head were demanding I paint.

***

EYEDRUM

"Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands,
hoist the black flag and begin slitting throats." -- H.L. Mencken

During the Summer of 2002 I was in a relationship with a woman that was fashioned primarily of drunken quarrelling in lieu of sex. Around 2am – after a bitter evening of inebriated malice and passionate recrimination – on my way to home and sanctuary I was pulled over by the Cobb County Police. I have no memory of the evening after midnight. Until I remember attempting to focus on how I would get back to something approaching normal from the doublevision that had Interstate 75 converging and veering off in dual opposing arcs. For a while holding my left hand over my left eye while steering with my right hand seemed to work. But in the end I chose to aim the car – as best I could – between the intersnaking yellow lines of the roadway and its doppelganger. After that I remember the blue lights flashing in my rearview mirror.

I was gregarious with the constabulary.

“Good thing you got me off the road, Officer. I’m definitely a danger to life and limb.”

“What have you had to drink, sir…a couple of beers?”

“Way more than that. I lost count hours ago. No reason to administer roadside sobriety tests. I assure you I’ll fail them all.”

I was arrested, convicted of DUI, served 24 hours in jail, paid fines, attended DUI School and was required to perform 40 hours of Community Service for a not-for-profit entity.

Over the decade I’d lived it Atlanta I’d had contact with a couple of creative not-for-profits. But Eyedrum, the art gallery, was axial. We’d had a relationship since October 2000, when I’d had a one-man show at the space.


***

One day in early 2000 I was contacted by Ben Young, one of the collective that administered Eyedrum, a small gallery on Trinity street, in a unpleasant downtown neighborhood in the shadow of the State capitol.

The gallery took up the ground floor and the basement of the building. Over the years the building was subject to the laws of gravity and the poor buttress qualities of red clay. So the floor of the main gallery was at a notable tilt.

The basement walls were painted white except for an alcove at the back of the room painted black. Here, in an arcane cave-like environ, was an illegal bar (recommended “donation” for a Foster’s oilcan: $3.00), an overstuffed well-used and abused couch and a couple of chairs. At the far end of the basement was a bandstand for the weekly music/film/video evening events, the admission to which was the bread and butter that kept the gallery afloat. It was a long, narrow room with low ceilings serpentine with pipes and ductwork.

Woody Cornwell lived and worked as an abstract artist on the third floor of the building at 253 Trinity Avenue. His apartment had a tin ceiling that he had painted silver so when he opened the downstairs gallery space he called it “The Silver Ceiling”. A bit later, since properly maintaining a gallery is an assiduous task, Woody took on the assistance of seven other young bohemians, they formed a collective dedicated to featuring unfettered art attacks that weren’t being shown in other Atlanta galleries. The gallery was named "Eyedrum". Woody became the gallery director and he was a guy I felt an instant kinship with. When I’m in the company of someone with a reckless disregard of propriety coupled with florid child-like vision my simian instincts allow that I should pay attention. I knew that Woody was a Brother Rat.

I agreed to Eyedrum’s solicitation for a show. It would be a chance to display some of the large-scale pieces I’d been working on during my hermitage.

In the upstairs gallery I hung 25 or 30 paintings. In the basement I displayed 150 pages of original comic art and ephemera. I had some friends of mine – an all-girl power trio heavily influenced by Metallica named ”Pinkeye” – play for the opening. Pinkeye gave me the finger as they strode onstage. Each of the three girls was dressed in a black cheerleader outfit with knee-high black boots and a big red numeral “6” on the front of each jersey. The music roared, the liquor flowed and the room was fuliginous from marijuana smoke. As these events go it was one of the more excessively agreeable artistic excursions I’ve experienced. And so it went for the month the show was up.

I was always present during gallery hours, weed rolled and beer in hand. There was a party the night of the show’s closing. The weather was wild and turbulent, lightening ripped the firmament and rain fell in torrents, so the crowd was smaller than the opening -- some friends and family and all the Eyedrummers. But the party was as feral as opening night, perhaps even more indulgent. The band Wide Open rocked the rafters until it was time to stagger home. The exhibition got notable coverage in Creative Loafing, Atlanta’s alternative weekly, and a positive review and splashy photos of my art in the Atlanta-Journal Constitution. I didn’t sell a single piece from the show but as some sort of hippie-pagan-art-happening timewarp it was a resonant success. In any case, I cloistered myself back into my studio and gave only passing thought to Eyedrum until my run-in with the Authorities in the Summer of 2002.

***

I’ve asked artists why the arts are so inert and conservative in Atlanta. Too much humdrum, not enough artgasm. Like a patina of tedium, the language of Atlantan arts is voiced in monotone and its palette, monochromatic. Why is this?

I’ve been told more than once “After all it is the South.”

What the fuck kind of attitude is that?! Art by its very essence is iridescent cacophony. Unchecked anarchy – the individual human spirit unleashed through the hearts and brains of reckless visionaries. Slash and burn on a very personal level. Longitude and latitude have no bearing.

Atlanta, by way of corporate rapacity and business-friendly gentrification, is on the world stage. But it’s arts are directed by women and men in turned out Suits with dollar signs in their eyes who dictate creativity in a corporate direction. And the artists have bought into it. A Coca-Cola (Evil, murdering sugar-water manufacturers!) sponsorship and a show in the Sun Trust (Bankster thieves!) lobby is backpedaling. Hallmark Moment Fiberglass Cows as public art (nothing political, nothing religious, nothing to offend delicate sensibilities accepted) are intellectually diminutive, a dumbing down of art. In general most of the art I've seen exhibited in Atlanta reminds me of bad New York City art from a decade earlier.

Art is not some way over-intellectualized “Artist’s Statement” or a predictable and uninteresting non sequitur on canvas, or a bag of rocks hanging in a doorway or a box of ribbons on the floor. Art is energy, life, color, design, form, texture, sound and flavor that streams unencumbered from the predacious hearts and haunted minds of individuals willing to indulge their beguiling delirium for the amusement of themselves, if not the rest of us. It cannot be taught and, more often than not, formal Academics are a destructive factor that encourages imperious political reproach of “unauthorized” creativity.

***

By the time I’d called to volunteer Eyedrum had moved into a new space that was more traditionally gallery-like – an open area with high ceilings, tract lighting, level floors and white walls. The old place had been more anti-formal and I’ve always been one to prefer the breezy to the ceremonious. I personally preferred the oblique building in the scary neighborhood but I’ve found that the Wheels of Progress tend to grind on without my permission.

I called Eyedrum leaving a message that I’d like to volunteer my time to them. I knew that volunteers were the lifeblood that kept the day-to-day workings of the gallery functioning. A month or so passed before I heard back. Eventually I received a call from Stan Woodard, the gallery manager. I explained my legal entanglement and he said there was no problem with me volunteering but asked me to talk to Robert Cheatham about what exactly I could do for them.

Robert Cheatham had just taken over the gallery directorship from Woody Cornwell. It was a bloodless coup. Woody was burnt out after years wrestling Eyedrum’s demons, so the mantle was passed to Robert. And Woody remained as one of the collective’s fourteen.

I called Robert at his home and explained that I’d been busted for drunk driving and I was predisposed to perform my community service at Eyedrum. Robert was enthusiastic about me doing something for the gallery. And, he added, since all artists are irresponsible drunks it wasn’t uncommon that Eyedrum was a community service venue for the rogue iconoclast.

The new Eyedrum was set back off the road, across an expansive gravel parking lot, in a group of low-rise industrial buildings. One of the problems with the new location was that it was easy to miss. People seeking an edifying artistic experience would frequently drive by the place three or four times only to give up the search and take their art patronage elsewhere.

One of the solutions the collective came up with was to decorate the facade of the building so that it could not help but be noticed. They’d asked local graffiti artists to bedeck the wall, changing adornment (artist to artist) every month or so. But the Eyedrummers weren’t particularly happy with what had been done. My theory is that it was against the grain that graffiti artists be told where to apply their spray paint. The very ethos of graffiti is that it is a clandestine act committed after dark and on the run. To say to them, “Here is a wall. You have our permission to deface it.” is antithetical to the tagger’s nature. Without the ever-present chill of discovery and lawlessness, the fire was diminished.

So Robert asked me if I’d be willing to paint a more permanent signage on the front of the building. This was an idea that appealed to me. After ten years ensconced in my studio north of metropolitan Atlanta I’d have the opportunity to plumb the urban hellhole, work outside and commiserate with fellow artists. The intriguing prospect of bohemian vagabondage churned and jiggled lyrically on my artistic horizon.

It started with a fairly simple cartoon figure of an eyeball with arms and legs beating on a tom-tom, the appellation “Eyedrum” encircling the image.

When I met Robert Cheatham he met my stubborn requirements. He possessed a compelling intellect, was a philosophical anarchist and the couple of times I was fortunate enough view his art installations his ingenious ability produced a rapid heartbeat.

Then there was Stan Woodard, a surley and lecherous rascal. In a politically correct world he was a closet vulgarian, routinely preying on young female interns and artistic wannabes. In addition to being a sourpuss and a predator he was also untalented artist

Understand this – I don’t begrudge a man his Evolutionary Biology. The relentless urgency to propagate the species manifests itself as the robust male compulsion to splatter the insides of as many female bellies as he can during his lifetime. The Collective Male doggedly hammers away, blissfully ignorant that his depraved gratification keeps us at the top of the food chain. But don’t get me wrong. I’m as much a product of histology as any other guy. In fact I rather wallow in it. But I don't tolerate charlatans well.

Around the time I’d started painting the wall, artistically decontaminated fiberglass cows were about to be foisted as public art on a gullible public. Atlanta, ever the culturally backwater megalopolis, came late to the party. For years this mad cow parade had, like a bovine scourge,migrated from city to region across the nation. Some areas selected cow alternatives in deference to local fauna like fish or dogs or horses.

In Wyoming I saw a fiberglass horse emblazoned with Custer’s Last Stand – white, uniformed government representatives being slaughtered by dark-skinned indigenous warriors. I very much liked that horse and its cautionary message. But in Atlanta only decorous imagery would be allowed.

So on the Eyedrum wall I painted a cow crucified on a cross of Art – “Guernicow!”
after the terrified horse in Picasso’s “Guernica”.

***

As Spring ripened into Summer the wall panel I was painting became a dense cartoon ragout of musicians, demons, critics considering lynched misfortunates and Hello Kitty as art, dancers with lightning bolts for hair – a panorama of artistic licentiousness with hell’s flames and rascally imps at sidewalk level stretching up to a starry firmament and an avenging angel at the rooftop.

On Saturdays Stan and Robert would sit outside soaking up rays and observing my progress.

“Hey, Skip, where’s the sex?” drooled Stan.

“Yeah,” rejoined Robert. “Where’s the sex?”

Painting the wall had become a social process. I was not adamant or proprietary about this project. I had incorporated suggestions from other artists, children and the occasional crack addict. So I was certainly open to counsel from the gallery’s director and manager. But the fact is, as an underground cartoonist I'm not really known for my sexual content.

“Sure,” I said. “When I’ve completed this panel I’ll go back in and paint a little depravity in the circle behind the eyeball.”

In the meantime I’d asked permission of the committee to expand my imagery across the entire façade of the gallery – to make it a mural and they agreed.

***

Having been a recluse for nearly a decade I was looking forward to a little interaction with cultured rabble and postmodern ergophobiacs.

In the complex that housed Eyedrum there were studio spaces utilized by individual artists, one of which was an ambitious young man named Travis Pack. Travis sported a five-o’clock-shadow haircut and a forced manic personality that seemed to be his take on the way an artist should behave.

Travis hissed “I should be painting that mural. Why didn’t they ask me?” His eyes cramped into covetous slits “I need to be on the committee. I will be one of the fourteen!”

He showed me his paintings – robots, monkeys, letterforms and shapes arranged collage-like in a lackluster palette. His work was not without its charm but it was callow – not yet exceptional. He told me he was influenced by the Chicago Imagists. Well, the Chicago Imagists were – for twenty years – my friends and fellow travelers and, frankly, I just didn’t see it. I didn’t impugn his work though the stench of Agenda was acrid.

***

One Saturday Stan said, “We have a new girl coming aboard to gallery-sit. She’s doing community service for a DUI just like you. And she’s cute!” just as Robin Brasington came bicycling across the parking lot.

I liked Robin almost immediately. She was a student of Sara Hornbacher’s digital video class at the Atlanta College of Art, and proved to be an affable bundle of genuine talent.

Robin was born and raised in rural Adairsville, Georgia, and Atlanta was as far as she’d ventured on the planet. She was quietly talkative, critical and opinionated. She’d let me know what she thought was strong and what she thought was weak about my work. “They teach us to be critical at school,” she said.

Our bond – other than art – was that both of us had served time in the hoosegow because we’d chosen to operate heavy machinery while pie-eyed. “I’d only had one beer,” she complained. “I wasn’t even drunk,” she grumbled.

“They took me to jail and made me take a shower. I was like the only girl without a shaved pussy. They let you have razors in jail?!”

Robin really got my attention when Eyedrum sponsored an evening of videos from Sara Hornbacher’s students. In one of Robin’s vids she’s running through the woods and comes upon a doll hanging by its neck in a tree. She cuts down the doll and buries it in a shallow grave. “This video’s about when I when I was in college,” she explained to me “I had a boyfriend. He was a shy quiet guy who got involved in a drug deal and was murdered. His body was found in a shallow grave.”

Some of her videos were just plain goofy, which of course appeals to me. In one her areolas become twin Pee Wee Hermans. One was about the annoying physics of multiple personality disorder, and others were lush undulating sexual imagery.

***

I’d nearly completed the first panel and had started sketching and applying paint to the second panel.

The art for the second panel would be an enormous goat-headed colossus, an art deco edifice -- under each arm a kneeling virgin -- one white, one of color. Like the Statue of Liberty there’s an entrance at the foot of the colossus. Above the doorway is the legend “BUREAU OF SANCTIONED ARTS”. In front of the colossus is a broad field crowded with cows painted metallic gold and behind the colossus is the Atlanta Skyline. A garland of smaller images depicting artistic capitulation and human folly would surround the main graphic.

And I’d drawn up six or seven retro-sexual images to put behind the drumming eyeball. There were cartoon dogs happily copulating, a reverse centaur – top half equine with human female bottom half, a reinterpretation of “Envy” borrowed from Bruegel’s “Seven DeadlySins” (A canine/humanoid sticks his tongue down the throat of a willing female as another canine/humanoid looks on jealously.), some sort of lupine beast in a pimp suit humping a naked woman, a hairy demon head (Self portrait.) with a naked girl spread-eagled across his tongue and a kneeling sybaritic and horned female devil sucking on her own tail.

Since they'd played a primary role in the genesis this section of the mural, I showed the sketches to Stan and Robert. There was no objection but maybe a little nervous laughter.

I applied the outline of these figures in soft color behind the eyeball figure. I wanted to keep these more sexually provocative additions achromatic in a graphic field that was full of bright color, so that these images could not be seen from a distance but only when close up to the wall.

The paint was scarcely dry when rumblings of disapproval resonated from the committee and I was asked to join them at their next meeting. I was being sent to the Principal’s Office once again, my insurgent heart was nourished by the prospect.

Before the meeting Nisa Asokan, one of the committee of fourteen, cornered me outside the gallery.

“I don’t know what the problem is,” she said. “These are just pictures of people having fun.”

The meeting started with someone saying “Y’know, Skip, we really appreciate the great job you’ve done on the mural…”

“Let’s cut to the chase,” I suggested

“There’s some feeling in the committee that the new images you’ve put in the mural are not appropriate on the façade of Eyedrum.”

“Who objects?” I asked. “Let me hear the objections.”

“The children,” said Hormuz Minza, the only vocal objector of the fourteen. “When families visit the gallery children will be exposed to those drawings.”

“The kids will love ‘em,” snorted Woody Cornwell. “It’s the parents that won’t like it.”

Nisa added, “I want Skip to paint my big pussy on the wall.”

I agreed to replace two of the images – the beast in the pimp suit fucking a woman and the spread-eagle girl on the demon’s tongue. And the committee determined that the rest could stay.

The show in Eyedrum’s main gallery during the outrage over my disreputable imagery consisted of yard signs, each sign divided in half, one half was normal yard signage. The other half was the artist’s precise anatomically correct renderings of provocatively posed close-ups of female genitalia. I guess in theory children would suffer damage from the cartoon art outside yet would enjoy artist edification from the photographically explicit cooter images hanging inside the gallery

I had contacted Creative Loafing, Atlanta’s alternative weekly about the friction within Eyedrum over my immodest art. Stirring the waters seemed like a good way to get more than the usual eight or nine people a week over to the gallery. And the irony of commotion at Atlanta’s anointed “cutting-edge” artspace over artistic propriety begged to be a matter of record. The Loaf published a short piece about the hubbub. The following issue published a choleric letter from Mary Alice Ramsey complaining that Stan Woodard’s name had been misspelled. And that I profited from Eyedrum’s international reputation while Eyedrum was poorer because of an “uninteresting mural”.

***

Over the months I’d been painting the wall I had the opportunity to view one pallid exhibition after another in Eyedrum’s main gallery. There were a couple of notable exceptions and several engaging shows in Eyedrum’s small gallery. But in the evenings there were often wonderful presentations of music, poetry film, video and sound art. Bizarre shit like improv-isational opera, or Adam Overton’s sound/video-feedback/dance cross-dimensional excursions, or a musical aggregation called “Three Blind Mice” that consisted of a dozen or so blindfolded saxophonists all playing at the top of their lungs without regard for what the other “Blind Mice” were doing, or a European gypsy-punk band inspired by the culture of American
violence.

So I put together an Eyedrum evening event in June 2003. I asked Robin Brasington to provide a video loop that would be projected over the performance of AquaVenus, an electronica duo. I hung teal and dark red draperies, the colors of Kabuki Theater and, with monofilament, dangled lurid gold and spangled assemblages I’d constructed from toys throughout the space. The gallery became an unusually sensual metaphysical funhouse with undulating hedonic images illuminating the perplexing electro-pagan euphony of Vince Wiggins and Sonia Perrine, all surrounded by the heroic metaphysical/dreamstate/surreal paintings of Maurice Clifford in my opinion the strongest show in the main gallery during my time at Eyedrum.

Nobody from the fourteen except Robert Cheatam, who was collecting admission at the door, attended.

The next day when I was tearing down the set Maurice Clifford was switching out his paintings and rearranging his show in the main gallery. He said, “I thought the drawings on your mural that offended the committee were the thing made your art interesting.”

***

I arrived to work on the mural one Saturday in late summer, hauled out the ladder, my paints and brushes and started setting up for a day of painting alfresco. I looked at the wall and discovered that someone had painted over all of the offending images, not just the two I agreed to replace.

This was murder in the cathedral! At least Diego Rivera’s mural was sledgehammered at the behest of Evil Capitalist Pigs – you expect that sort of thing from Evil Capitalist Pigs. But this self-officious meddling was far more egregious. It was by one of the coven – an artistic vigilante.

”Who painted over my art?” I asked Robert Cheatham.

He said he’d thought I’d done it because it was so well executed.

“Yes,” I said. “The background color is perfectly matched. Whoever did it has a good eye.”

“Then it couldn’t have been anyone on the committee," smiled Robert.

***

One of the gallery sitters, told me she’d overheard Travis Pack – by now one of the fourteen -- talking to some of the other Eyedrummers about having another artist replace the Eyedrum mural. And a couple of weeks later it was announced in class by a student at the Atlanta College of Art that the Eyedrum mural would be painted out so that she could project video on the wall for an evening event. No one at the gallery had taken time to mention this to me. It came to me second hand from a classroom at the Woodruff Art Center. Maybe I'm wrong, but I think a phone call to me from Eyedrum would have been the courteous thing. But to get the news through classroom gossip was contemptible disregard ladled onto judgmental hooliganism by any reckoning.

The Woodruff Art Center was actually a fertile source for information. An artist I knew who shared one of the studio spaces behind Eyedrum told me there that her roommate, Mary Alice Ramsey (A member of Stan Woodard's concubine) was the woman who’d assumed the mantle of moral arbiter and, avenging brush in hand, expunged my nasty bits from the wall.

I contacted Robert Cheatham and asked if there were plans to paint out my work. He said the committee had decided to return to the policy of rotating the mural art to a variety of artists. I wondered did anyone intend on filling me in on the plans?

“I’ll let the committee know that you’re dismayed that your art will be painted out.”

“Just let me know when it will happen,” I said. “I’d like to capture video of it being painted over.”

I didn’t hear back from Robert or from anyone else at Eyedrum central. But a couple of months later someone I ran into on Euclid Avenue told me the mural was scheduled to be removed in December 2004. And a new one painted by Travis Pack.

Once again no one from the gallery had the integrity to give me the courtesy of a phone call.

I emailed Robert and told him I’d found out on the street about Eyedrum’s pending plans to destroy my art. I said, “You guys should be ashamed of yourselves.”

“We have no shame,” he responded.

The next day my unfinished mural was expunged and Travis began applying his paint.

***

THE LANDMARK DINER

"Painting: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather
and exposing them to the critic." -- Ambrose Bierce

In 2004 I was well into production of a documentary about my art and life and whenever I'd get the opportunity I'd show an edit (25 minutes to 45 minutes) in order to get feedback, as a means of self-promotion and for the entertainment and edification of others.

While stalking Kelly Hall at the Euclid Avenue Yacht Club in Little Five Points I got to know Tim Cordier, who occasionally served me my drinks. Besides slinging poison Tim was an aspirant comedian. Every summer he was the host of "Alive in Little Five", a monthly late-night talk show on stage. Tim was the host, performed a monologue and sat at a desk. He had a wacky sidekick and every guest was escorted on stage by a long legged young woman in a Playboy Bunny costume. He was like Steve Allen with a healthy dose of Pee Wee Herman reshaped for modern youth.

His guests were political types, Atlanta sports heroes, burnt out ancient rock and roll guys, local tv weathermen, and civil rights icons.

Tim asked me if I'd like to be a guest on "Alive in Little Five". I said sure. He could interview me and I could show the movie.

We did it and it was fun, the girl -- in the skimpy bunny costume -- who escorted me onstage was nine months pregnant. Afterwards me and my friends all went back to the Euclid Avenue Yacht Club and tanked up until the wee hours.

In Spring of 2005 Tim had the opportunity to expand his comic base.

The Landmark Diner is a chrome and neon 24-hour eatery at the corner of Piedmont and Roswell Road in Atlanta, in the heart of the reprehensible Buckhead neighborhood. The menu is vast, the food is mediocre and overpriced. It has a reputation as an after-hours hangout for local celerbities. Elton John has been spotted there. As has Jeff Foxworthy. And lots of creaky old Italian and Greek guys with pinky rings chomping on cigar stubs, their gold chain neckware entwining into graying chest hair as it trailed into open-necked hawaiian print shirts. Hunched over a plate of Herring at 4 am.

Attached to the Diner (in back) was the Landmark Lounge, a nightclub that had been designed by Johnny Esposito a Sicialian club owner and entrepreneur. (He was known for Johnny's Hideaway, a dance club for the middle aged.) The Landmark Lounge was dark, the walls were black and red hung with a few Art Deco paintings of women in slinky gowns and smoking cigarettes. The room had lots of chrome trim and mirrored walls. There was a small stage, a dance floor, tables around the the perimeter and -- in the back -- a horse-shoe shaped bar. A cozy little dive where Frank and the Rat Pack would have felt comfortable ringa-ding-dinging.

The Landmark Diner owners (the Lambrous) were looking to have the Lounge area produce cash. They had been booking comedy, and the occasional controversial speaker. Tom Bernheim, a German club manager fresh from Munich had been charged with revitalizing the venue.

Tom Bernhiem asked Tim Cordier if he'd like to present his live talk show act at the Landmark Lounge. Tim asked me if I'd be one of the guests (another would be Johnny Esposito). I said "sure". I show the movie edit again. Tim introduced me to Tom Bernheim. Tom asked if I'd like to hang some of my art in the club the night of the performance. "I can do that" I said.

So March 26th, the day of the show, I pulled into the Landmark parkinglot, their marquee proclaimed "Live at the Landmark Lounge Tonite! Skip Williamson, Johnny Esposito".

I carefully removed the art deco paintings of women and stored them in a closet. I hung eight of my pieces on the walls.

The show went well enough. Not as amusing as the original "Live in Little Five" thing. But ok.

Afterwards I told Tom Bernheim I'd be back in the morning to pick up my artwork. Tom said there were comedians performing at the Lounge tomorrow. Could I leave up my art for their show? I said I guess so.

Came the light of day I'd changed my mind and decided that I wanted to go ahead and reclaim my paintings. I called Tom Bernheim and told him I was headed over to the Landmark Lounge to pick up my art.

I walked into the Landmark Diner. The Greeter-- Carolyne Lambrou, the owner's wife-- smiled and asked me how many in my party. "No" I said. "I'm here to pick up the paintings and artwork in the Lounge area. I'm the artist."

Carolyne Lambrou's gaze went glassy and she gulped an "Okay..."

I headed toward the back.

When my eyes got used to the dark the first thing I noticed was... No Art. The walls were bare. I figured Tom had someone take down the art for me. I looked in the closet. The art deco women smoking cigarettes were there but not my art. I poked around behind the bar. Even in the liquor storage area. Nothing.

I called Tom Berheim and asked "Were's my art?" "It's there" he said "hanging on the wall." "No it's not" I said. "I'll be right over" he said.

While I was waiting for Tom I continued looking for my art. I ended up outside and in an empty lot behind the Lounge I found two of my paintings tossed and damaged. Six were still missing.

Tom showed up and decided that there had been a robbery. "But why would someone sneak in the Lounge and steal my paintings?" I asked. "Especially with the Diner area open 24 hours! Did anybody see anything? And why were two paintings thrown out back?"

I called the police and reported a robbery while Tom went over and talked with Mrs. Lambrou, a waiter and a couple of busboys.

Carolyn Lambrou had arrived at the Landmark Diner bright-and-early around 6am Sunday morning. She gave the place a once over and set a fire under the wait staff, got the busboys bussing and, before she assumed her greeter post she wandered toward the back.

The art hanging on the walls were an immediate offense. These were clearly products of a black and twisted soul. The unnatural color, the Mephistophelian glitter and the unpropitous imagery seared her retinas and scarred her brain. She went apoplectic, frozen by icy nausea. Repulsion washed over her like raw sewage. She had been flagrantly provoked on her home turf. Her province had been violated and would not be tolerated.

She peered at a painting. Her eyes bugged out. In the painting there was an automobile with a bumper sticker that said "Don't Blame Me, I Voted for Hitler." Clearly anti-Semitic. After all, the hated "Hitler" name had been used. What could be more anti-Semitic than that? This could be bad for business, anti-Semtic art hanging at the Landmark.

Then there was a 3-D construction. An iniquitous red-glittered triangular windowbox with a golden Statue of Liberty that had morphed into a Ginch-like monster. A golden Mantis and ebony spiders adorn. Gold chains and gewgaws drape malevolently. She decoded this as Satanic Arab propaganda specifically designed to drive off her customer base.

Another painting was of a woman riding a bike. The bike's seat is another woman's head, tongue extended. It was titled "Byke." This one offended her sense of Sisterhood! As a woman she could not permit such blatant objectification of women to hang on the walls. Offended women customers would spend their husband's money elsewwhere and she wasn't about to sit still for that!

"This is just like my husband", she thought to herself. It enraged her that her Pig of a Spouse had purchased (in her mind) these offensive items to hang in the lounge area. And she wasn't about to let him get away with it! She would take it upon herself to be the arbiter of good taste. She had a Bottom Line to protect. And a husband to set straight.

With the help of a busboy she ripped the art from the walls and tossed them in the trunk of her Mercedes. Two of the largest pieces wouldn't fit in her car so she had them discarded behind the building. She tore off up Roswell Road about three miles to a Kroger food market. She pulled around back and pitched six pieces of my art into the Kroger dumpster. Then she drove back to the Landmark Diner, plastered on her meretricious smile and started her day as greeter at the restaurant.

After his wife had finished her shift and left the restaurant. Tom Lambrough had me sit at a table with him.

"I know what happened to your art." he said. He explained to me that his wife had confessed to junking my paintings into a dumpster up the road. "She thought I'd bought them for the Lounge and took it upon herself to dispose of them" He said she was on the way back to the diner in order to go with me to the Kroger dumpster to see if anything could be salvaged. I agreed to call off the police investigation until we had a chance to recover my work.

When Carolyn arrived we drove to the dumpster and she climbed in and dug through the day's grocery store garbage, all the while sobbing that she was a lover of the arts but complaining about how offensive my art is. The dumpster had been emptied at least a couple of times since she'd delivered my art there. There was nothing to be found. But it gave me some satisfaction that this woman -- with too much money and too much time on her hands -- had to climb and dig through rotten lettuce and spoiled chicken parts because of her own hubris.

Late that night I went to the Buckhead precinct and filed a criminal complaint against Carolyne Lambrou.

In order to avoid arrest she had to pony up full-boat for the paintings. And she did so without blinking an eye. She presented me with a check accompanied by a note complaining about the repugnant nature of my art.

I still don't know if this one goes into the "win" or "loss" column.

THE RUBDOWN AND THE RUBOUT

As anyone with a sense of history knows, the link between Organized Crime and Organized Politics in Chicago was so solid it was often difficult to discern one from the other, especially during the reign of Hizzoner, Richard J. Daley.

So it was that Chicago's First Ward (The diamond necklace on the Windy City's North Side) was booty to be plundered by those wielding peremptory power. Ergo Chicago's ward heelers were in cahoots with Chicago's racketeers so they might mutually fleece the fuddled public. So massage parlors -- blowjob bordellos – began to sprout like venereal warts throughout the First Ward and later into other neighborhoods.

About midway through my tenure at Faces magazine (By that time I'd taken to calling it "Feces".) it became apparent that, in order to make ends meet, I needed to supplement my income because Francy's drug habit was out of control and if I didn't provide the boodle she'd do whatever needed to be done in order to procure her pharmaceuticals.

My friend, Bob Rudnick, had taken a job at the Harem, a massage parlor on LaSalle Street literally around the corner from the Chicago Avenue police headquarters. Bob told me that they could use someone to work the desk, that the perquisites were intrinsically libidinous and that a clever boy could easily skim extra bullion from the cash-only business.

I took a job working three nights a week. My duties were to work the desk, count the money and make sure everything tallied, protect the girls from aggressive customers and sniff out cops in case of a raid.

Of course the law and the outlaws were in league. But occasionally the police were required to put on a show of feigned force in order to assure the gullible public that local government was doing its job. It was explained to me that – if raided –we'd all be paraded down to the local police station but within an hour we'd be bailed out and back to work.

The night I started at the Harem someone tossed a bomb through the window of a massage parlor a few blocks away. Like any family the Chicago Outfit experiences sibling rivalry. And, like wild dogs, the kin are territorial beasts, alpha-males snipping and snarling at others of the brood when encroachment is perceived. Such was the bombing of the nearby parlor. A minor spat between brothers. Like children fighting over a toy.

At the Harem you could purchase a blowjob for 20 bucks. If you wanted a fuck it would cost 40. The girls weren't supposed to fuck but they all did it anyway. Part of my job was to keep an eye on what the girls were up to via closed-circuit tv and to let my Mafia overlords know if they were porking. I enjoyed watching them have sexual intercourse and I never turned them in.

I'd had a slight connection to the massage parlor business before I became an employee. Toward the end of the Gallery run the magazine was going to do and article and/or a pictorial about Chicago's massage parlors. An editor and I met with Vince Gerace, a proprietor of a parlor at Belmont and Clark Street.

But one day Vinny turned up missing. I suspect his bones rest with those of other unfortunates in the polluted silt of the Chicago River. Apparently Vinny had tread on the wrong toes. And perhaps because he was not a member of the immediate family, he was not afforded the protection generally reserved for the kindred. It was Vince Gerace who became the model for Neon Vincent, a comic strip character I'd later serialize in Playboy magazine.

My job at the Harem only lasted a couple of months. Shortly after I arrived I was assigned the desk at Gentleman's Retreat, a new parlor that was being opened in a more blighted neighborhood than the Harem. The Harem was fairly upscale. The girls were attractive and the patrons were lawyers, priests from the Archdiocese, off-duty cops and businessmen who needed to relieve the stress of the workaday world. However the girls working at Gentleman's Retreat were more like biker chicks – snarling, jailhouse-tattooed, acne-scarred and fucked up on barbiturates and angeldust. And the neighborhood was the kind place where anyone with the price of a blowjob in his pocket would be ill advised to wander around after dark. I was provided a pistol and advised I'd probably need it. So Gentleman's Retreat went bust about the time Rudnick was caught pilfering.

Bob was taken into a back room were his head was wrapped in towels (so's not to leave marks) and he was beaten with a telephone book. "Good thing for you we're reasonable guys," he was told. "Anyone else woulda broken your legs." Seemed like the right time to give notice.

IT BEGINS

"Time rushes towards us with its hospital tray
of infinitely varied narcotics, even while it is preparing
us for its inevitably fatal operation." --Tennessee Williams



There were 13 refineries and a forest of oil rigs around Ploesti, 35 miles north northwest of Bucharest. This included the Romano Complex, Europe's largest refinery formerly run by Standard Oil of New Jersey. Churchill called Ploesti "the taproot of German mechanized power." It was the center of the Rumanian oil fields, which produced seven million tons of oil a year. Rumanian oil was vital to the Nazi war effort and Hitler spared nothing in his protection of Ploesti

On August 1st, 1944, five groups of B-24s from the 9th Air Corps stationed in Lybia took off, fully loaded for targets at Ploesti. They flew at 400 feet -- to avoid radar -- into one of the most heavily defended sites in the Adriatic theater. Each plane was loaded with 10,000 pounds of 250-pound bombs. They had a ten-man crew. Radio operators and flight engineers were given Thompson sub-machine guns to fire out the waist position windows. The flack and German air-defense was dense and the Luftwaffe BF 109 and Rumanian IAR-80A fighters were alert and deadly accurate. Of 178 Bombers, 54 would be lost.

***

They hadn’t yet unleashed their bomb-load when flack from Nazi anti-aircraft guns destroyed an engine on the right wing. Underpowered and heavy the plane was doomed. After losing an engine the aircraft was attacked from the rear and peppered with 20mm shells. A large chunk of shrapnel blasted through the tail gunner and a shell exploded in the cockpit igniting the oxygen supply and the hydraulic system. The navigator was heading for the front hatch when the plane exploded, the hatch blew out and propelled the navigator into the ether. He pulled his ripcord and hoped his altitude wasn't too low for the chute to open.

The navigator survived being blown out of the sky but broke his leg because his parachute didn’t fully deploy. He spent the remainder of World War II as a prisoner of war at a camp in Transylvania in the shadow of the Carpathian Mountains. He told me once "The accommodations were primitive but we were treated well. The Rumanian soldiers who were our guards were aware that the German War Machine had been defeated. They knew that before long they'd be taking orders from us."

On August 19, 1944 I was born Mervyn Wilton Williamson, Jr. at an Army Air Corps facility in San Antonio, Texas. I was an anemic weight and was not expected to live. All the incubators had been melted down and rebuilt into tanks and aircraft carriers. But an enterprising nurse constructed an incubator from a shoe box and a light bulb and I thrived.

Mervyn, Sr. was Missing in Action. Anxiety over the fate of my Daddy resulted in my Mom, Rhoda, presenting prematurely. And was the reason I was named (presumably posthumously), Mervyn.

Until Poppa came marching home my Mom and I lived with my Grandpa Ruben and Nana Magdelena on Ray Avenue in San Antonio. Ruben was a Choctaw from Mississippi. Didn't get to know Ruben -- he died shortly after I was born. Nana was half Mexican and half Potawatomi, a Wisconsin tribe that had been shipped off to a reservation in Oklahoma. And Nana was a Pentecostal preacher. She had a store-front church. She was brimming over with the spirit of the Lord, praising him constantly. Her agenda was the happy glorification of Jesus with an anti-Catholic subtext. She'd praise the Lord at every opportunity. She'd sing her message accompanying herself on the accordion. Church was twice on Sunday and a rolling-in-the-aisles-talking-in-tongues tent meeting every Thursday evening. And a smattering of revivals. I remember it as being very exciting and entertaining.

When Big Merv came home from the War we moved to Lynchburg, Virginia, where he was employed as a teacher in the English Department at Lynchburg College, and where he pursued post-graduate education on the GI Bill.

One of Poppa's students was Jerry Falwell, who failed his course. Falwell later railed against the the liberal college professors who had fired him with the fervor of crypto-fascist Christianity.

Dad's parents were provincial Virginia tobacco farmers who worked a 40-acre tobacco farm in Appomattox. Nana and Pop (William and Ruth) -- with their slow daughter Melva and their stuttering son Bill Henry lived in a house without plumbing or electricity. Mervyn, the oldest, Audrey and Teenie had married and moved out. Light was provided by kerosene lamps, food was cooked on a blue enameled woodstove in the kitchen, a handpump ported water into the kitchen sink and there was a root-cellar under the kitchen floor. There was a butter churn on the back porch, a slop-jar under every bed and an outhouse out back. There were chickens in the front yard, a few hogs in the pen and two mules and a milk cow in the pasture. There was always a jar full of freshly-baked biscuits and home-made pear preserves on the kitchen table for those in need of a snack. A pleasant childhood memory of mine is drifting off to sleep in a featherbed as the rain syncopated on the tin roof of the old farmhouse.

Hard labor from sunup to sundown was the ordinary routine. The Williamsons, on these 40 acres, were virtually self-sufficient during the Great Depression -- particularly brutal in the post-Civil War South.

I was renamed after a cartoon character. Nana took to calling me "Skippy" after Percy Crosby's newspaper comic strip dickens. Skippy was a philosophical little hell-raiser. A hardcore predecessor to what Charles Schulz would dilute with "Peanuts" down the line.

She started calling me "Skippy" because I reminded her of the disobedient cartoon scamp from the newspaper. The name stuck. In my dangerous world it was safer to be "Skippy" than to be "Mervyn". My first cousin, "Elbert Leroy" -- a year older that I -- had benefited from his nickname, "Butch." So instead of Mervyn Wilton and Elbert LeRoy we were Skippy and Butch. It gave us better street cred. Wayne was our other first cousin. He kept his given name. The three of us would run and cavort like young monkeys. Because he was the youngest Wayne was the lowest in the pecking order. So Butch and I would beat him up leave him lashed to a tree in the woods. Or stuffed into a posthole. Then Butch would beat me up.

During the Depression through the Post-War Boom newspaper comics were cultural touchstones. They were -- particularly the Sunday Comics Pages -- the HDTV of the era. The Sunday paper came wrapped in the comics. The Funnies were the four-color main attraction. During the War years when newspapers had to suspend publication because of paper shortages President Roosevelt would get on the radio and read the comics to families crouched around radio sets coast to coast.

My uncle Bill Henry facilitated my addiction to comic books. Whenever I was visiting down in the country I'd sneak a peak at Bill Henry's comic books. In a cardboard box under his bed in the old Appomattox farmhouse he kept a stash of True Crime Comics, Charles' Biro's "Crime Does Not Pay". And Western Comics, Lash LaRue and Six-Gun Heroes Plus the occasional horror comic.

Like pornography I couldn't get the images out of my mind. They made my heart beat faster and released latent pheromones. The smell of the newsprint, the gaudy colors and explosive action, fists pounding, knives slicing and firearms firing and splattering blood, retribution and death playing out across lurid landscape. It had a life of its own and it had harvested my soul.

But Bill Henry would have to be cautious with the horror and science-fiction titles, my favorites. Nana would routinely police his comic book content. And she was not tolerant of demons. If she found something grotesque, horrific or reptilian she'd tote his entire box of comics down to the kitchen and burn them all in the wood-fired cookstove.

DEATH OF THE GYPSY QUEEN

For ten years I lived walking distance from the Chicago lakefront at the north end of Lincoln Park. On the weekends during the warm months tribal enclaves of seemingly endless ethnic diversity would stake out territory to barbecue the goat the pig and the fish. And bring together the extended family al fresco. Haitians, Salvadorians, Ethiopians, Hippies, Puerto Ricans, African-Americans, Hillbillies.

But, as an observer, my favorites were the Gypsies. The men in their wide-brimmed black hats and thick mustaches drinking red wine, smoking cigars and strumming guitars. The women in hooped earrings and babushkas reading the cards, peering into crystals and smoking pipes. The young girls in long colorful dresses dancing and twirling with each other. The boys practicing their pick-pocketing skills and honing their knife-throwing accuracy by lobbing their blades into tree trunks.

When I was a kid in Canton, Missouri, Gypsy caravans would move through town once or twice a year. They'd camp in the little park south of town on Route 61. Shopkeepers would lock their doors in a futile effort to prevent thievery and mother's feared for their youngest. But inevitably two or three local babies would go missing. Then, after a couple of days the Gypsies moved on and life was once again bleak and uninteresting.

In 1973 I was dating a woman who worked as a nurse's aide at a hospital on Chicago's near north side. I would wait for her at the hospital's side entrance. She would almost always be late because of all the vomit, shit and blood that it was her duty scrub antiseptically clean. Or because she was fucking some doctor in a supply closet.

It was autumn, dark early and a little chilly when I arrived for my wait. As I approached the side entrance I could see, silhouetted by the light breaking through the doorway, nine or ten figures of men milling around and sitting on the hospital steps. When I got close enough I saw that they were a band of Gypsy men, passing around a flagon of wine and in a celebratory comportment. They were talking excitedly, arms around one another and drunk. I nodded to them and found a space to sit among them. They passed me the wine. And made friendly conversation. They asked if I was waiting for a friend. I said "Yes. My girlfriend." "Is she beautiful?" they wanted to know. "Yes." They laughed approvingly, slapped me on the back and passed the wine again.

They told me that their queen was upstairs dying. By tradition the women were attending to her as she gave up the ghost while the men caroused and quaffed on the hospital stoop. They explained to me that death -- especially the death of a Gypsy Queen -- was a cause for celebration because death was just part of the grand adventure, a continuation of the mystic voyage of the soul that really had just begun with Life. It was a rebirth into a wondrous realm and the queen, because of her stature, would be welcomed with fanfare and ballyhoo by those on the Other Side. A reason to drink and cavort, they said, and passed the flagon around in raucous eulogy.

And -- at the moment of her death -- a new queen would be consecrated. More reason for happiness. More reason to swig wine and sing.

Marcia exited the hospital, took my arm and we began the walk back to her apartment after I said my goodbyes to my new friends. I explained to her what was going on with the Gypsies. She said yeah she knew. In fact the queen had just died she said.

As we walked into the cold, dark Chicago night a great "Huzzah!" erupted from the hospital steps. And the jug of wine was passed around again.

SIDETRACKED

By 1976 the Chicago Daily News had become a carbuncle on the public's need to know. Nightly, Walter Cronkite supplied entertainingly brief, full-color snippets of teeming domestic turpitude and pending atomic doom. Newspaper were a lugubrious gray wall, and the writing was on the wall. Newspapers had become bovine and the mood across the nation was to slay some of the cumbersome herd.

At the Daily News ravening carrion looped in wide arcs over the city room. In display advertising the sticky musk of decay cloaked gruesome sales statistics. In executive offices churlish proprietors and cantankerous administrators plotted their schemes to resuscitate the clay-cold journal. Meetings were called and stolid editors relayed the plans to a skittish staff.

***

In Chicago early spring can be a mean and icy proposition. In those days, before Global Warming, the last cruel licks of winter were a certainty. The wind whipped and sawed through the neighborhoods splintering endurance while Big Police prowled menacingly through the wards serving and protecting men in thick suits who smoked fat cigars and made deals that would enrich the privileged and exploit the disenfranchised. Like all police states, the trains ran on time. It was the city that worked, but there was trouble afoot.

The tribal warfare that is Chicago politics was heating up. There was a power vacuum, and all sides were scrambling for the spoils and jockeying for position.

For 21 years and 2 months, Richard J. Daley, Hizzonner the Boss ran it all from city hall. He was the glue that held together the last of the big city political machines. But the old gray mayor was not what he used to be. He used to be alive, but on December 20, 1976 a massive coronary sent Mayor Daley packing off to the Great Patronage System in the Sky.

The patronage system was the bond that held together Chicago political power. It manifested itself as a kind of racial nepotism. The nucleus of the political system was the neighborhoods. There political animals with names like Pucinski, Vrodolyak, Dunne and Marzullo weaseled and scrambled from bungalow to bungalow buying votes with cash and city jobs. This consolidation of influence, augmented by bribery, kickbacks and nefarious alliances was designed to keep the feared coloreds at bay and the Machine running in the unlikely event that Mayor Daley turned out to be mortal.

But the Liege was dead and this was to be a time of minor kings and lesser deities.

Michael Bilandic, a life-long Daley capo, was from Brideport, the same neighborhood at the recently deceased mayor. So it was less confusing -- more neat --to appoint someone from the same precinct as the late great. As time passed people became painfully aware that acting Mayor Bilandic was a low-voltage line. So the political skirmishing intensified and became cannibalistic.

***

In March I got a call from Andrew Epstein, a friend who had just taken a job at the Daily News. He was hired to art direct an weekly supplement tha would lure the baby boomers with its percipient hipness while enriching the corporate pot with increased revenue provided by the disposable income endemic to white youth.

Andrew wanted to know if I'd be willing to create a strip for Sidetracks, the supplement to the Thursday edition. The call had gone out to counterculture types throughout the city and beyond.

So I accepted, knowing full well that it was once again time for me to bring my hand to the stove top of editorial prerogative and press the flesh of my palm on to the red-hot griddle in order to see if I would get burned.

In my experience I've generally found editors to be snarling, thin-skinned petty despots. Devoid of humor, the prowl their trivial territory marking its boundaries with blue-penciled scrawls while scurrilously meat-axing artful creation.

The editor at the Daily News had the adroit notion to use the Underground Press as a model for Sidetracks. Of course they would have to soften the anarchist rancor, side-step the radical politics, disallow dope advocacy and eliminate the sex-mongering. Sidetracks would be a more sanitized Bolshevik.

By this time the Underground Press and been dead and buried at least half a decade, and the Woodstock Generation had finally had some sense clubbed into it by the Authorities. The hippie women had become embittered and mannish, and the men got haircuts. Everybody started snorting cocaine, using deodorant, getting jobs and buying up every microwave oven and mutual fund in sight. And already these white baby boomers were hypnotically responding to faint signals transmitted from a homing device that shadowy figures had planted into Ronald Reagan's otherwise empty skull.

***

By the spring of '77 the nation was in malaise, shell-shocked by Vietnam and betrayed by the sneering and malevolent Nixon Mob. By the icy political forces had toted out the ungainly Gerald Ford, manifesting their contempt for the electorate. And now, after all that, a mortified citizery suffered through it's first born-again pantywaist Presidency.

Chief Executive Jimmy Carter demonstrated physical weakness by passing out during a televised foot race.. Not to mention his unstable relationship with Nature when he was savaged by a rabbit. In the meantime the economy was in a tailspin, inflation was in an upward spiral, motorists suffered long lines at the pump and, in Iran, Moslem fundamentalists began thinking of unprotected Westerners as negotiable currency.

In New York City, Studio 54 thundered and blared all night as the Son of Sam stalked unfortunate victims.

In Chicago, Heather Morgan had her matrimonial sights set on acting Mayor Michael Bilandic.

The Morgans, cousins of Eastern robber barons were old Chicago money and conspicuous philanthropists. Heather Morgan was sleek and educated. She was blonde and tailored, an artful thoroughbred. In contrast, Michael Bilandic was a Back-of-the-Yards lumpkin. But even worse than his unpleasant lineage was his inaudible bearing. He was a man of few word and fewer ideas. Never one to go to the brink or hog the spotlight, Bilandic was more comfortable as an indistinct shadow --- vaporous, a fog.

The public imagemakers were pleased at the nuptial turn of events. The Bilandic/Morgan merger would add the distractions of social glitter and opulent Astor street fashion to the people so often absorbed by the ungentlemanly specter of political dog-fighting. And Heather wanted to be the First Lady of the Second City.

***

At the Daily News, new blood Gregory E. Favre had been engaged as managing editor, and Abe Peck was hired away from Rolling Stone to be editor of Sidetracks.

In those days, before it became contemptuous and dimwitted, Rolling Stone was seen as an inviolable trendsetter. I had known Abe Peck since the late sixties when, as editor of the Chicago Seed, he'd attempted to bring reason to the deranged "Movement". After the Movement finally pooped itself out, Abe went to Rolling Stone as music editor.

I met with Jim Hoge, editor-in-chief of the newspaper. A pipe clenched steadfastly in his teeth, Hoge was a square-jawed man and Robert Redford handsome. But his head loomed a couple of sizes too big for his body. I liked that about him. Handsome men and beautiful women are a blemish on the species, should always be feared and never trusted. So Hoge's balloon head gave him character and a germane presence despite his vast power.

It also helped that he greeted me warmly, comforting me with compliments. When I asked for the money I require and ownership of the comic strip, he agreed without hesitating or wrangling. Hoge shook my hand and said "Deal!" An editor present visibly winced. You could tell that this just wasn't his way of doing business, especially when it came to dealing with a blasphemous cartoonist. Intimidation, the crowbar of opprobrious editor, was much more to his liking. The business of friendly commerce was alien, cut across the grain and set a bad precedent.

A couple of weeks later the Sidetracks staff held a christening party at Gregory Favre's Evanston home. Jim Hoge and I tossed back shots of Wild Turkey in Favre's kitchen. With inebrient eloquence we waxed the beauty of rural Virginia. Hoge suggested that, if I were a wise investor, I should buy property in the South Dearborn Street area. And it was his opinion that the key to Chicago becoming a truly cosmopolitan city was the success of its theater community. Dilettante foolishness I figured, desultorily fancying myself a constituent of the hard-drinking Fratenity of Journalism.

Not long ago I wandered through the South Dearborn Street neighborhood, now an upscale haven of chic shops, restaurants and loft spaces. And these days, no small thanks to the likes of David Mamet, Steppenwolf Theater, Stuart Gordon and others, the Chicago theater scene is the most actively courageous on the planet.

And now Chicago, with its horse-drawn hansom cabs and its gentrification of once vividly ethnic neighborhoods, is or elegantly cosmopolitan that it makes me puke.

For awhile I'd been toying with the idea of doing a series of strips about the brawling and corrupt Chicago streets that I knew so well. The unpolished romance of dope-shooters and prostitutes, the savage political realities, tormented souls and wasted lives. In fact I'd done a couple of strips titled "Halsted Street, Stories of Torment and Drama from the Hog Butcher." But the editors at the Daily News were more interested in something that would appeal the more genteel, cash-fluid North Shore types.

So I retracted a few scruples, created a couple of characters that would mimic the editorial protoplast and hoped I could sneak the rest under the fence. I submitted the following outline. Halsted Street, Stories of Torment and Drama from the Hog Butcher. Seeking the high-rise lakefront life-style that is the glittering necklace that graces the neck of the City of Big Shoulders, Bosco and Sheila Spoonbread find it nigh impossible to escape the raw nerve of distilled Chicago essence epitomized by Halsted Street. Running north/south, this boisterous thoroughfare cleaves through the neighborhoods that are the roughhouse soul of Chicago.

Bosco's refuge is the Blue Moon Tavern. And endless parade of characters pass through the Blue Moon. Politicians, transplanted cowboys and drunken Indians, the literary crowd, the city's uniformed finest and a vast aray of urban nomads.

Shelia finds vocation in rehabilitating juvenile offenders, lobbying for the E.R.A. and upward mobility. On the whole she'd rather live in in Skokie, or in Highland Park when she is of a more pastoral mind. Her shelter is the camaraderie of girlfriends and the company of her mother, a resident of Camelot Acres. 'Far enough north' says mom 'to escape the encroachment of minorities and other rude unpleasantries of the metropolitan lifestyle.'

Obstacles and soapy melodrama little Bosco and Sheila's path. But even confrontation with such urban manifestations as the Paddy Brauler Memorial Towing Service, alcoholic anarchis Johnny Walker Red, the Marquette Park Alliance for Pigheaded Pigheads and an aggregation of vegetarian terrorists do not dissuade our protagonists in their futile for the Good Life in the Windy City."

***

It was a tradition as venerate as vote fraud that Chicago newspapers were in the Machine's corner. It was really more a matter of which corner of the Machine the papers were in, as some reporters and columnists daily recounted the Part Line from the perspective of their established alliances. It was permitted to take sides within the Party's confines. And because he was such an atonic and vulnerable target, Michael Bilandic (elected Mayor on his own in 1977) was frequently tweaked and pranked in the Fourth Estate, the result of city hall/journalist covenants by those in search of clout.

Jay McMullen was a reporter covering the city beat for the Daily News, and he enjoyed the carousal of Machine politics. He did his job, he had his fun. In Esquire magazine McMullen said "I've screwed girls who worked at City Hall for years. There was a day when I could roll over in bed in the morning and scoop the Tribune. Anybody who wouldn't screw a dame for a story is disloyal to his paper." His current bop was Jane Byrne.

"Chinaman" in Chicago political jargon means sponsor. If someone wants to get on the patronage payroll he comes, hat in hand with reverence and respect, to the local precinct captain with a reference from his Chinaman. The more clout the Chinaman has, the better the patronage job. Jane Byrne's Chinaman was Mayor Daley.

Jane was an ambitious and malevolent technocrat. Her clout with while Daley was alive was legendary. She was a moderately prosperous Irish widow from the Northwest Side whom Daley eventually put in charge of the city's iniquitous Department of Weights and Measures. Mayor Daley found Byrne's company agreeable and, according to Jane, they had a sundry of closed-door chats in the Mayor's private chambers on the fifth floor of City Hall.

She must have been quite a vision for Hizzonner, her high-heels clacking and echoing through the granite halls as she strode into his office in her dayglo polyester miniskirts, her hair brassily bleached and flipped, her columns tallies, her figures aligned.

But Byrne's clout died with Mayor Daley, a distressing turn of events for a life-long political dervish.

So Jane Byrne and Jay McMullen formed an alliance and started dating regularly. Amid the sniping and pecking at Mayor Bilandic, McMullen began the Canonization of Jane with purposeful relish and regularly in the pages of the Chicago Daily News.

***

Winston Moore has been a big, bad mean cop his whole life. To him, like so many in Corrections, the singular pleasure of his profession was the warm glow and rapid heartbeat brought on by brutalizing suspects or innocent civilians unfortunate enough to have drifted into his path of destruction.

Winston Moore had acquired clout and, by the summer of 1976 he was a major player in the penal wing of the Machine in his capacity as executive director of the Cook County Department of Corrections. But by May 1977 Moore was on trial charged with aggravated battery, battery, official misconduct and perjury resulting from a sound thrashing he allegedly administered to a hand-cuffed inmate at the Cook County Jail.

Moore's misfortunes were a slug on the front page of the Thursday, May 5 issue of the Chicago Daily News,

The Headlines on that edition read "Nixon bares regrets." Three years after self-immolating and going belly-up, Richard Nixon had climbed out of the slime and immediately began denying everything.

The blue banner at the top of the blue streak edition proclaimed "Sidetracks...a new magazine." Sidetracks, the newspaper bragged, "offered a 'new journalism' that drops the barriers separating the readers from the writers. It talks straight to them. Straight to you."

The cover attraction for the first edition of Sidetracks was an Abe Peck interview with Stevie Wonder. And on page two Bosco and Shelia debuted in "Halsted Street".

On page three, Representative Harold A. Katz, Democrat from Glenco, lobbied on behalf of a piece of legislation that would reduce the penalty for the private use of marijuana to levying a fine against the offender, but no criminal record.

Jack Hafferkamp fashioned a survival guide for unmarried couples living together, and Eliot Wald wrote a column about the best movies to see after ingesting psychoactive drugs.

Woody Allen was funny about sex with women in a piece reprinted from The New Republic. There were photographs taken in a disco, some pictures of Elvis, and Susan Dworkin had a reminiscence about her encounter with Saul Bellow when she was a youth.

The style of Sidetracks was slightly askew and chatty, its layout was colorful and tastefully reckless.

But far and away, the most astounding aspect of the first Sidetracks was it's
back cover, a full-page ad for a "POLYESTER-KNIT, ONE PIECE, 'DROP-SEAT' Glamour Jumpsuit."

"The $50 LOOK," the advertising copy claimed. "NOW YOU PAY ONLY...$16.95...2 for $33." Also, the ad divulged "...waistband unfastens for drop-seat convenience!...This sexy-proportioned jumpsuit follows your curves...Perfect for all your activities or just looking glamorous!"

The "drop-seat" was apparently the salient feature as it was mentioned no less tha five times.

The illustration was typical of an advertisement for mail-order, polyester clothing circa 1977 -- a stiff line drawing of a woman in a lime-green, criminally tasteless, high-water, bell-bottom polyester jumpsuit.

Inset, there were smaller illustrations demonstrating the usage of the "drop-seat".

***

Republicans were a non-entity in Chicago politics, but statewide was an entirely different matter. During times of GOP administrations, cross-party retribution could be dealt out by federal prosecuting attorneys working in collusion with terrorist organizations such as the IRS and the DEA.

U.S. Attorney for Northern Illinois, "Big Jim" Thompson was a man of lofty notions. It was his plan to be Governor of Illinois. And then President of the United States.

Thompson was the Nixon Justice Department's liaison in Illinois during the Watergate disgrace. Under direct orders from Attorney General John Mitchell (the only Attorney General of the United States to ever do time) it was Big Jim's job to nail corrupt Democratic ass and to harass those on Richard Nixon's infamous "enemies list." It was a high-profile dream job for the aspirant prosecutor and for a focused political zealot like Thompson. It was inconsequential that the escalator to higher office was littered with broken lives, shattered home and the crushed bones of innocents, along side the guilty.

The big head on Jim Thompson's trophy wall was Otto Kerner, a former Democratic Governor of Illinois, a sitting federal judge and son-in-law of Mayor Anton "Boss" Cermak, the creator of the Chicago Political Machine.

Kerner had a reputation as a clean politician. But the Noxon boys, consummate politicians themselves, knew that to be a contradiction of terms. So Otto Kerner was indicted for conspiracy, bribery, mail-fraud and tax-evasion. The main charge against Kerner was that stock given him constituted a bribe from horse=racing interests who later received preferential treatment from the State.

Otto "Mister Clean" Kerner, selectively prosecuted by James "Big Jim" Thompson, checked into federal prison in July, 1974. In March 1975, Kerner, riddled with cancer was paroled. He died in May, 1975, a human sacrifice to political expediency.

There's nothing better for the ambitious political animal than to portray himself as an anti-smut crusader. So Thompson set his sights on sybarite publisher Hugh Hefner and figure to bust him for dope. As a means to get evidence against Hefner, Thompson's office shadowed and threatened Bobbie Arnstein. Arnstein was Hef's personal assistant and a woman the U.S. Attorney's office knew was fragile and unstable.

Leaving a not alleging that "government agencies" were hounding her, Bobbie Arnstein committed suicide in January 1975. Thompson's people quietly pulled the plug on their inquiry and no charges were filed against Hefner or anyone in his company.

He may not have gotten an indictment, but Jim Thompson was getting a lot of flashy TV coverage. Besides, he had a campaign to run. And on November 2, 1976, James Robert "Big Jim" Thompson was elected Governor of Illinois, defeating Mayor Daley's hand-picked candidate, Michael J. Howlett, by 1.4 million votes.

***

On Thursday, August 11, 1977, David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam serial murderer, was arrested in New York City. Headline across the nation announced the seizure of this demented postal worker from Yonkers -- including the headline on that Thrusday's edition of the Daily News.

But splashed above the strident prose and photos of the smiling Berkowitz in police custody was my drawing of Jim Thompson. I had characterized him as a caped super-hero flying to rescue Shelia Spoonbread from the clutches of a phalange of homicidal vegetarians. The slug read "Jim (Big Bird) Thompson visits Halsted Street."

To the people at the Daily News it was always open season on the Governor. In fact, the editors would beam and strut whenever I would smite a sanctioned target -- like police corruption in Chicago Heights, or breakfast with the newlywed Bilandics, or the high-profile nightclubbing of Superintendent of Police Rochford.

But clearly, whenever my aim drifted to the left, abomination and bristling consumed the editorial spirit.

Abe Peck ordered a drawing of Sheila Spoonbread bound-up and and surrounded by the cut-throat vegetarians who were her tormentors in the "Halsted Street" comic strip with accompanying type reading "Save Sheila Spoonbread". This art was to be inserted as a t-shirt iron-on in the next edition of Sidetracks. Even though the artwork had been accepted with enthusiasm, the iron-on never ran. And the next time I walked into the offices of the Daily News, dispositions were as cold as stone.

The flinty atmosphere became especially noticeable when I would satirize the institutions and trappings of the liberal media. The air crackled with hostility, the mood was rank and the editorial demeanor was sour and mean-spirited.

"People aren't following the storyline. They don't know what's going on" complained editors who didn't know what was going on.

Even without the baggage of pornography, this comic strip seemed to violate community standards. That is, if the city room of the Daily News could be considered a community. Unauthorized changes in dialogue began showing up on the printed page. And one strip that proposed that alderman be cooked in puff-pastry and served to the taxpayers simply didn't run.

"Could we wind up this storyline?" whined the editorship as they reduced the size and page position of the comic strip. And there was some fear expressed that Bosco and Sheila might be an inter-racial couple.

Producing "Halsted Street" under these circumstances was becoming ponderous, so it was not impending doom I spotted on the horizon as much as daylight.

I abruptly brought the Bosco and Sheila story to an end and began casting my sexually-suspect character, Snappy Sammy Smoot under the weekly "Halsted Street" banner.

The editors would provide me with the theme for the week. Sometimes it was innocuous fluff like the time they sent me to a "Mr. Macho" competition at a downtown bar. It was like a men's wet t-shirt contest for the benefit of urban female office workers. Presumably high-profile targets for the Sidetracks advertising department.

Sometimes there was more practical motivation. Like a little media-generated scandal predicated on the flimsy villainy of judges owning concession franchises at O'Hare Field.

However, the strip published in the December 8, 1977, edition of Sidetracks was my own notion. With a weary wave of a hand the instruction was "You come up with something this week". This was not a concession of trust, but an oversight on the part of an editor already overwhelmed by lagging circulation figures and weak ad sales.

In the comic strip Snappy Sammy Smoot suggests to a woman wearing an "ERA Now!" button that hyperactive children should be mounted on rollerskates and hauled off to Montessori parking-lots,

"No on around here thought that was funny!" hissed the editor, barely able to control his rage at the notion that I had caused him grief because because his superiors had dropped their considerable umbrage into his lap.

So that was it for me. I was invited never to darken their newsprint again.

There was still one comic strip in the pipe-line and it was published in the December 15 edition of Sidetracks, an especially anemic looking issue. The supplement had shrunk to 16 pages, 5 1/2 of which were ads for photographic equipment. The color budget had been slashed. The cover was lifeless and gray. And the cover attraction was an article by John Milward about Paul Simon -- the singer/songwriter, not the politician. There was a short gossipy column by Abe Peck and four short articles, two of which concerned the operation of photographic equipment.

***

The Chicago Daily News succumbed to its lingering cancer and died at the age of 102 on March 4, 1978.

This turn of events left Jay McMullen unemployed. So Jay, never short of enterprise, married Jane Byrne and became the manager of Jane's campaign for Mayor of Chicago.

Faint and frail, Mayor Bilandic was felled by a soft, white blow to the electorate when Mother Nature dumped 90 inches of snow on Chicago during the winter of '79. Snowblinded, Bilandic failed to get the city's snow removal equipment on the streets, and voters cars were buried under mountains of ice until the spring thaw. The public was enraged. Chicago was the city that worked. You put the politician in, and the deal was he gets rich and you get your garbage picked up.

So in Febuary 1979, Jane Byrne won the Democratic primary for Mayor of Chicago and Michael Bilandic was out on his ear.

And in the smoke-filled backrooms of the Democratic Party of Chicago, those in search of clout fought among themselves with ferocity, splintering the superstructure of the Machine, while Harold Washington (elected the first black Mayor of Chicago on Feburary 22, 1983) bided his time.

HEF'S PAD

"Sometime's you just have to piss in the sink."
--Charles Bukowski

Before I was employed by Playboy magazine I was hired as a designer (In 1970) by Playboy's Book Division where I laid out books, mainly paper-back collections of cartoons from the magazine.

During that time Robert Crumb made one of his regular trips to Chicago to help Jay Lynch and me put together an issue of Bijou Funnies.

Jay and Jane Lynch, Robert Crumb and I were invited to a reception for the psychedelic poster entrepreneur, Peter Max and his guru, Swami Satchidanada. This transcendental soiree was held in the lakeshore high-rise apartment of Paul Magit, a prosperous clothing retailer/meditator. The attendees were a variegated flock of well-heeled liberal functionaries, wealthy polo hippies, a retinue of hardboiled, whiskey-drinking Chicago newspaper reporters and a gaggle of scraggly young cartoonists.

In the bedroom the beatific Swami levitated in a lotus position inches off the bed and randomly deciphered the Meaning of Life for the assembled gentry.

In the living room macrobiotic snacks and a bar stocked with organic fruit juices fed our secular needs. The reporters became dark and surly due to lack of liquor. Meanwhile, the affluent white people continued to ferret out Godliness while Peter Max's faint handshake and dazzling garage-door grin serviced the entourage.

Around this time Playboy was about to publish an article about the underground comix phenomenon and the magazine was attempting to woo Robert Crumb into becoming a Playboy cartoonist and Robert was finding delight in rejecting their advances. The corporate pressure was being applied through Harvey Kurtzman, mentor, friend and symbol to Robert. Consequently, we were all invited to meet Hugh Hefner at the Chicago Playboy Mansion.

So, one afternoon, after working as a wage slave/junior designer at Playboy's
book division I get picked up by a sleek limousine, where I join, Jay, Jane, Robert, Harvey.

As we were chauffeured up Michigan Avenue Harvey, looking out the window, I spied a breast-pendulous and braless love child strutting down the avenue at a bouncy gait.

"I'll never get used to the braless look", commented Harvey. It struck me as peculiar, this coming from the guy who created the breast-pendulous and often naked nymphet, Little Annie Fanny.

The limo rolled through the radio activated gates of the Playboy Mansion. We were ushered out of the car and through the commanding iron-relief doors, past a burnished suit of armor and a hologram of an enormous killer white shark, razortoothed and hostile. We were escorted around a colonnade and into the 66'x33' Living Room of the Great House.

The Living Room was palatial, a masculine expanse awash in dark virile leather and intrepid mahogany. On the west wall a Franz Kline hung in resolute misogyny next to a mean-spirited portrait of a woman by De Kooning. The acrid stench of testosterone stained the air.

We were told it would be awhile before Hef would be awake. There would be a few hours to kill and we could order any food or drink we desired from the Mansion's company of snappy servants. I had a steak and began an aggressive assault on the host's intoxicants. We were free to investigate all the facilities, except the Great Man's personal quarters and rotating love nest.

I began to wander and ended up in the Red Room, where playmate Donna Michelle capriciously romped in the Playboy of my youth. But the room, sadly, seemed much smaller and had less audacity than in the photos of my adolescence. More like a motel room really. A bed, a TV and on the beside table was a lamp, a remote control, but instead of a Gideon Bible the current issue of Playboy held sway. Reality versus fantasy is always a losing battle. Before long we were invited to slide down a phallic brass firepole through a vulvic hole cut through lush carpeting and dark hardwood that accessed us into the gameroom below. There, the manly arts of pinball, bowling and billiards could be practiced and honed by those with balls enough.

We were solicited to sip the driest of martinis in the undulating and hypnotic confines of the Grotto Bar where a glass wall looked into the famous kidney-shaped Playboy pool.

"How often", I brooded "had nude exhibitionist sprites romped in rude water-ballet, while in the shadows of the Woo Grotto voyeuristic hep cats sipped Rob Roys and reposed enrapt?"

I sucked my cocktail onion dry and ordered another drink, my focus in disarray.

I was poolside where, only months earlier, the entire cast of "Hair" frolicked in naked hippie abandon much to the delight of sophisticated couples, ice cubes atinkle and libidos aflutter.

But this night there no bare-bottomed free spirits or hard nippled water sprites playfully splashing. There was only an empty pool and a bar full of mudlark cartoonists. The booze had washed me clean of propriety. I told Jane Lynch that it had been my fantasy to skinny dip in Hef's pool, so with her encouragement I stripped down to my love beads and bellyflopped into the perfumed swimming hole.

Before my aquatic antic I whispered to Jay – I thought facetiously – "I'm going to take a shit in the Playboy pool."

Jay knew I was a mischievous sort and correctly observed that Demon Rum had me in its diabolic grip. The line between truth and caprice was sufficiently blurred that he took me at my word and warned Harvey Kurtzman that I intended to loose a floater in Hefner's swim tank.

Kurtzman, who was seeking a raise in pay for his "Little Annie Fanny" strip, figured that his chances for more money would be diminished if a companion of his pooped in the pool. So he informed security of my scatological intent.

Scowling security personnel hustled me out of the area and padlocked the Grotto Bar and pool.

I was outraged, as I saw it, at being kicked out of the pool for swimming naked – by this time having totally forgotten my offhand fecal threat.

Incensed, I stormed out of the Mansion before Hef arrived on scene, kicking the suit of armor in the shins as I left.

Later that week Jay, Robert and I produced a collaborative strip for Bijou titled "Hef's Pad" in which Snappy Sammy Smoot, having been invited to Hef's home, aggravates his companions by pissing in the sink.

BUSINESS TRIP

"Moderation is a fatal thing.
Nothing succeeds like excess." -- Oscar Wilde

When I was in New York on business for Playboy I always had the magazine put me up at the Plaza or the Waldorf Astoria. But I preferred the Waldorf because the building is such an Art Deco marvel. I'd wander around by myself at night exploring closed off auditoriums, ballrooms, the swimming pool and the illustrious Starlight Roof. Every turn revealed a wonder. Byzantine mosaics alive with dragons and serpents. Mirrored hallways where coils of cast iron formed trunk and bough and curled off to encapsulate the sections of reflective glass as it branched out and sprouted leaves and blossoms. Art Deco spiders wove luxurious webs and vigorous grapevine heavy with fruit entwined along the border. There were rooms that were thick with gold brocade, flocked wallpaper, Tiffany chandeliers and ceilings painted as elaborate skyscapes. Inevitably I'd hear the crackling of a two-way radio and security would present itself and demand to know why I was wandering around in closed areas at 2:30 in the morning.

During the day I'd do my Playboy stuff, but during the mid-seventies NYC offered up a throbbing nighttime underground music scene awash in narco-transsexualism and screaming in nihilistic punk resolve. Who was I to say no? Besides I had a tour guide.

My friend, Bob Rudnick had a column in Circus, a rock 'n' roll magazine. Rudnick had always been involved in the music business. As a radio DJ, as a writer and as an MC, not to mention his own dynamic. One night in Detroit he introduced me to David Bowie. He got Joey Ramone to endorse my comic book character, Snappy Sammy Smoot, in the pages of Circus. With Rudnick I met and hung out with a wealth of rock and jazz musicians during the mid seventies.

Rudnick says "Tonight we're going to CBGB with Legs O'Neil and his girlfriend, Sue Williams. Some members of Television and Lou Reed's band a gonna jam with Patti Smith.

Legs O'Neil was a NYC punk rock promoter and manager. His best known band was New York City's in-your-face answer to the "Sex Pistols", "The Dead Boys". On the following Friday he was opening his own nightclub, the Mudd Club. The Mudd Club would reign for ten years as New York's hottest slash-and-burn music club.

We arrive at CBGB before the O'Neil entourage but the Dead Boys were there, fluorescent-colored spiked hair, zippered black-leather jackets, ripped up jeans. And they were beat to shit. Black eyes, stitched gashes, bruises, abrasions, busted lips and broken teeth. Earlier in the week they were all on the subway when an Hispanic youth gang took sport in beating and stabbing them so that they nearly were (really) the Dead Boys. I played a little pinball with my new punk pals until Legs showed.

When O'Neil and his crew arrived most of them followed him to the back. But Rudnick and I stayed at the bar. There was some drinking to be done and I was on an expense account.

Leg's girlfriend, Sue, didn't skitter to the back with the boys but slouched into a chair at a table directly across from us. She caught my eye immediately but she sure wasn't paying any attention to me.

She was thin and small, cute in a sullen way. Short, dusky hair and large dark eyes. She was wearing a boat-necked, long-sleeved t-shirt with wide horizontal red and white stripes. She had on tight black jeans and black spiked-heel boots.

Reflexively, my genitals began to warm and my pulse increased. Hippies are full of romantic meat-hooks on which to impale primal thought. Punks, on the other hand, engorged with choleric rage and malevolent antipathy, cannot comprehend sentimental drivel and mawkish behavior.

But consumption was the evening's mandate, so I put aside my primative compulsions and continued my binge with Bob.

Abruptly there was a loud smack. Loud enough to get my attention over the din of the club and the distraction of the liquor. I looked over at Sue. She appeared a little dazed. Then she whispered something into the ear of a terrifying looking young man who had taken a seat beside her. He raised his hand, palm out, and brought it down full-strength, slapping Sue across the face, nearly knocking her off the stool. Again she whispered into his ear, and again he slapped her silly.

This happened two or three times before I was appreciative, cognitively speaking, with just what the fuck was going on. I moved on the guy and grabbed at his hoisted arm. I caught him by the wrist and held his arm up high so that he couldn't bring it down or pull away from my grip. I jerked his arm down quickly, kicked the barstool out from under him, pushed him face down on the floor and pinned his arm between his shoulder blades. In my peripheral vision I could see the huge mass of a bouncer approaching like an angry dark cloud. Rudnick assured the bouncer that I was okay, that the unfortunate pinned to the floor deserved pinning and more and that everything was under control. The bouncer, in deference to Bob's standing, backed away.

Sue, dazed and confused wandered to the back, presumably in search of Legs. Or some other scumbag with whom to play out her masochistic game. I sat down with the unfortunate and had an half-hour of fine conversation. He had a band called "Black Sun" and he intended to commit suicide on stage.

The next afternoon, while recovering from the previous evenings abominations, there was a knock on my hotel room door. I opened the door to Sue Williams. She walked right in and asked "What the fuck happened last night?" I was pretty fucked up...I don't really remember. But the bouncer told me you fuckin' kicked some guy's ass."

We spent awhile talking. She told me she was an artist originally from Chicago. She knew my work and thought everything I drew was "too cute". I said "Yeah. It's the Disney imprint. I can't escape it".

Whenever I'd bring my art to ad agencies they'd say it was "too bizarre". You can't please anyone in this world!

She was railing and bitching that her boyfriend, Legs, was "A fag!" Bedeviled by the thought she repeatedly spit out the word "fag!", describing how he would ignore her. A door was opening and on the other side sat an attractive young punk girl in need of attention. And, because I'm a hopeless romantic, I was too courteous to refuse.

When she got her clothes off she asked "Wanna see my bullet-hole?" and pointed to a small circular scar under her small right breast.

"Jeezus Christ!" I blurted "What happened?!"

"I got shot by an old boyfriend."

Then she started bitching about her current boyfriend.

Masturbation would have been more satisfying than the icy intercourse on that day. As we fucked -- or rather as I pounded away at Sue's physical husk -- she was clearly elsewhere. Maybe everywhere else. But, other than her body, she sure wasn't in that bed with me. Luckily, being male, it didn't matter. I just went about my business as if everyone in the bed were as busy as I was.

The lousiness of the fuck transcended the ejaculatory event. So when Sue stopped by my Chicago office a couple of months later, I asked her why she didn't enjoy sexual intercourse with me.

She looked at me, thickly layered in sullen punkgirl mien, sulking (it seemed to me) she said "I only enjoy sex if I'm being paid or being raped."

"I would have been happy to have done both." I replied.

THE SCHOOL OF HARD KNOCKS

Mrs. Motley was a large woman. An English teacher at Canton High School, she was also an Enforcer.

Back in the days before Ritalin the accepted way of dealing with hyperactive and troubled youth was a good whack up side the head, a ruler across the knuckles or a razor strop to the buttocks -- it dovetailed nicely into abuse was happening on the homefront. And Mrs. Motley, with the build of a linebacker and the disposition of a storm trooper was all about it. Monomaniacally she would stomp the hallways in search of hapless transgressors and apply redress with extreme prejudice.

One of the traditions at Canton High was that during the World Series academics were supplanted by baseball. It was common that students were allowed to forego classes and watch the Series on a television in the gymnasium. During the playoffs we were allowed to bring transistor radios into the classroom and listen to the games between classes and during lunch time.

It was a warm Fall. The windows were open to provide a little relief from the heat. And the wasps were swarming in preparation for the dormant season.

It was at the end of the lunch period and we were sitting in a classroom waiting for the bell to ring. There was no teacher at the helm yet. Just students at their desks listening to buzz of the wasps and the ball game on transistor radios.

A wasp landed on my desktop. I raised my history book and slammed it down -- with a resounding "Bam!" -- on the unfortunate insect. At the moment that I dispatched the bee with my history text Mrs. Motley was patrolling the hallway and, as bad luck would have it, walking past our classroom.

The thud of my book onto the wasp stopped her in her tracks. She turned into the doorway and, like a malevolent colossus, she lumbered in my direction. Full of conniption and fury she snatched me up out of my desk whacking and punching me in the process.

"PEOPLE ARE TRYING TO LISTEN TO THE BALLGAME!" she shrieked. Pummeling and kicking at me as she hauled me out of the room. My class mates watched in awe and each uttered a silent prayer of thanks that they were not (this time) the recipient of her choleric wrath.

She had me by my collar shoving me down the stairs in the general direction of the Principal's office landing blows along the way. She belted me across the face, busting my lip. Blood bubbled out and dripped down my chin. She pinned me against the wall with her massive forearm and pointed to the blood dripping onto my shirt.

"STOP BEING SO DRAMATIC!" she bellowed.

JOY

Back in the day they knew how to build a woman. For instance there was Joy. I would see her around the Seed office, but I didn't know her very well. She had a shock of wild kinky hair that floated over her like a dark thunderhead. She was white-skinned and had angular features. And in her down-time she built bombs and smuggled guns from the deep South to Weather Underground cells.

I ran into Joy at a wake for a radical publisher who died when he was run off the road by Government Agents. We were on the publisher's family estate on the bluffs overlooking Lake Michigan north of Chicago, a gaggle of hippies and aspirant urban terrorists mourning the death of a friend by standing in a circle, holding hands and droning Native American chants.

Joy had come to the event with Jeffery, a skewed and bony, blind-as-a-bat, 7-foot tall geek from the Karma Farm collective who'd lately taken to parading around naked or wearing dresses. Tonight he was in a frock.

I started a conversation with Joy about the simplicity of operation and the stopping power of the AK-47. We discussed the inadvisability of cooking up nitroglycerine in a frying pan as we found a walkway down to the lake's edge. There was a full-moon over the lake. Quite spectacular. But everything can be improved upon. I asked Joy if she'd like to drop some acid as I popped a couple of bright purple tabs onto my tongue. An hour later we were fucking like brain-addled godlings in the tall grass next to the lodge as hallucinations of the People's Blitzkrieg detonated in cadence with our rambunctious porking.

Suddenly Jeffery was standing over us all asymmetric and perturbed. Clearly -- since he brought her to the event -- he felt he should be naked with this woman. Unfortunately he'd chosen not to attend nude but also to wear a gown, further blurring gender specifics. Poor motherfucker didn't have a chance.

"It's time to drive back to Chicago" Jefferey whined.

Joy and I got somewhat dressed, partially disengaged and climbed into the front seat of the car next to Jefferey. During the ride back my hand was entangled in her lupine bush as her hand pumped my insurgent willy. I remember loud slurpy sucking sounds (That, at the time, I interpreted as Godly pronouncements.). And Jeffery -- hunched over the wheel-- was indignant.

We got to her girlfriend's place where she and Jeffery were staying and headed for the spare room where two mattresses were on the floor. Jeffery climbed into one and Joy and I dove, carnally inseverable, into the other. We fucked like unhinged necromancers until daylight. About two hours into it Jeffery, wrapped in blankets, stomped malevolently out of the room in order to find someplace where he could get a little sleep.

The next morning Joy dropped me off at work. On the way we discussed the proper ratio of powdered laundry detergent to gasoline in a Molotov cocktail in order to achieve the maximum Napalm effect.

We said our goodbyes, she drove away to catch a flight to LA and we haven't seen each other since.

***

Warren Leming wrote in the preamble to his play Cold Chicago, a Haymarket Fable "Clara Zetkin, Alexandra Kollomtai, Rosa Luxemberg, Emma Goldman, and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn all led (19th and 20 century) revolutionary movements. Even negative images of the Revolution, like Dicken's Madame Defarge, grimly perched at the foot of the guillotine suggest that the spirit of the event, like the Muse, is feminine."

So where are the women of substance today? There must be some Immortals out there somewhere. I can't find them and I've been looking. No Angela Davis, no Leia Khaled. Where is our Maid of Orleans?

Hypnotized by vapid popular culture and distracted by shiny trinkets, modern female malcontents wade in a shallow pool. There are plenty of self-centered bar-fly coke snorters who posture toward the bohemian lifestyle. But piercings, tattoos and a penchant for rock 'n' roll do not a worthwhile human being make. Without quiddity there is no soul to the spirit.

I guess it's not so much that I want them to make bombs (although that's a start) as it is I want them to have ideas.

Generally speaking I love women and prefer their company to that of men, even though I'm painfully aware that human bankruptcy lives in the heart of the beast, regardless of gender. Nietzsche said "Women are God's second mistake."

I admire the whole woman -- the entire individual in all her lunal complexity and feral witchery. In all sizes and shapes, in every configuration. Females are tangled, elaborate and perplexing. And there's always more than one person living in there. Usually an unruly crowd.

Someone once asked a woman friend of mine "What's Skip's favorite female body part?" Her answer nearly went below the belt. But she caught herself and said "The brain." We have a winner! Answers like that give me Joy in this impossible world.

THE PEN IS MIGHTIER WITH THE SWORD

Placido Fellici Anatra was a friend of mine from the Gallery days. He was dark, tall, Sicilian and had no visible means of support, at least none that I could discern after ten years of hanging out with him. Sure he delt a little coke every now and then, but then it was the Eighties and it seemed like everyone was dealing and doing a little coke every now and then in those, the weaning days of the disgusting Disco Era.

I never figured Place for a "made" guy. Connected maybe. His family were probably foot soldiers for the Outfit. At least that's what I gathered from the interesting and entertaining morsels and hints he'd drop in casual conversation. And then there was his approach to life's pedestrian aggravations. Like the time he was having trouble with pigeons roosting and shiting on his bedroom windowsill.

"I shot one of those birds," he explained. "And left the fuckin' carcass on the windowsill for three or four days. Those fuckin' pigeons got the message. No more hanging out and shitting on my windowsill."

Then there was the time he nervously mentioned to me that he may have been running a couple of high-end hookers on someone else's turf. Someone, he whispered, who it was unwise to cross.

A firebomb was tossed into his vestibule. The damage was minimal but the message spoke volumes. In order to be prudent and maintain a lower profile he moved to a little house in Chicago's western suburbs, a house that was also firebombed. Luckily no one was hurt and after a while everything seemed to blow over. Frequently these little tiffs and entanglements between toughs can be ironed out if arrangements are made that transgressor simply do a little favor for the aggrieved.

Harriett is a writer. She's a journalist whose credits include a five-year stint as an editor at Associated Press and, during the last six or so years we lived in the Chicago area she was a stringer for the New York Times. So when Placy needed help writing a letter he figured she was just the gal to help him out.

"There's this guy I know, John Dejohn. He used t' work with my uncle. He's doin' a little time in Joliet for larceny but he's available for work release if there's a job waiting for him on the outside. He can go to work at my uncle's salvage yard on the South Side but we need a letter for the parole board. You're a writer. You can do a better job than me."

Always one to assist in the rehabilitation of a bushranger, or in the deliverance of one who has wandered off society's civilized pathway, Harriett agreed to dash off a note to the necessary regent.

A month or so later I came upon an item in the newspaper. "Harriett, what was the name of that guy Placy had you write the letter about?"

"John Dejohn, I think."

"Well it says here that 'John Dejohn, a known organized crime associate, recently released from prison on a work release program was found murdered gangland-style." Apparently persons unknown had emptied a small caliber weapon into Dejohn's brainpan.

A couple of days later Placy dropped by the house and Harriett buttonholed him. "What's going on? Did I write a letter to get this guy out of prison so he can get whacked?!"

"How do you like being a part of history?" Placy purred.

BLOODSPORT

It was after dark and Francy and I were walking home. As we approached our apartment in the alley behind 711 Diversey Parkway we could see that the door to the place was standing open. The lights were on inside, an invitation for anyone with nefarious intentions to walk on in and help themselves.

Bob Rudnick had been staying at our place for a few days. I said to Francy "Godamnit! Rudnick left the fuckin' door open!" He was always doing something of that nature. One time -- while housesitting -- he hung some clothes in the bathroom and turned the shower on hot in order to get out the wrinkles. Then he nodded out for several of hours flooding the landlord's apartment below ours.

We climbed up the stairs and through the open back door into our kitchen.

The place was covered in blood. It looked like a slaughterhouse. Like someone had been ax-murdered. The metallic stink of blood was overwhelming. There was blood all over the floor and pooled over the dirty dishes in the sink. There was a blood trail leading from the back bedroom where Bob had been sleeping. The bed was blood-soaked. There were towels sopped in blood and strewn around the bathroom floor. There were bloody footprints and bloody handprints everywhere. No room was untouched. We were aghast. What had happened here? Had Bob been murdered. Had he murdered someone? Surely no one could survive this volume of blood loss.

I closed the kitchen door. And written in blood on the back of the door was "I'm ok. Gone to the hospital." We both started laughing. I got out the mop and began cleaning up.

A couple of hours later we got a call from Rudnick at the hospital. He'd been sleeping -- he loved his naps -- in the back bedroom. The bed was against a window and he had flailed his arm during his siesta, smashing it through the windowpane and severing an artery. The event woke him out of his peaceful slumber. He went careening throughout the apartment like a chicken with his head cut off (or like a junkie with his arm sliced open). He ran into the bathroom and attempted, unsuccessfully, to stem the flow of blood with bath towels. Then into the kitchen to rinse the flow in the sink. Then into the livingroom to call a friend to take him to the hospital. By the time his friend arrived Rudnick had begun to slip into unconsciousness (a fairly common occurrence for Bob) and his buddy hauled him off to the hospital. But not before Bob, always courteous--even in his sanguinated semi-conscious chaos -- scrawled his bloody message on the back of our kitchen door.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY LBJ

"I would rather be ashes than dust! I would rather that my spark burn out in a brilliant blaze than it be stifled by dry-rot.I would rather be a superb meteor,every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet
-Jack London, 1916


We were in the Chicago Coliseum for the Lyndon Johnson Unbirthday Party during the Democratic Convention in 1968. The Coliseum was a cavernous old convention hall, in it's heyday housing the very national political conclave that we were there to protest. Three-thousand people filled the meeting place, and the evening was electric witth portend, afire with augur. At the dais were the literary lights and political provocateurs of our time. Jean-Paul Sartre, Truman Capote, Jean Genet, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs. From the counterculture were the Fugs represented by NYC poets Tuli Kuppferberg and Ed Sanders as well as Realist publisher, Yippie co-founder and incendiary satirist Paul Krassner.

Periodically, as Burroughs or Capote droned on, Abbie Hoffman would dash in off the streets, grab the mike and give updates on the police action and demonstrations in the city's parks and avenues.

We knew that history was in the making. The revolution was at hand. The old guard would be replaced by the new and there would be hell to pay. The world would never be the same again. The hall was aglow as hundreds set fire to their Selective Service cards and held them aloft in testimony and allegiance to unequivocal and determinate political transformation. Clenched fists were defiantly raised and everyone knew that soon rifles and pistols and grenades would be clamped resolutely in those same hands and lives would be lost for a greater cause. There was a sense of unstoppable momentum that could not be denied. We were in the tow of an irreversible tide.

Ed Sanders took the microphone and intoned what everybody already knew "This is very heavy. Very Heavy."

At the end of the event the crowd moved out of the hall. I got into my car and headed north on Clark Street.

At the corner of Lincoln Avenue and Clark Street Lincoln Park, to the east, was crowded by hundreds of concerned clergy from all over the country in an anti-war protest and pray-in. To the west was a phalanx of helmeted, gas-masked and baton wielding police. The orders had come down from the mayor. The city parks were closed to the public after 11pm and no transgression would be tolerated.

It was just after 11pm when I got to the intersection of Lincoln and Clark Street. The police had already waded into the throng of clergy. Teargas fogged the air and with each pop!, pop!, pop! of exploding canisters it became thicker. All traffic came to a stop and human pandemonium filled the street. It was like a macabre costumed drama. The priests and nuns in black tunics and habits and the paramedics in white with large red crosses across their backs on one side, and the police in robin's eggshell blue helments, gasmasks and jackboots on the other, The night was filled with the noise of screams and howls and the crack of batons against human skulls. There was blood everywhere, splattered on the windshields of cars pooling in the streets and sidewalks, flowing from open head wounds.

I hit the brakes as a paramedic was grabbed by the collar by a pork-bellied policeman and thrown across the hood of my car. Two other cops joined in and beat the medic unconscious. I was caught between the the panicked ecclesiastics and medics and the marauding police. I knew I had to get out of the riot immediately. I looked to my left and caught a glimpse of a nun taking a police boot to her spine and then a truncheon to the skull as she went face down into the street. I saw an open spot, did a quick U-turn and screeched down Wells Street atttempting to elude the chaos. I pulled my car between two apartment buildings and hopped out to reconnoiter just what to do next. The pandemonium snaked it my direction. People were coming out of their apartments to see what was going on and they were being pulled from their stoops by crazed policemen and beaten senseless in their own front yards. I looked down to the corner of North and Wells.

The police were firing their service revolvers in the air screaming for people to get away from the windows. Squad cars, sirens screeching and mars lights flashing were speeding past at breakneck speed. People in the street were picking up rocks and bricks and hurtling them at the police cars as they accelerated down the street. Instinctually I picked up a chunk of broken pavement. Standing next to me was a battered priest, blood streaming down his face, his tunic ripped, his white collar hanging off his neck. His eyes were glazed and shocked. He looked at me and – devil's advocate – I put the chunk into his hand just as a squad car came screeching toward us. As the vehicle careened past he lobbed the piece of concrete and shattered the windshield. The police car went up on two wheels and its passenger-side door flew open in mid-flight spewing out a cop from Hell with the radicalized vicar in his crosshairs. The Man of God, without hesitating took off like a rabbit down an alley with the deranged cop on his heels. As I watched them disappear in the dark at a full run and I swear I could not see their feet touch the ground. I don't know what happened to that priest that night but I figure the rampaging constable probably nailed his sanctified ass.

FROM HUSTLER TO PLAYBOY

I was the first art director for Hustler magazine.

The chain of events that led me to that job opportunity started in 1973 when I took the position as art director of Gallery magazine. Ron Fenton, the founding publisher of Gallery, was not himself connected but enjoyed the company of yeggs that were – as well as corrupt attorneys, punch-drunk prizefighters, prostitutes, hit-men and thugs of every stripe. He fairly wallowed in and was thrilled by nefarious association. And he was also obsessed with Hugh Hefner.

He was so consumed, in fact, that he opened Gallery's offices directly across the street from Playboy's offices, he procured a mansion just down the street from Hef's, opened a key-club that parroted the Playboy Club and designed his magazine to look exactly like Playboy. Even down to choosing a name that contained seven letters. This close visual association was beneficial in that readers assumed that Gallery was Playboy's sister magazine and that resulted in impressive initial circulation numbers.

The Bunny Empire was not amused. However their ensuing legal maneuvers were not successful and Fenton was allowed to continue his mimicry. But Fenton's undoing would come by his own hand. As well as his association with a certain legally questionable club owner from Ohio.

The editor of Gallery was Don Myrus, my former boss and friend at Playboy Press. I'd never art directed before. I'd worked as a designer for Myrus. But as far as running the show I was inexperienced. On faith Don positioned me at the graphic helm of a monthly, three-hundred page magazine that was selling 1.5 million copies a month. There were familiar faces at Gallery, as its staff was rife with ex-Playboy staffers. And my friends Abe Peck and Eliot Wald – formerly of the Chicago Seed -- were on-staff editors and writers.

By the time I came aboard as art director Gallery had sprung a serious leak and was sinking in a sea of debt brought about by the publisher's extravagant lifestyle. Contributors weren't being paid and getting the payroll met when due was becoming problematic. So Fenton, through his sinister connections, solicited a cash infusion from Larry Flynt. And Flynt was looking to get into publishing. So, with an icy handshake and brimstone redolent, these two rascals formed an alliance.

But corruption is a relative matter and, in the scheme of things, there was more venality per square inch in magazine distribution than in magazine publishing. So the distributor wrestled the ownership from Fenton and crew and moved Gallery to New York so that they could more easily plunder its assets.

This was merely a minor setback for Fenton and he immediately set about to publish a new magazine with his newly acquired business partner, Larry Flynt. The magazine would be called "Hustler" (seven letters).

We set up shopkeeping in a recently vacated whorehouse above a gyros joint at the corner of Lincoln and Armitage in Chicago. There was a waiting room, three bedrooms and an extraordinarily spacious bathroom with a bank of theatrically lit makeup mirrors four toilets side-by-side and four bidets.

I set about designing a brochure in order to solicit advertisers. My instructions were to once again ape the Playboy magazine format while Larry Flynt sat across from me all querulous and feral, crunching numbers at an adding machine. The air fairly crackled with menace and gloomy malfeasance.

My friend Bob Rudnick was hired on as editor and he brought with him an interview with Bob Dylan. As the first issue of Hustler began to egress from the odious braintrust of Fenton/Flynt, Rudnick and I lobbied Flynt to make it dirtier.

After a couple of weeks, early in the formation of the first issue, I could take it no more. I resigned my position and walked away from the project. My only real contribution to the first issue of Hustler was the design of the cover. Just as well because after the premiere issue Larry Flynt snatched ownership of the publication, moved it back to Ohio and made it dirtier. Leaving Fenton, once again, magazineless. The rest, as they say, is history. And has been made into a major motion picture directed by Milos Foreman and starring Woody Harrelson.

It's ironic that I now regard Larry Flynt as one of the principal champions of our rapidly diminishing First Amendment Rights.

***

I'd spent the summer of 1974 on a farm in Missouri where I got a call from Ron Fenton. He was starting a new magazine. This one, he explained, would not be pornographic in nature as he had become "born again", a phenomenon that was all the rage in those days.

Fenton said his new venture would be much like Life magazine, only more personality oriented. Of course what he meant by "like Life magazine" was that it would be a carbon copy. The name of this budding periodical would be Faces, and did I know of anyone who'd be willing to art direct? I knew better but I said I was available. It would get me a chance to get back to Chicago and make a little money.

Ron's partner was Bob Baldi who, I would later learn, had been recently paroled from prison after serving time on a manslaughter rap. So Baldi rode high on the masthead and was listed as Associate Publisher.

One of Baldi's sources of income was rental property. Specifically, he was a slumlord. And, at the first of the month, he would personally collect the rent by tooling down to the South Side of Chicago. There he'd haul out his .357 Magnum and fire a couple of rounds into the garbage cans outside his building. This was the signal that the rent was due and, cash in hand, his tenants would file out. "Dem niggers, dey're never late wit' d' rent", Baldi would chuckle.

Despite his "born again" status, Fenton continued to surround himself with Outfit dregs and scary characters.

One of the scariest of Fenton's cronies was a flat-topped, cigar-chomping spark plug of a man who was known as "King" Solomon. "King" was a resident of Chicago's Sinclair Hotel and was, by profession, an enforcer and murderer for hire. "D' Feds credit me wit' 41 hits. But dere numbers are off and dey can't pin nuttin' on me," Solomon would snort. Generally speaking "King" was an affable enough guy but, when he was in one of his dark moods it was a good idea to steer clear. I've found, through experience, that these Outfit guys are mercurial. At one moment deferential and at the next nasty and dangerous. Very similar to the behavior of law enforcement types, actually.

One afternoon Bob Baldi was coked to the gills and, after stuffing a lid of reefer and an ounce of coke into one pocket and a gun in the other, he went out to collect a seriously overdue debt.

Arriving at the debtor's home Baldi became all monstrously garrulous, his ruthlessness fueled by nose candy and his generally gorgonesque nature. He commenced to bang on the door while shrieking his demand for payment. Terrified, the individual who was in arrears (and his wife) escaped out a window just as Baldi, pernicious and homicidal, crashed through the door. As bad luck would have it the couple's teen-aged daughter arrived home from school and onto the turbulent scene. Baldi's brain was afire with nettled animus. He was gonna kill somebody, and if it had to be the adolescent child of the debtor, then so be it!

Meanwhile, the escapees had run to the nearest pay phone and called the cops. "A madman broke into my apartment and is holding my daughter hostage!" sputtered the indebted wheedler. The police arrived on the scene, guns drawn. Baldi had the girl in a stranglehold with his pistol at her temple. Using her as a human shield Baldi screeched "Put d' guns down or d' kid dies!" The police responded by emptying their service revolvers into Baldi's head. After all, everyone knows that the law doesn't give in to terrorist's demands. And as for the safety of innocent bystanders, collateral damage is frequently the cost of keeping malfeasance in check. A small price to pay, they'd have you believe. But as good luck would have it the kid was unharmed except for the trauma of being pelted by the glutinous goo of Baldi's brain-matter.

This unfortunate turn of events left Faces without cash flow and I was once again out of work. I decided to walk up Michigan Avenue to see if Playboy magazine needed an art director.

DIFFERENT DANCES

Shel and I would talk a lot. His mind was brim full of all kinds of shit. Stuff that was always spilling out in songs and poems and cartoons and conversations. His thoughts were constantly overflowing his physical casing. His ideas were organic, had souls and needed to get out and live on their own. More often than not he'd be confronting them internally, lost in inwardly implicit conversation, deciphering the spooks and enigmas that were clawing their way out. Those of us on the outside were frequently left out of the equation. We couldn't compete with the depth and turmoil of his internal sprites. Sometimes he would grab them as they escaped and scrawl their essence on bits of paper. His conversations with them were way more interesting than anything I could bring to the party. There were many times when his mind and heart were not in the same room we were in.

It was rare that he lost contact with his internal selves. But that's what was going on when we met. He was stumped. He had cartoonist's block. He had a book project, half complete, but his ideas and sprites had bailed on him.

Because his children's books were their best-sellers, Harper & Row had agreed to Shel's request to produce a vanity project.

He didn't have a title but he knew it wouldn't be commercially viable. It would be an hefty oversized, hard-bound collection of primarily sequential cartoons that dealt with adult themes. Like Man's unremitting pursuit of nookie and endemic moral capitulation. Cautionary tales told with clever resolution and humor. And produced without editorial interference. It was very much like Shel's underground comic book.

I got to know Shel when I introduced myself just outside my office on the tenth floor of the Playboy building. He'd been hanging around the art department talking to Kerig and Lenny. He looked like he needed someone to go to lunch with. I was effusive and fawning. Nervously I darted into my office and retrieved a art-filled sketchbook. "You're a major influence on my art" I bleated.

He leafed through my book of drawings and snorted "I don't see it!"

A half hour later we were walking to Melvin B 's for lunch. Melvin B's was on Rush Street a couple of blocks in one direction from the Playboy Building and a couple of blocks in the other direction from the Playboy Mansion. Shel and his friends had been having lunch alfresco at Melvin B's since the early sixties. There was a sense of History -- of continuity -- for him there. This was the first of many luncheons we had there.

"I'm blocked" Shel said. "I'm halfway through with this book project and I've hit a brick wall. My ideas have dried up and I'm having trouble generating new ones. The book doesn't even have a title. Maybe you'd like to take a look at what I'm working on?"

After lunch we ended up at Vic Lowndes' suite in the Playboy Towers -- where Shel would stay when he was in Chicago, if the rooms were available. Lownde's (originally sent to oversee Playboy Europe because he kept stealing Hef's girlfriends) had fucked up things royally and lost Playboy's British Gaming license. So tensions were high between Hef and Lowndes. His suite at the Playboy Towers in Chicago was always available. And that's where Shel was working on his book.

The suite was strewn with pieces of Bristol board, each scrawled with images that would eventually be assembled and glued into final art. If he drew a figure and didn't like the positon of -- say -- the arm, he'd scissor the arm off the drawing and glue it into a more satisfactory position. He wasn't one to white-out an area and redraw the thing. He was adamant that an artist draws what an artist draws. Correcting something by painting it out and rendering over the paint-out was -- to him -- repugnant. But hacking with scissors and gluing it into something more pleasing to his eye seemed to be ok.

Shel broke out a little cocaine. He had a system regarding coke. During that time coke had become all the rage. Especially among artists, muscians and women, Shel's main retinue. Normally lines were laid down and snorted in quanity until the chatter became inane and tooth enamel was ground away. But Shel used coca as a tool. He's toot up a tiny matchead of the white crystal and work off the energy provided by the drug until it dissipated. Then snort another small amount and get back to work. So it went with us that night. Sorting, talking, laughing, drawing. Through the night, into the next day until the sun set again. We spent about three days and nights getting to know each other, exchanging ideas, finding solutions and inhaling cocaine. Now and again he would pick up his guitar and sing a song he was working on. I would light up the occasional joint for inspiration and to take the edge off the coke. But Shel wasn't a reefer-hound like me. He stuck with his anodyne and I with mine.

By the end of the second day we had knocked his block loose. And that which. would become "Different Dances" found itself.

***

Shortly after I'd moved to the Atlanta area at the beginning of the new century I lost three of my closest male friends to the Reaper. One was Shel Silverstein, troubadour, playwright, poet, author, artist. He died of heart failure in bed surrounded by a clutter of unfinished work.

I was art directing at Playboy in 1977 when Shel made one of his frequent forays back to the Windy City. I always enjoyed Shel's company and he sought mine when he was in town. Besides being a fellow cartoonist and a willing accomplice in promiscuous monkeyshines, he was a walker. I liked that about him. When you were in Shel's company you walked. He didn't drive and taxis were a last resort. He was an eager and resolute walker.

Chicago's North Shore had been Shel's home turf since he was young but he had made his way in the world and now he lived in several locations so that he'd have a base of operations as he wandered the country. He had a houseboat in Sausalito, apartments at the Playboy Mansion West and in Greenwich Village and he was about to buy a little house in Key West. But the North Side of Chicago was home. His mom lived there and -- always the good son -- he attended to her maternal needs. Family and history always brought Shel back to Chicago.

There was nothing better than prowling Chicago's Gold Coast with Shel. He hauled me into a shoe repair shop where a cobbler would repair and fill the holes and worn spots in his ancient cowboy boots. He'd been wearing the same pair, mended and rebuilt, for more than a decade (A few years later he'd write the cobbler into the film "Things Change" which he co-authored with David Mamet.). I went with him to look at banjoes in a storefront stringed-instrument emporium on Rush Street. A place owned and operated by an elderly artisan known for constructing the finest violins. We'd stop for lunch alfresco at Melvin B's sidewalk cafe. "I've been comin' here for twenty years," he said. We'd sit and talk about art, music, the early days at Playboy and Man's unremitting pursuit of pussy.

For the last few years Hef had been flying to Chicago from the West Coast Mansion for regular meetings with the editorial staff. Gradually he'd been setting down roots in Los Angeles. Finally it had been decided to sell off the Chicago Playboy Mansion and to ferry the editors to LA every month. So the Chicago house was emptied and locked. The Livingroom where Sammy Davis Jr. and Lenny Bruce had boogied all night was a vacant chamber. The Grotto pool where naked water sprites splashed and shrieked was dark and had been drained. Hef's bedroom with his great rotating round bed was a barren tomb. The Red Room where bombastic playmate Christa Speck pillow fought with her giggling girlfriends, their amazing breasts defying gravity, was hushed and unlit. It was just a big old empty house. Elvis had left the building.

Shel stopped by my office and asked if I could get him into the Mansion for a final walk-through and adieu. I said "Sure" and grabbed the keys from Barbara Hoffman and we headed out walking down Walton to Rush and north to 1440 N. State Parkway.

Shel was quiet during the walk. Normally he'd be animated, talking about a project he was working on or spinning stories about hanging out with Warren Beatty or jamming under the Texas stars with Willie Nelson. He could be absorbed if he was trying to knock loose a lyric, uncover the payload of a cartoon or discover the direction of a quatrain. He'd retreat creatively into his thoughts, focused on the problem, scratching down ideas on scraps of paper. Searching for the solution within himself. Not at all concerned with the external world. But as for now he was lost in melancholy, not creativity.

As we made our way to the Chicago Playboy Mansion Shel's hands were jammed into his pockets, his shoulders hunched against the wind, his stride resolute, his focus penetrating and his aura silent as Death.

I unlocked the black wrought-iron gate. It squawked and swung open. A short flagstone footpath led to the portico and the front door, a dark mass of hardwood alive with Moorish carvings and set off by intricately detailed brass hinges, straps and sensually esoteric fixtures. I inserted the key and the lock unlatched with an echoing clack. I leaned my weight into the heavy door and it creaked open slowly, hindered by its own heft. It admitted us into a dark and silent vacant cavity.

Shel was stunned and glum. His heart was broken, his soul lost in memories of past revelries. He seemed stooped and small in the remarkable emptiness. "I can't believe this" he whispered. "There was something very special that happened here. Now there are just phantoms in the dark. This really is the end of an era. Like a death in the family." His voice trailed off.

Eras don't end suddenly. Like our lives they erode slowly until one day we turn and look and discover nothing's left.

BETTE MIDLER, SEX AND DEATH

In 1973 I was the art director of Gallery magazine. I was getting into a little thing with the receptionist at Gallery. She'd come into my office and we'd mess around a bit but we couldn't properly pound it out because my office door wouldn't close. So we made a fuckdate. I went to the apartment where she was staying. She was living with an attorney. She could live there rent free as long as she'd pork him. There were no commitments. She could go with whoever she wanted as long as she took care of his needs. I knocked on the apartment door but girlfriend, as usual, was fucked up on downers, She would NOT be roused. I banged and kicked loudly on the door. The attorney exited the elevator, came down the hall, unlocked the door and and barked "Your date is here!" "HEY!! WAKE THE FUCK UP!!!" After a few minutes she finally stirred.

We were ready to leave and the attorney looked at me. I was bearded, had shoulder-length hair, Fry boots with two-inch heels, a western-style snap-front shirt embroidered with roses and cacti and a cowboy hat that had been given to me by Janet Keldulka. Each of my fingernails was painted a different color in a futile attempt to stop biting my nails. I looked like a Flying Burrito Brother. Only more psychotic. The attorney says to her "He looks like he's up to the job of taking care of you." He smiled. We left and went to my room at the Ambassador West and fucked for a couple of hours. Then attended the Hippie wedding of one of my art directors.

During this time I was spending most nights with Janet Kedulka. We'd made a date to go out and catch some music. I went to her apartment. Instead of going out we had sex. From that night on we slept together often, wrapped and knotted around each other. But we'd never fuck again. Janet didn't want to. I never really understood why. She didn't have any attachments. Was it a vow of celibacy? Was she going Lesbian? (She was too affectionate with me to be going lesbian.) Was she suffering a trauma that had left her without sexual feelings? Who knows? It really didn't matter and she didn't talk about it. She was a great physical partner. A spooner, wonderful to sleep with. As our morning routine we'd roll out and stand by the bed with our arms wrapped around each other saying good morning and kissing. Tightly squeezing chest to chest, pelvis to pelvis. Being a young and vital primate male, I inevitably had a morning chubby. And she would, without fail, whisper compliments in my ear about what a virile man I was. Then we would begin our day. I was beginning to understand that between couples there were many acceptable configurations.

In October Gallery wanted to do a profile of Bette Midler so I was assigned to take a photographer and follow her from soundcheck through the concert. Coincidentally Janet Kelduka was a friend of Bette's. So I asked her to go with me.

We arrived at the theater with a photographer and I was immediately cornered by the publicist who had arranged us access. He was upset that Gallery was interested in doing a Bette Midler profile. "No, No No!" he squeaked. "We want you to profile Bette's arranger and piano player. He's in the process of moving off on his own and he's going to be BIG!" The publicist yelped. He grabbed my arm and pulled me into a dressing room and introduced me to a skinny blond man with a big nose. "Say hello to Barry Manilow!" the publicist squawked. "How y' doin?" I said as Manilow weakly pumped my hand. "Were's Bette?" I asked the sputtering publicist as I turned and walked out the dressing room door and headed for the stage.

Janet had already located Bette on stage at the mike. Her hair was in curlers, tied up in a bandana and she was in jeans and a t-shirt. Janet and Bette were all arms around each other, jumping up and down, squealing and laughing like schoolgirls. "Remember that cab-ride across Manhattan? Singing at the top of our lungs the whole way!" chirped Bette. Janet said "This is my friend, Skip." Bette took my hand warmly. "Welcome", she said. "Any friend of Janet's..." her voice trailed off. "Hello, Skip" said a gruff and rough-hewn voice from behind me. I turned and saw Aaron Russo, looking for all the world like Dr. Jeckyll's Mr. Hyde. Hunched and pileous, he was dressed in a black Victorian frock-coat, wore a satin-lined cape and wielded a cane with a silver head shaped like a snarling Hyena

"Good to see you again" said Russo as he lurched across the stage, his silver-headed cane clacking the floorboards as he approached. I'd known Aaron Russo since he'd run the Kinetic Playground, a music venue in Chicago. Now he was Midler's Svengali. He managed her career, controlled her life and slept in her bed.

About an hour before show time Bette was getting herself made-up and Janet had to leave because of a previous commitment. Aaron Russo cornered me backstage. "Can you get some coke? Bette needs coke."

I told him "I'll see what I can do."

I called Ron Fenton and asked him if he knew where I could get some cocaine. He said his source was out and he didn't know where to get any. This was the time just before cocaine avalanched coat-to-coast. It was pretty easy to procure in L.A. and NYC, but not so easy (yet) in Chicago. MDA and Angel Dust were no problem but cola wasn't available.

I went to Russo and told him I'd come up empty.

He morphed into a foul and bristly mountain troll, blood-stained canines bared and sulphuric smoke trailing up out of his nostrils. Malevolently he slammed his cane into the wall, throwing off sparks. His eyes turned blood-red and he shrieked "GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE!"

Afraid of contracting rabies I left.

The profile of Bette Midler would never be published because Gallery (as we knew it) was in its final throes.

A month later I was at a friend's house for a Thanksgiving dinner for orphans. My wife, Cecilia, had taken my daughter, Megan, our washer and dryer and hightailed it back to Lagrange, Missouri. I had no family with whom to share the holiday. This was a turkeyfeed for those of us without family in the area.

While at the feast I received a phone call from Bob Rudnick. "I've got something for you. You need to get over here now!" He gave me an address.

A half an hour later I was in a room with Rudnick, a slimy drug dealer, and Francy.

Rudnick put his hand into the small of my back and whispered in my ear "She's yours. Happy Thanksgiving."

Francy was a lovely 24-year-old woman, a vision. That night she was wearing a smokey lavender knit dress, red tights, green glitter platform shoes and she smelled of rose oil. Almost immediately I told her that I wanted her to be on the cover of the next issue of Gallery. I went home with her that Thanksgiving night and I never left.

The following weekend I was covering the World Swingers Convention for Gallery. It was at a hotel out by the airport and I had a suite of rooms and a room service tab. I asked Francy if she'd like to come along. She said "You bet!"

I hired a photographer and assigned him to spend the weekend scouring the hotel for photographs of the swingers' activities. Francy and I spent our time naked in the hotel room. Early in the morning on Sunday cranky male swingers began setting small fires around the hotel because no women had shown up for the conclave.

By the end of the weekend Francy and I were hopelessly in love with each other so I moved in with her. We lived together for a year or so, then -- after my divorce -- had a five-year marriage. And we shared a heart-bound friendship that lasted until her death in 1988. She was a physically beautiful female. A bit like Liv Tyler. Only prettier and with bigger tits.

Meanwhile, at Gallery magazine things churned and roiled.

Allen Culp was one of (the publisher) Ron Fenton's best friends. Culp was a corrupt attorney and Outfit pimp who ran a stable of several high-end call girls in Chicago's First Ward. But Culp had made a fundamental error. One an Outfit pimp should never make. He fell in love (heavily, obsessively) with one of his girls. And she jilted him for some other scumbag.

The weekend I spent with Francy at the World Swingers Convention Allen Culp, armed with a .357 Magnum, morose and lovesick, committed suicide by blowing his brains all over his bedroom. Fenton was picked up by the cops and hauled over to Allen Culp's place in order to identify the body.

Ronnie told me the following Monday "There wasn't much left of his head. He was a real fucked-up mess. That's a thing a person doesn't want to see, your friend's brains all over the room" He thought for a minute and added "I was gonna give him the reception area furniture when Gallery shuts down."

That's how I found out that Gallery was over.

Fenton had tried to take on the Distributor. Ronnie had tough friends but the Distributer had been at it for decades, had bigger teeth and played the game more hardcore. Fenton had set up the Distributor's representative with an underage girl in his hotel room and got pictures and recordings of it. But it was water off a duck's back. In the end control was snatched away from Fenton and the magazine was moved to NYC and became a completely different animal.

I was kept on the payroll because Fenton had other plans. For the previous couple of months Fenton had established a fiduciary alliance with Larry Flynt. So when Gallery was wrestled away from Ron he placed a call to his pal Larry. Flynt would be the publisher and Fenton would be the associate publisher. I immediately got to work producing a brochure to solicit advertising for a new magazine called Hustler.

IN THE HUTCH

It was 1977 and I was sitting with Hugh Hefner in the library of the Playboy Mansion West. He was in a dark leather wing-back chair, behind him on the wall was a framed copy of a Faces magazine cover I'd designed that featured him and his long-time girlfriend, Barbi Benton.

In the corner Michelle Urry was thumbing through a stack of cartoons and handing them to Hef as he requested a new supply.

Earlier in the day, in the Mediterranean Room, I'd smoked powerful dope provided by John Dante, a former bartender at the Chicago Playboy Club who'd become a close friend to Hef over the years. We passed the doobie, Dante, Harry Reems (mythic porno star) and me, around the table in this azure-tiled room surrounded by paintings by Dali, Jackson Pollock and de Kooning.

A bit later Harry Reems and I, looking for a little action, took a dip in the scented lagoon that is the Playboy Grotto. But it was a little early in the day for all the lewd angels to be about. Still at serene slumber they were, rhapsodically dreaming of the previous evening's abominations. Carnality was on the clock and we were in the right place at the wrong time.

Later in the evening the sullen little nightbirds who inhabited the Bunny Dormitory at the Playboy Mansion settled in around Hef, Dante, Reems and me in the Great Room, where a screen descended from the rafters and we all, rather draped and strewn across the antechamber, viewed Bernardo Bertolucci's erotic masterpiece "The Last Tango in Paris."

But as for now, I was sitting with Michell Urry and Hugh Hefner scrutinizing cartoons for the magazine.

I mentioned to Hef that both at Playboy Press and at Playboy magazine I'd worked on projects that required me to pour over thousands of pages of his personal scrapbooks that he'd been scrupulously compiling since 1943, when he was a senior at Steinmetz High School in Chicago.

The real connection between Skip Williamson and Hugh Hefner is our mutual love and regard for the art form of the Cartoon. In his adolescent and young adult days Hef wanted to be a cartoonist. In fact, the year before he published the first issue if Playboy he self-published a book of cartoons titled "That Toddlin' Town", packed with callow gags and stiff drawings of lecherous men at play in the bars and byways of Chicago. And when the magazine became reality Hef cultivated a stable of unparalleled cartoon talent. Shel Silverstein, Harvey Kurtzman, Jules Fieffer, Gahan Wilson, Buck Brown, John Dempsey, B. Kliban, to name a few.

One of the early cartoon geniuses Playboy published was Jack Cole. Those who know regard Jack Cole, in the pantheon of cartoon talent, as one of the guys at the top of the heap. A star, a paragon, an exemplar to those of us who chose to traverse cartooning's hard-hearted boulevard of sullied desire.

In 1941 Jack Cole created "Plastic Man", a comic book that featured a superhero who had preternatural elasticity allowing him to form into any object or escape danger through the tiniest aperture and keyhole. Along with his goofy, dimwitted sidekick, Woozy Winks, "Plas" fought crime and malfeasance with a slapstick aplomb unique to the genre. By 1955 Jack Cole had begun contributing his "Females by Cole" feature to Playboy magazine, as well as producing some of the most accomplished and beautiful watercolored full-page cartoons the magazine has ever published. In 1958 Cole syndicated "Betsy and Me", a newspaper comic strip, through the Chicago Sun-Times. On August 15, 1958, after writing a suicide note to Hugh Hefner, Jack Cole took his own life.

"When I came across Jack Cole's suicide note in your scrapbooks", I said to Hef, "it felt like an invasion of privacy."

"Oh no", said Hef. "You were given access to my scrapbooks. You didn't invade my privacy."

"Not yours", I said. "Jack's"

***

Arthur Paul, the illustrious founding art director of Playboy has been quoted as saying "I don't have an art department as much as I have a contingent of merchant marines." So true.

My history with intoxicants was extravagant, but I had nothing on these guys. Playboy's art directors were positively paranormal in their immoderation, particularly with alcohol. But, because they were a bit older than I was, not so much with psychoactives.

It wasn't that Playboy was a hive of dipsomaniacal activity as much as it was that during those times aggressive consumption was pretty much a cultural rudiment. It was the rule up and down Michigan Avenue, at the ad agencies, at the newspapers and at Playboy. Plus, these were the disco years and cocaine had become prominent in the lexicon of the pie-eyed. Dabs of white crystal festooned nasal openings while mindless chatter and the audible grinding of teeth echoed through the halls of Hugh Marston Hefner's flagship.

The art department was so hardcore that they were required to remain in a sequestered area during parties at the Mansion. They were to stay behind a red velvet rope, a barrier between them and Hef and his favored guests.

Once, at a Mansion party, the evening was in full swing. Naked bunnies swam and frolicked in the Grotto pool, celebrities played pinball in the Game room, loud music blared in the living room as guests and staff boogied in tandem. As if he were throwing off protons in his wake, strobe lights popped and shutters clicked wherever Hef moved throughout the house.

Hef liked to enter late, after the party was in full swing. That way he'd reap the greatest impact as he entered the fray. He strode into the room wearing black pajamas, a blond on each arm, his pipe clenched firmly between his teeth. Built-in strobe lights flashed and popped as a cadre of photographers scurried underfoot capturing the moment for posterity.

So Hef was on the scene and the scene was happenin'! Flip Wilson was playing pinball and getting cozy with a couple of Playmates. Buddy Rich was grabbing ass over by the suit of armor. The room was smoky, crowded and loud. Within the art department a whirlwind of drunken lawlessness churned, splintering civility and crushing decorum underfoot. One, well-costumed and with calculated order strides the room amid flashes of light, the conqueror with tribute on either arm. And the other, a wild-eyed band of intoxicated mutants, out of their minds, savage, on the rampage and obnoxious. Oil and water. Martin and Lewis. Sonny and Cher. The shit was bound to hit the fan.

They were in the Game room. Moody and Blume were shooting pool. Bob Post was having great fun repeatedly tilting the pinball machine and drunkenly pontificating about the death of Art and why Abstract Expressionism went belly up, Lenny and Norm were enthusiastically giggling.

Hefner walks through the door just as Ron Blume reaches for his glass of booze perched on the pool table but misses, delivering it a glancing blow and sending it shattering and splashing on the black pajama cuffs of Hugh Hefner. This caused a rend in the fabric of Reality. An audible and collective gasp of repulsion escaped the throng as the clamor of the soiree fell silent and steam churned from Hefner's pinkened ears.

Seething with discommodious pique Hugh Hefner grabbed the wiskbroom and dustpan from the hands of a servant skittering in to clean up the clutter and swept up the mess himself! As he stared toxic odium at Blume. It was an innocent accident untainted by purposeful chicanery, but it was the straw that broke the libertine's back.

The intemperate veneer of self-indulgence was starting to crack. Ron Blume was fired as an example to others. Livers perforated by years of abuse were starting to fail. First one, and the another staggered up the Twelve Steps. Characters breastfed on saturnalia and rampage became born again. Meanwhile profits and circulation took a nose dive causing the corporate whip to be employed bringing recalcitrant troops into the lock-step one would witness visiting Playboy's headquarters these days.

DADDY WAS A LADY

"Goin' up to Cripple Creek, goin' on a run
Goin' up to Cripple Creek to have a little fun."
--traditional folk song

By 1965 things were starting to churn. In March LBJ sent the first ground troops into Vietnam. Martin Luther King turned up the heat in Selma, Alabama, and the police responded with tear gas, dogs and clubs. Malcolm X is shot and killed at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem. Augustus Owsley Stanley manufactures and distributes 300,000 hits of LSD. The L.A. Free Press starts publishing regularly. Dylan releases his first all electric album, "Bringing it all Back Home". Watts burns. Che Guevara heads for Bolivia. The Selective Service starts calling up 40,000 a month. The SDS launches the first anti-Vietnam march in Washington -- at 25,000 strong it equals the number of troops in southeast Asia. The Beatles play to 55,000 screaming girls at Shea Stadium. Mini-skirts appear in stores. And Pop art fills NYC's trendy galleries.

In Canton, Missouri, life chugged along at its usual prosaic and colorless pace but we made do. Cecilia Einhaus and I were in love and spent as much time as possible hitting it in the backseat of my Dad's Ford Falcon stationwagon. I was a young, bearded art kid trying to be as bohemian as the environment would allow. And Cecil was going all Carnaby Street in a small town Missouri way. The infectious Counterculture had set down roots but it would be a couple of years before it became a full-blown taint.

In the meantime I'd completed my sophomore year at Culver-Stockton college when a summer job opportunity came my way.

RAE

In April 1965 Truman Capote was at the Lansing Correctional Facility to witness the executions of Perry Smith and Dick Hickok. He had already spent considerable time in the Kansas sticks researching the murder of the Clutter family for a book that would become In Cold Blood.

When Tru needed to blow off a little steam he would escape the outback for the relaxation and entertainment of Kansas City's transvestite clubs. And the primo tv club in Kansas City in '65 was the Jewel Box Lounge, an Outfit-run business (operated by mobster John Trucillo) at 3219 Troost -- next door to the Yum-Yum Club, a popular strip joint. The headliner at the Jewel Box was Rae Bourbon.

Bourbon was a legendary drag queen fond of rewriting his own history. He claimed to be born Hal Wadell in Texarkana, Texas, in 1892. Another time he said he was born Ramon Icarez near Chihuahua, Texas, in 1889. Or that he was the illegitimate child of a Texas Congressman. He finally settled on claiming to be the son of Franz Joseph of Austria and Louisa Bourbon. As a young man, at his family ranch on the border of Texas and Mexico the story goes he assumed the identity of "Senora Diablo" and, in Mexican drag, smuggled guns and supplies to Pancho Villa. In 1917 He entered a Photoplay contest and won first prize, a studio contract. He was given small parts is several silent films including Blood and Sand, The Volga Boatman, Manslaughter and The Ten Commandments.

By the mid '20s Bourbon was on the vaudeville stage with Bert Sherry (straightman to Bourbon's exuberant queen) as half of the act "Bourbon and Sherry". By the '30s Rae was working full-time as a female impersonator at Jimmy's Back Yard in Hollywood and other L.A. and San Francisco nightclubs. In 1933 his live radio broadcast of "Boys Will Be Girls" was raided by the police and Bourbon was arrested for the first of many times for performing his art. In the late '30s and early '40s Rae was the headliner at his own Los Angeles club, The Rendezvous in his revue "Don't Call Me Madam"

In 1944 Rae Bourbon caught the eye of Mae West who cast him in stage productions of "Catherine Was Great" and "Diamond L'il. He performed "Don't Call Me Madam" to sold out crowds at Carnegie Hall. In the '50s and '60s he played clubs and dives throughout the U.S., and recorded dozens of record albums. During these pre-Stonewall days Bourbon was like the connective tissue for a community of Gays in tanktowns to urban areas. Like Johhny Appleseed in a sequined frock, Rae planted his pansy bon mots nationwide. Bourbon's act was simultaneously trashy gay and covertly seditious. His show was vulgar, hilarious, rude and brilliant. As part of his act he had four or five trained dogs dyed different colors who would urinate on cue.

Over the years Rae was arrested for the crime of impersonating a female in Los Angeles, Seattle, El Paso and New Orleans. In 1958 he was arrested in Miami for impersonating a man.

Despite his close connection to the Gay community Rae was a switch-hitter. He had been married a couple of times, had a son and would perform in and out of drag. He enjoyed robust relationships with both sexes, though he had an affinity for young boys. And he had developed a deep love for animals. At one time he had 40 dogs, several cats and two skunks. And if you valued your safety, you'd do no harm to his animals. Rae Bourbon was homicidally intolerant when it came to animal cruelty.

By the 60s Bourbon's career was on the skids and he was having a difficult time making ends meet. He had written (with input from Mae West) a largely autobiographical play, "Daddy Was a Lady". He had negotiated with R.W. Elsenpeter Productions to produce his play, first in Cripple Creek, Colorado, then Off-Broadway in New York.

So in June, 1965, Rae, with his 18-year-old lover, Pat Lee, motored his beat-up 1955 Cadillac Sedan into the sunset hauling a ramshackled house-trailer filled with 26 dogs -- he'd pick up a few more strays along the way.

POSSUM HOLLER OPRY

Possum Holler Opry was a country and western jamboree television show that was broadcast live from WGEM-TV, channel 10, out of Quincy, Illinois, every Sunday at 12:30. The announcer would call out "Hi Ho neighbors! It's Possum Holler Opry time!" Then the fun would begin.

The producer of the show was Richard Elsenpeter. He was also the host and performed under the persona of "Toby Dick Ellis", a goofy, carrot-wigged, bib-overalled country bumpkin. He imbued the show with a crazy pedestrian sensibility that would later be effectively exploited by Chuck Barris -- a state of human consciousness that civility prevents us from enjoying as the Good Lord intended. That we are basically knuckle-heads even though we consider ourselves erudite and Byzantine.

The "Toby" character was a Midwestern show-business phenomenon born out of an attempt to bring entertainment and culture to the hinterlands. Early in the century traveling tent shows would tour rural America on the Chautauqua circuit. Originating in Chautauqua, New York, the idea was to bring teachers, entertainers, speakers and specialists to those who normally would not have exposure to such enlightenment. Over the years the high-end cultural nature of the Tent Chautauquas eroded into vaudeville-like performances. And out of that was born the "Toby and Susie" shows.

Toby and Susie were kind of a provincial American Punch and Judy played out by actors instead of puppets. They were cut of broad humor, sight-gags, pratfalls and marital rumpus designed to appeal to rural audiences. The Toby character was always a dimwitted bucolic lout in bib-overalls, bare feet and an orange fright-wig. And that was Elsenpeter's role on Possum Holler Opry.

I was a fan of Possum Holler Opry and I wasn't alone. It was the most popular show on WGEM, reaching 75,000 viewers a week. And when Toby Dick made a personal appearance at the Keokuk, Iowa Street Fair (Billed as the largest Street Fair in the USA.) in 1963 he drew the largest audience in the history of the fair.

Toby Dick's sidekick was Al Harvey. Al was short, bald and paunchy in an over-sized ten-gallon hat and sequined duds. Toby and Al would banter and joke and, occasionally Al would break out his guitar and croon a country ballad or two. At some point in the show Toby would break into the "Possum Holler Strut". To the music of a bluegrass breakdown Toby would go as ridged as a board from the waist up but frenzied spaghetti-legged hoedown stomping from the waist down.

The guests on the show were usually country & western performers on the way up or on the downhill glide to obcurity. And the end of every show was a Baptist-flavored religious message. Somber organ music swelled "Nearer My God to Thee" and there stood Toby Dick, country bucktoothed goofus fright-wig and all, imploring us all to love one another and to get to church and worship the God of our choice. Fade to black.

Elsenpeter lived and bled show business. He had appeared in numerous tent shows throughout the Tri-State area of Illinois, Missouri and Iowa. As well as on radio, television and in motion pictures. Members of the Possum Holler Opry gang made personal appearances and often provided backup band support for country stars like Flatt and Scruggs, Tex Ritter and the Wilburn Brothers. They appeared to capacity crowds at the Illinois State fairground during the winter months hosting Gran Ole Opry acts and were heard live over seven radio stations in Illinois. Toby Dick handled the emcee chores providing comedy, chatter, song and interplay with the audience. And during the summer months R.W. Elsenpeter Productions produced summerstock stage-plays from St. Louis to Cripple Creek, Colorado.

In late Spring, 1965, I received a call from Toby Dick Ellis asking if I would be interested in helping with the publicity for a summerstock show he was producing in Colorado. The fact that I'd never handled publicity didn't bother me or Dick Ellis. I was after escape and adventure, he was after cheap.

I agreed to meet Toby Dick at Tony's Pizzeria just down the block from the WGEM-TV studios in Quincy, Illinois.

I drove twenty miles south and crossed the Mississippi into Quincy, Illinois, a boisterous river town of 45,000 originally settled by German Catholics. With a bar on every corner and a church in every block, Quincy was known as "Little Chicago" in deference to its corrupt politics and its highly organized criminal elements. And, back in the day, Al Capone would retreat there when the heat was up. It was the city to my village where my companions and I would go to drink, barrelhouse and seek the spirited mischief that we, in our youth, considered fun.

I walked into Tony's Pizzeria, shook hands with Dick Ellis and ordered a beer.

Tony's Pizzeria was not a carry out pizza joint but an Italian restaurant that specialized in pizza in order to appeal to the pedestrian taste-buds of the midwestern locals. It was owned and operated by Tony Aleman, a thick-necked and sturdy Sicilian who enjoyed a infamous reputation around town. Tony was a tough guy raised on west Taylor Street in Chicago, a member of the iniquitous Aleman family who were footsoldiers, enforcers and hitmen for the Outfit. Some said Tony was coerced to leave Chicago due to some transgression that, under normal circumstances, would have called for five or six small caliber cartridges emptied into his brainpan. But Tony was a Aleman, and in accordance with a code of respect in deference to his family's position, he was allowed to live but was banished and forbidden to enter the Chicago territories lest he suffer an encounter with concrete overshoes.

Tony ended up in Quincy in the restaurant business, an efficient way of masking other, more lucrative, enterprises. Upstairs Rose, Tony's girlfriend, rode herd over a gambling den and a couple of hookers. And Tony was a bit of a loan-shark. His enforcer was his bartender, "Curly". He was a bald mountain of menace who somewhat resembled "Curly" on the Three Stooges. Only more homicidal.

"So, Skip" says Toby Dick, "I'm producing a couple of summerstock shows this year. One is a melodrama in the Ozarks. And the other one is in Cripple Creek, Colorado. The one in Cripple Creek is an original comedy called 'Daddy was a Lady', written by Rae Bourbon and Mae West. Rae will star in the show. He's known world-wide as the best female impersonator in show business."

"He isn't a queer, is he?" I chirped. "This isn't a queer show?"

"Naw! This guy is legitimate theater. He's been on the Ed Sullivan Show. Bob Hope and Bing Crosby are his friends. He produces record albums like Redd Fox and Rusty Warren. Y'know...party records for sophisticated adults. He's been around a long time, a real Hollywood character. He even played a shepherd girl in "The Ten Commandments". Silent version."

"We want you to design the posters, showcards and print ads." continued Toby Dick. "You'll prepare press releases and act as the spokesman for the production to newspapers, radio and television. You'll be Mr. Bourbon's personal press agent. We plan to take the show to New York in the Fall. If you work with us now, you're with us Off-Broadway."

"Why Cripple Creek?" I asked.

"There's lots of summertime tourist trade there because of its history as a Gold Rush boomtown. And there are a lot of military bases in the area. When these guys are on leave they need to have a couple of drinks and a little nasty repartee. We can give them one-stop service because we'll be operating a restaurant, a saloon and a theater out of the Grubstake Hotel. Cripple Creek is like a page out of Zane Grey complete with prospectors, wild donkeys and half-breed indians. Tony and Curly are going out to run the bar and restaurant for us." Toby Dick said. "We'll pay you forty bucks a week plus room and board. And we'll provide you with a car."

Over that beer my soul left my good counsel and entered in league with a seventy-two year old cross dresser, no matter how homo his sexuality. The deal was made. The promise of adventure and thrill serenaded provocatively, stage left.

For me it would be a Coming of Age experience. For Curly, a more Coming of Death thing.

CRIPPLE CREEK

In the early days of 1890 the valley between Pike's Peak and the Sangre de Christo mountain range was largely uninhabited. But by the time Cripple Creek was incorporated in 1892 there were 5,000 residents in the district that included Cripple Creek and the town of Victor ten miles due south. By 1900 the gold-rush was on and the population of Cripple Creek had swollen to 35,000, and Victor to 5,000. At that time Cripple Creek had 49 grocery stores, 20 meat markets, 14 bakeries, 5 livery stables, 90 doctors, 2 undertakers, 73 saloons and 16 churches. 15 newspapers were published in the district -- 8 in Cripple Creek, five of which were dailies.

But by 1965 Cripple Creek was largely a ghost-town. There were maybe 5,000 residents but the physical town remained as an abandoned grid of homes, businesses, whorehouses, churches and a jail -- like history suspended in amber.

Ellis and I followed route 24 through Colorado Springs, Manitou Springs and past the Garden of the Gods. Then up the mountains until we were above the timber-line. When we reached the Florrisant Pass we turned down route 67. About a mile from our destination we passed the skeletal remains of the Mollie Kathleen, a gold mine abandoned by the big mining companies when the gold was depleted enough that the operation was no longer cost effective. All that was left were corroded conveyor systems and rusted-out ore carts scattered and toppled, a monument to Man's propensity to suck the assets of a given area and then to forsake it for fairer fare. Then up over the rise of an ancient rim of a prehistoric volcanic crater. In the valley created by the crater lay Cripple Creek. As we crossed over the rim a cluster of wild angora goats bleated and announced our arrival to an old blind man who lived among them. He greeted us and welcomed us to the Gold Camp.

It was twilight as we rolled into town and down Bennett Street to the lowest recess of the antediluvian crater and parked in front of the Grubstake Hotel. The Grubstake was a hotel, saloon and theater where "Daddy Was a Lady" would be staged.

As the sun set behind the Sangre de Christo range a female figure silhouetted in the second floor window of the hotel sang "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child". Her crystalline voice resonated and echoed the tuneful harbinger across the valley.

As we unloaded our goods some hapless soul had been collared by a couple of men and tossed onto the street through the swinging doors of the Grubstake saloon.

"And stay out!" one of the men barked.

We entered the saloon, found a seat at the bar and I ordered a beer. I turned to an hammered customer sitting next to me and asked "Who was that guy who just got tossed out?"

"The sheriff," he answered

APRES SHOW

The final curtain had come down. The show had played to an audience of three. Now the place was dark, home only to the ghosts of the Gold Rush and dead Indians. The patrons and Grubstake staff were in bed or had gone home, but we were hungry.

Cecilia, Larry Fischer and I headed up Bennett Avenue to the Imperial Hotel for a little food and drink. The place was lit up and raucous. It was the Fourth of July weekend and the bar area was bursting with intoxicated prospectors and owlhoots who'd been drinking all day. You could hear the laughter and boisterous celebration all the way back to the Grubstake hotel. The unruliness was punctuated by the occasional blast of an M-80 or a Cherry Bomb from inside the barroom, always followed by loud acclaim from the sotted, who were in full celebration. It was a cheerful night.

As we approached the barroom doorway a giggling grizzly drunk stumbled through the swinging doors with a lit Cherry Bomb in his hand, and he tossed the sputtering firework into the open window of a police car parked just outside the bar. The eyes of the cop sitting behind the wheel bugged impressively as the Cherry Bomb exploded in the seat next to him. It seemed the entire vehicle lifted off the pavement. And the cop wisely floored it and high-tailed away from the mayhem, smoke trailing from the open window of his squad car.

We went into the bar and found a table. The place was packed, and every table was overflowing with empty quart beer bottles. Only 3.2 beer was served here so it was necessary to consume ample volume in order to achieve the required delirium. Critical mass had been realized and lawlessness and disorder ruled the night.

We found a table and ordered beer. Our quarts arrived and we focused our energies on melding into the bedlam. An M-80 exploded in the corner of the bar and the crowd roared approval.

At the table next to us a pie-eyed old prospector, semi-conscious and very slaphappy -- having consumed copious quantities of beer -- sat at a table strewn with an impressive number of empty quart bottles. Momentarily lucid (or what passed for it the chaos) he spied a fellow tanked-up backwoodsman, a friend of his sitting at a table on the opposite side of us. His means of communication were limited. The din and yamp was much too raucous for any sort of verbal communication, not to mention how hammered he was. But he was an enterprising old sot and settled on a more tactile approach.

He grabbed the beer bottle he was swilling and, thumb tight over the lip, he shook it vigorously letting go in the general direction of his buddy. Unfortunately his aim was skewed by drink and most of the beer spewed our table. Particularly Cecilia.

She gasped and I said "Just let it go. We'll drink up and get out of here."

But some of the spray had reached its target. And the prospector's buckskinned
buddy gregariously answered his friend's liquid fusillade with one of his own. Unfortunately his aim was worse than his friend's and he scored a direct hit on Cecil, drenching her as the two old mugwumps sniggered and guffawed in drunken delight.

Cecil was fuming, beer dripping from her hair and drenching her clothes. And I wasn't too happy myself.

I jumped up from our table with a full quart in my hand and emptied it over the head of one of the offenders. Then I hurled the empty bottle at the other. It smashed in a hundred pieces square in the middle of his forehead.

The place came to a dead silence. But only for a second.

Then it went up. Chairs hurled, tables overturned, bottles breaking, inhuman animal sounds screaming "FIGHT! FIGHT!", fists flying.

I grabbed Cecil and yelled at Larry "GET ON THE FUCKIN' FLOOR!" and, as hell rampaged above us, we crawled on our hands and knees through the swinging doors to the street outside. The three of us ran down Bennett Avenue toward the Grubstake like our lives depended on it, which they did. We were two blocks down Bennett when I turned and looked back. The entire bar emptied out on the street, the night air full of commotion and rage. "THERE THEY GO! KILL'EM!"

We ducked into the Grubstake and locked the doors behind us. Certain no door would hold back the rampaging mob we locked ourselves in a closet on the second floor, Larry Fischer clutching a large pair of scissors he'd grabbed along the way. We were quiet in the dark, three hearts pounding in fear. We knew with certainty that this night we would die. Unpleasantly.

But no one came. No lynch mob, no angry mountain men, Nothing.

After an hour or two we went off to our beds. Just another night in Cripple Creek.

A few days later I ran into the prospector I'd upended the beer bottle on. He peered at me quizzically. He knew he should know me, but from where? And
then went on about his way.

Thanks to the ability of alcohol to numb the brain and fuddle memory, I was allowed to live to see another day.

INTO THE FRAY

"If Liberty means anything at all, it means
the right to tell people what they
do not want to hear." --George Orwell

The underground comics (or "comix") movement presented itself in the late 1960s, a time of abundant volatility, and single-handedly propelled comic art into the spangling arena of Art with a capital "A". This feat was accomplished by the underground cartoonists connecting their unbridled joy of creating comic strips – free of the extraneous influence of commerce – with the unrestrained manifestation of their esoteric insights and exotic delusions.

In 1961 I was a 16-year-old high school student in Canton, Missouri. I had judiciously followed the work of artist and editor Harvey Kurtzman since his Mad comics days, and it was Kurtzman who single-handedly fueled my fledgling cartoonist's fire.

Harvey Kurtzman's artistic disposition was brilliantly saw-toothed and raw, but simultaneously comprehensive and full of work-intensive particulars. He was an artist and writer who chose to proffer his manic morality plays panel by panel, and inspired a generation of artists to rattle the cage and taunt the Beast. Kurtzman knew the joyful truths of humor and anarchy. And that there is shelter and mitigation from the gloom of mortal reality through the rude auspices of satire.

In 1960 Kurtzman unleashed Help! magazine. Originally titled Help for Tired Minds, Help! was a departure for Kurtzman, as well as a primordial bouillabaisse in which important cultural talent of the Sixties would coagulate.

With Help! Kurtzman relied heavily on photography. He created fumetties; photo comic strips. And the covers for Help! were photographs, the early issues were staged photos with famous comedians of the day – like Sid Caesar, Ernie Kovacs and Jerry Lewis. He didn't abandon art, still utilizing the talents of his long-time art buddies Bill Elder, Jack Davis and Arnorld Roth. He hired an ambitious young Gloria Steinem as his assistant editor. Also on staff was a young cartoonist named Terry Gilliam.

Actors were always needed to populate Help!'s fumetties. Woody Allen – before he was a film director – appeared in one, and a British actor, John Cleese, in another. Gilliam and Cleese became friends and, after Help! went out of business, Terry Gilliam accompanied John Cleese back to England where Gilliam would become the only American member of Monty Python's Flying Circus, as well as the animator for the show. Gilliam is now an eminent film director; "Brazil ", "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas", "12 Monkeys", etc.

In the Spring of '61 I received a letter from Gloria Steinem accepting a cartoon of mine for publication in Kurtzman's Help! magazine. By 1963 Help! was regularly publishing Robert Crumb, Gilbert Shelton, Jay Lynch and Skip Williamson.

Help! closed its doors in 1965 but the damage was done. We were in incubation, engorging ourselves on the juicy nutrients of insubordination as depraved social undulations sensually heaved in and out of the fabric of a growing consumer class – like a hungry retrovirus ravenously feeding on the collective brainstem of Culture. America's early sixties narrative was backed by the syncopation of bongo drumming and would soon explode, fully orchestrated, as their children danced entwined, excessive and clamorous. From sea to shining sea.

An imposing intellect wasn't necessary to understand the turbulent permutations and exhilarating social sedition at large. We were given it as a cultural rudiment. We could smell its musk like an animal in heat. We could taste the salty, slightly metallic tang of it. It had a backbeat and we could cavort to it. It was a warm and slippery slope. It was made of colors and shapes unimagined. It had sharp edges but was pliant and supple as corrupted flesh. It was a husky whisper, a lewd and angry tongue in our collective ear. It was as sloppy and pungent as ripe cheese, and we wanted to get it all over us. We were tumescent in anticipation. We were,above all, impatient, our Rapidographs at the ready.

When the Underground Comix movement initially detonated it was asking the didactically loaded question, "Do you really mean Freedom of the Press?" This was a group of artists, working without economic expectation, expressing art without society's polite restrains, while employing an intrinsically American cultural curiosity, the Comic Book, as its delivery system.

In 1967 I drifted upstream from my home in a small river village on the Mississippi to Chicago in order to publish a magazine with my friend Jay Lynch. Chicago was kind of like Communist Bulgaria then, a gray and oppressive working-class atmosphere ruled by iron-fisted police upon the orders of portly, cigar chomping bureaucrats. A presence of Fear hovered over the lakefront. Brutality was law on the south and west sides of the city. Intimidation reigned glorious north and northwest. It was, in fact, a terrific environment for the novice artist. Plenty of social injustice about which the fledgling crackerjack cartoonist could endlessly harangue and, for fear of bodily harm, no reason to venture outside. This left many hours that would be normally wasted on existential despair during which one could hone the old brain/eye/hand coordination. In San Francisco it was the Summer of Love but in Chicago it was the Summer of Angst. I had been publishing cartoons since 1961 but never with such agitated indignation.

Together Jay Lynch and I produced three issues of the Chicago Mirror, a peculiar magazine of paranoia, psychedelia, satire and cartoons. The third issue of the Mirror had letters from Woody Allen and Madalyn Murray O'Hair, an interview with Paul Krassner and a blurb on the inside front cover announcing the first issue of Zap comics.

Robert Crumb had published the first issue of Zap Comix in San Francisco. Jay Lynch decided to change The Chicago Mirror to a comic book format, and in 1968 Robert Crumb caught a free ride to Chicago with a busload of protestors on their way to the Democratic Convention. Together Jay, Robert and I put together the first issue of Bijou Funnies, while almost simultaneously Gilbert Shelton published Feds 'n' Heads out of Austin, Texas. From that point on the demon had broken his chains and was at large in the countryside.

In August, 1968, the Democrats brought their big show to the Hogbutcher, and hizzoner, Richard J. Daley, unleashed his hungry dogs upon the flower children. I remember coming home one night after a full day of pitched battles with the police and National Guard. I was stinking of CS gas, my clothes were in rags, I was dirty and beaten down. I staggered into my apartment and there sat Robert Crumb and Jay Lynch.

So in the middle of the police riots at the Democratic Convention in Chicago -- after completing the cover art for Janis Joplin's "Cheap Thrills" album – Robert had come to visit. And that week Crumb, Lynch and I (along with contributions from Gilbert Shelton and Jay Kinney) concocted Bijou #1. Bijou, with its stellar lineup of regulars (Crumb, Lynch, Williamson, Art Spiegelman and Justin Green), lasted 8 issues over four years. A new issue forged whenever Robert rambled back into town.

In 1969 I edited Conspiracy Capers, a comic book published by Susan Sontag and Kathleen Cleaver and financed by Abbie Hoffman in order to raise money for the defense of the Chicago Seven. Meanwhile Crumb wandered the cultural landscape producing a voluminous comic art opus that, to this day, is an inspiration and impetus to those of us who followed in his wake.

In those days who among us knew we were creating "Art"? Certainly not those of us creating it. In fact, as far as we were concerned, these little comic books we cranked out were anti-Art. Not canvasses on a gallery wall viewed by the few, but an ephemeral sheath of newsprint to be read on the toilet and discarded. I'm still not convinced it's Art. All we really had in mind was youthful anarchistic fun. And to establish a forum where we could give the finger to the established authorities and moon the vapid Art world, to display a wanton and unbecoming lack of propriety by way of our untrained comix and to release a pathogen targeting the orthodox.

The Underground Comix were a direct descendant of the 1950s E.C. comics line and the government repression of superior comic art that was enforced by the Comics Code, the castration of the medium at the hands of reactionary politicians. As we matured from children to adults our outrage over the censorship of our treasured comic books mutated by way of campus humor magazines and eventually ignited unhinged into the florid sex, violence and anarchy that became the benchmarks of comix during the psychoactive drugs era. But by the mid 1970s fascist power brokers in conspiratorial league with Corporate America put an end to our tomfoolery, leaving behind the pale vestige of alternative comics and the Republican politics we enjoy to this day.

In terms of comics, underground comix didn't make much of a ripple other than existing in a small-press and unprofitable arena, and for laying the groundwork for the more explicit homogenous sludge pumped out for mass consumption by the likes of Marvel and DC.

Culturally, though, the underground comix were – very briefly – important. Largely because this group of upstart, rag-tag artists had the mettle to suggest that established convention was not as sophisticated and infallible as it thought it was. Armed with the zealotry of impetuous youth, these cartoonists tested how far the Orthodoxy would really tolerate Freedom of Expression.

And, other than being the most interesting art movement during the last half of the 20th Century, Underground Comix also established the artist's ownership of his intellectual property – you create it, it's yours. And graphically demonstrated that the artist's vision has no restraints no matter how many government stooges and academic morons guard the Gates of Culture.

Historically, other movements in Art have done much the same. This time the blithe bubble of recalcitrant Art was squashed flat under the repressive hobnail boot of Nixon's unscrupulous gaggle.

As a result the underground comix went belly-up to sea level where they became only comic strips again, taking the form of an aggregation of the largely lackluster independent titles and the comix-like strips that tediously appear in every city's "alternative" newspapers. There has been fine work in subsequent years. Raw, Blab! and American Splendor, to name a couple. But none speak to the moment with the pulse-quickening immediacy as the originals.

GENESIS

"If you're not good enough to be a cartoonist,
maybe you can be an artist."
--S. Clay Wilson

It started as cave drawings. Pictorially recalling the mastodon hunt for the enjoyment of the cavern-bound. Then it became glyphs and cuneiform raised to a High Art by the Egyptians, applied to papyrus as the florid sequential cartoons that was their method of written intercourse.

In more modern times the English caricaturists of the 18th and 19th centuries became popular in the illustrated broadsides of the day. Artists like William Hogarth, Thomas Rowlandson and George Cruikshank were, to the delight of readers across the waning Empire, illustrating political and social foibles in a satirically grotesque and unflattering light.

During the nineteenth century newspaper comics became popular, particularly in Germany. Wilhelm Busch's "Max and Moritz,” strips about diabolic children amok, was appropriated for American readers -- this time under the name of “The Katzenjammer Kids" by Rudolf Dirks.

The first American comic strip, “Hogan's Alley” was drawn by Richard Felton Outcault and published in the New York Sunday World on May 5, 1895. The setting was squalid city tenements and backyards filled with dogs, cats, tough customers and street urchins. One of the guttersnipes was a bald, floppy-eared, grinning kid in a long dirty nightshirt. His name was Mickey Dugan but he became known as the Yellow Kid because his nightgown was yellow. The newspaper’s printer had a excess of yellow ink and, free to experiment, the kid’s night shirt became the test area.

The comics were an instant success. So William Randolph Hearst using money as bait, lured many of the New York World’s cartoonists to his paper, the New York Journal. When R.F. Outcault left the World for the Journal the New York World hired another cartoonist to draw the “Yellow Kid,” an early skirmish over artist’s rights and the ownership of intellectual property. The rivalry became intense between the two newspapers and the term “yellow journalism” was coined as a result.

In 1908 Windsor McCay debuted his comic strip, “Little Nemo in Slumberland”. Each strip was an enigmatic dream of the protagonist, Little Nemo, and each ended with Nemo awake on the floor, wrapped in blankets, next to his bed commenting on his odd dream event.

Windsor McCay is regarded as the father of animation (“Gertie the Dinosaur”), was an extraordinary draftsman – stylistically influenced by the Art Noveau movement – who, every Sunday, illustrated full-color, architecturally correct phantasmagoric night traumas to the delight of newly-industrialized, post-agrarian newspaper readers nationwide.

One of the most incredible and popular of the early newspaper cartoonists was George Herriman. In 1910 Herriman created “Krazy Kat” for Heart’s New York Journal American. The main characters were Krazy Kat (A sexually morphic cat, one couldn’t tell if Krazy was a he or a she.), the volatile Ignatz Mouse, and the local cop, Offica Pup. The innocent, harebrained and hopelessly romantic Krazy Kat was targeted by Ignatz’ constant assaults. Usually with a brick to the head after Krazy declares eternal love of Ignatz Mouse.

All of this took place in Coconino County, which was Herriman’s take on the Southwest, particularly the Monument Valley area. Monument Valley landmarks and American Indian motifs litter the backdrop for Krazy Kat’s adventures.

As the story goes, George Herriman moved from NCY to Arizona partially because he enjoyed smoking marijuana and, during those days, it was more available in the Southwest than the Northeast. Herriman’s taste for weed was eventually woven into the “Krazy Kat” strip when, in May 1936, Herriman abandoned his usual anarchic lyricism for eight weeks in order to present a sustained Krazy Kat narrartive involving a remarkable substance called “Tiger Tea”. Tiger Tea, when ingested by Krazy Kat, gave the ingratiatory innocent uncommon strength and remarkable fortitude.

Cliff Serret introduced “Polly and Her Pals” to comics readers at the time of the Womens’ Suffrage movement in 1912. Polly was an independent woman with a mind of her own and, invigorated by her access to modernism, she did not kowtow to the menfolk.

Serret’s rendering was flamboyant and colorful, sometimes almost abstract. He was very influenced by the Cubist art movement flourishing at the time.

It wasn’t unusual that the cartoonists were influenced by what was going on with the High Arts. Frank King, who produced “Gasoline Alley” in the early 30s loved to reference Expressionism, Post-Expressionism and Cubism in the Sunday Funnies.

As a cursory list, other important early newspaper comic strips were “Foxy Granpa’” by Carl Emile Schultze, “Happy Hooligan” by Fredrick Burr Opper, “Hairbredth Harry” by Charles William Kahles, “Mutt and Jeff ” by Bud Fisher, “The Gumps ” by Sidney Smith and “Bringing Up Father” by George McManus.

The first comic books were reprint compilations of newspaper strips. Famous Funnies was the first comic book sold on the newsstands. It appeared in 1934 and was published by M.C. Gaines who had a company called Educational Comics (or EC Comics).

A great impetus was given comic books by the phenomenal success of Action Comics #1, which featured the adventures of a new character called “Superman”. It was written and drawn by Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegle, a couple of teenagers. From that point on comic books were eminently successful enterprises. And content created specifically for comic books supplanted reprints.

In 1940 cartoonist, Will Eisner, had the idea of putting a comic book insert inside the Sunday newspaper comics section. The 16-page comic book insert had three stories one of which was the “Spirit ” by Eisner.

Policeman Denny Colt, had been killed in a fight trying to save Central City from the evil machinations of a mad scientist. However, the chemical used by the mad scientist to poison Colt only put him in a state of suspended animation. Thus the revitalized cop becomes the masked vigilante, the Spirit.

Eisner’s popular character continued until 1953 when it was discontinued. But the Spirit can’t die! It was revived for a short time during 1966-67 before being resurrected permanently by Kitchen Sink Press in the 1970s. In his later years Eisner began producing graphic novels, many of which echo his experiences living in New York City on the Lower East Side, the son of Jewish immigrants in the 20s and 30s. A seminal influence, master creator and artist, Will Eisner is among the most important names in the annals of comics (The cartoonist and writer, Jules Fieffer, served as Eisner’s assistant during the early Spirit days.).

Meanwhile, back on the newspaper comics pages, cops were also popular. One of the best known was Chester Gould’s “Dick Tracy”. “Dick Tracy”, originally published in the 1930s, was responsible for a radical innovation; the first character to be gunned down in the funnies was dispatched in the strip’s first week. Chester Gould pioneered a new, hard-hitting realism focusing on contemporary themes of urban crime peopled by a rogue’s gallery of nefarious characters. A world of inner city tribulation rendered in flat blacks and deco angularism.

In 1934 Al Capp brought “L'il Abner” to the newspaper comics pages. Capp’s broadly satiric hillbillies from Dogpatch – over-muscled dimwits and large-breasted females -- roamed the American landscape spouting meaty homespun sarcasm. Capp’s work is perhaps best exemplified in his cartoons epics featuring the Schmoos, bowling-pin shaped beings who willingly suicide themselves in order to supply humanity’s corporeal and spiritual needs and, therefore, pose a great threat to the Establishment .

By the 1950s comic books were reaching a more adult audience with cowboy comics, love and romance comics, horror comics and crime comics like Charles Biro’s “Crime Does Not Pay”.

William Gaines, son of Max Gaines, creator of the first newsstand comic book, had inherited his father’s business, kept the initials “ EC” but changed the name of the
company to “Entertaining Comics”. Gaines published a successful line of crime, horror and science fiction comics with titles like "Weird Science", "The Haunt of Fear" and "Tales from the Crypt".

In 1945 a young cartoonist named Harvey Kurtzman created a syndicated comic strip called “The Silver Linings” for the New York Herald Tribune Around the same time Kurtzman began contributing cartoons to comic book publishers. Eventually Kurtzman took a job at Timely Publications, a comic book company, and created “Hey Look!”, a manic satire strip that ran for several years in Timely Publication’s humor line, and a strip that would be the well-spring of an idea that would occur to him several years later when he was hospitalized with jaundice.

After his tenure at Timely Publications Harvey Kurtzman was hired by William Gaines to edit the two EC war titles, "Frontline Combat " and "Two-Fisted Tales". One of the fundamental characteristics of the stories Harvey wrote for the EC war comics was their prevalent anti-war tone. Other war comics of the day were bellicose, gung-ho exercises demonstrating America’s superior firepower over pitifully impotent foreign nationals. Harvey’s stories were more cautionary and ironic. Also Kurtzman’s stories were based on real events not on preposterous fictions. Numerous hours were spent researching the stories to insure that the facts and military armament were correct and exact in every detail.

In 1941 Dr. Frederic Wertham, a senior psychiatrist for New York’s Bellevue mental hospital, authored a book titled “Dark Legend”, the true story of a 17-year-old New Yorker who killed his mother in the late 1930s. Wertham believed the boy lived in a fantasy world created by movies, radio and comics. In 1948 Dr. Werthan wrote an article for the Reader's Digest that said that there was a direct correlation between comics and violence in children.

America was getting riled up. There was anti-comics pressure from religious and community groups. Major cities in some states banned comic books altogether. Comic books fed self-righteous bonfires from coast to coast. Laws were introduced in 18 states restricting the sale of comics, and a Senate panel was convened to investigate the link between comic books and juvenile delinquency.

In 1954 Wertham published, “Seduction of the Innocent ”, his epic treatise on the effects of comics on children. He gave graphic examples of sex and violence, scores of stories awash in dope, sadism, rape and murder. Commonly all thugs and social insubordinates read comic books when they were kids avowed Wertham.

After the Congressional investigation and by the end of 1954 almost three-quarters of the comic book publishing business was gutted by a mass hysteria fueled by a false premise exploited by ravening politicians on the scent of votes. Many publishers didn’t survive the witch-hunt. Atlas Comics (Now called Marvel.) nearly folded. DC Comics seriously scaled back the number of titles it published and EC Comics barely stayed alive.

The comics industry was coerced by Draconian means to self-regulate and to establish an industry-wide set of rules and regulations called “The Comics Code”. The Code carefully explained what was and would no longer be acceptable in comic books. Violence and sex were, of course, a no-no. Certain words like “weird, horror, terror” and “crime” were restricted. Slang terms were controlled and reproach of authority or religion was forbidden. If your comic books didn’t display the Comic Code emblem on its cover, the distributors wouldn’t distribute.

EC Comics had been a specific target during this pogrom. Inarguably filled to the brim with graphic gore, suggestive story lines, violence, drugs and sadism, EC could not get its books distributed after the Comics Code was enacted. Aside from the lurid gore – perhaps partially because of it – EC Comics also published some of the best artists and writers in the history of comics.

Meanwhile, because he was such a slave to the intricate detailing and absolute accuracy he required for “Two-Fisted Tales”, Harvey Kurtzman had let his health slide and was hospitalized with jaundice. While he was bedridden Harvey came up with the idea of a funny funnybook. Kurtzman, using the EC stable of superior artists, would write and edit a comic book that would satirize – through Harvey’s obsessively manic eye – American culture. Mad (first the comic book, then the magazine) would be the one idea that would keep EC Comics afloat. After a short time Mad would become the only title published by EC forevermore.

For awhile Mad survived as a comic book, spoofing comics characters, TV shows, movies, the human race and Life in these United States and, in 1953, in order to escape the censor’s knife, Mad switched to a magazine format and out of the purview of the Comics Code. But after a few issues Kurtzman left the magazined Mad in a dispute over ownership with Bill Gaines. Artist’s rights, creator’s rights, the proprietary rights of intellectual property were the issues in this primordial scrimmage. Gaines stood firm and Kurtzman either found or was shown the door. The editorship of Mad was turned over to Al Feldstein, one of the EC stable of artist/writer/editors, who had been editing Panic, a sister humor-comic published by Gaines .

But Harvey Kurtzman ’s talent was not unnoticed. In 1957 Hugh Hefner, the successful publisher of Playboy magazine hired Kurtzman to create Trump, a slick and sexy competition for Mad. Trump was a beautiful magazine, perhaps the most beautiful ever produced with a madman at the helm. Harvey pirated the best artists from Mad, Willy Elder, Jack Davis, Al Jaffee, Wally Wood and added and Robert Blechman to the mix. Trump had all the bells and whistles, four-color reproduction, centerfolds, and high-end production values. It was a tome of substance proudly representing the magazine patron’s astute hipness, humorwise -- whereas Mad had a bit of a puerile stink about it.

Unfortunately Trump only lasted two issues, but not because it didn’t sell well. It actually sold respectable numbers but Hefner closed down the shop because the magazine business was soft. Trump was sacrificed because Collier’s had gone out of business.

After Trump Kurtzman pooled his money with a couple of his artist friends and they launched Humbug in 1958. Humbug would last 11 issues before throwing in the towel. It was a wonderful satire magazine, intellectually and artistically superior to Mad, but it was small – comic book sized – and printed on crappy paper. The newsstand owners didn’t know whether to display it with comic books or magazines, and people couldn’t figure out exactly what it was. Sales lagged and eventually the ax fell. Kurtzman created, published and edited some of the finest comic art, yet he was never accused of possessing perceptive business acumen. But he did have resilience and a fanatic fan base.

The resilience demonstrated itself when he resurfaced and created Help! magazine in 1960. And the rapt attention of young comic book aficionados who had followed Kurtzman’s vicissitudes since the early EC days. Zealot apostles, they called themselves Kurtzmaniacs and had, in spirit, participated in the skirmishes that became campaigns that became seeming defeat that, in perpetuity, reignited from the ashes. All lead by an impish, deranged major domo in his artistic prime, happily rebuffing decorum while inevitably losing his shirt. Harvey demonstrated to his disciples the seditious notion that Art trumps Property and that unruly Art trumps Propriety. Across the nation unschooled art kids, with Harvey Kurtzman as their inspirational hero, set their sights on the impossible prize of Life as a Cartoonist. And, in the back of their collective minds, one mission would be to redress the emasculation of their precious comic books at the hands of autocratic opportunists and government agents.

Harvey Kurtzman's artistic disposition was brilliantly saw-toothed and raw, but simultaneously comprehensive and full of work-intensive particulars. He was an artist and writer who chose to proffer his manic morality plays panel by panel, and inspired a generation of artists to rattle the cage and taunt the Beast. Kurtzman knew the joyful truths of humor and anarchy. And there is shelter and mitigation from the gloom of mortal reality through the rude auspices of satire.

So in 1960 Kurtzman unleashed Help! magazine (Originally titled Help for Tired Minds.). Help! was a departure for Kurtzman, as well as a primordial bouillabaisse in which important cultural talent of the Sixties would coagulate.

With Help! Kurtzman relied heavily on photography. He created fumetties; photo comic strips. And the covers for Help! were photographs, the early issues were staged photos with famous comedians of the day – like Sid Caesar, Ernie Kovacs and Jerry Lewis. He didn’t abandon art, still utilizing the talents of his long-time art buddies Bill Elder, Jack Davis and Arnorld Roth. He hired an ambitious young Gloria Steinem as his assistant editor. Also on staff was a young cartoonist named Terry Gilliam.

Actors were always needed to populate Help!’s fumetties. Woody Allen – before he was a film director – appeared in one, and a British actor, John Cleese, in another. Gilliam and Cleese became friends and, after Help! went out of business, Terry Gilliam accompanied John Cleese back to England where Gilliam would become the only American member of Monty Python's Flying Circus, as well as the animator for the show. Gilliam is now an eminent film director; “Brazil ”, “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”, “12 Monkeys”, etc.

But Help!’s lasting legacy was as the breeding ground for the green cartoon talent that would ripen by the end of the decade, turn the comic book world on its ear and redefine Comic Art.

In 1961 I was a 16-year-old high school student in Canton, Missouri. I had judiciously followed Kurtzman since his Mad comics days, and it was Kurtzman who single-handedly fueled my fledgling cartoonist’s fire. In the Spring of ’61 I received a letter from Gloria Steinem accepting a cartoon of mine for publication in Help! . By 1963 Help! was regularly publishing Robert Crumb, Gilbert Shelton, Jay Lynch and Skip Williamson.

Help! closed its doors in 1965 but the damage was done. We were in incubation, engorging ourselves on the juicy nutrients of insubordination as depraved social undulations sensually heaved in and out of the fabric of a growing consumer class – like a hungry retrovirus ravenously feeding on the collective brainstem of Culture. America’s post-war narrative was backed by the syncopation of bongo drumming and would soon explode, fully orchestrated, as their children danced entwined, excessive and clamorous. From sea to shining sea.

An imposing intellect wasn’t necessary to understand the roiling permutations and exhilarating social sedition at large. We were given it as a cultural rudiment. We could smell its musk like an animal in heat. We could taste the salty, slightly metallic tang of it. It had a backbeat and we could cavort to it. It was a warm and slippery slope. It was made of colors and shapes unimagined. It had sharp edges but was pliant and supple as corrupted flesh. It was a husky whisper, a lewd and angry tongue in our collective ear. It was as sloppy and pungent as ripe cheese, and we wanted to get it all over us. We were tumescent in anticipation. We were,above all, impatient, our Rapidographs at the ready.

In 1963 Frank Stack published a photo-copied, hand collated and stapled comic book called The Adventures of Jesus, in ’64 Texas artist Jack Jackson self-published God Nose, a comic book about the interactions between a Supreme Being with a large snout and mortal fools. In 1967 I moved from Missouri to Chicago in order to publish magazines and make cartoons with Jay Lynch – since about ’65 Jay, Art Spiegelman and I had been messing around with the concept of surreal comic strips. In 1967 and ’68 Jay Lynch and I produced three issues of The Chicago Mirror, a peculiar magazine of underground paranoia, satire and cartoons.

In 1967 Robert Crumb published the first issue of Zap Comix in San Francisco. Jay Lynch decided to change The Chicago Mirror to a comic book format, and in 1968 Robert Crumb caught a free ride to Chicago with a busload of protestors on their way to the Democratic Convention. Together Jay, Robert and I put together the first issue of Bijou Funnies, while almost simultaneously Gilbert Shelton published Feds ‘n’ Heads out of Austin, Texas. From that point on the demon had broken his chains and was at large in the countryside.

When the Underground Comix movement initially detonated it was asking the didactically loaded question, “Do you really mean Freedom of the Press?” This was a group of artists, working without economic expectation, expressing art without society’s polite restrains, while employing an intrinsically American cultural curiosity, the Comic Book, as its delivery system.

But other than being the most interesting art movement during the last half of the 20th Century, Underground Comix also established the artist’s ownership of his intellectual property – you create it, it’s yours. And graphically demonstrated that the artist’s vision has no restraints no matter how many government stooges and academic morons guard the Gates of Culture.

INTERVIEW WITH "ME GUSTA MAS QUE DESAYUNAR UN HERPE"(I LIKE TO HAVE HERPES FOR BREAKFAST),

- First of all, How was yours behinds or how do you introduce in the comix
world? And which were the firsts references in your drawings?

When I was a kid, 8 or 9 years-old, my favorite comics were the Carl Barks Uncle Scrooge stories in "Walt Disney's Comics and Stories. And the EC horror comics like "Tales from the Crypt", "The Vault of Horror" and "Two-Fisted Tales". Anything that featured large-breasted women and ax murder got my attention. It was from the EC line of comics that "Mad" was created by Harvey Kurtzman. It was a comic book, not like the Mad magazine most people know. Mad, the comic book, was colorful, wildly sarcastic anarchistic hilarious cartoon art. It became my obsession.

Many years later in 1961 I published my first cartoon in Harvey Kurtzman's "Help!" magazine. Kurtzman also published Robert Crumb, Jay Lynch and Gilbert Shelton in "Help!" magazine. Kurtzman's assistant editor was Terry Gilliam, who met John Cleese at a magazine photo-shoot. When "Help!" folded in 1965, Gilliam and Cleese moved to England and founded Monty Python's Flying Circus.

- How did "your live" change when Jay Lynch invited to you to Chicago in the summer of 67? How did you meet to Jay Lynch? How was your experience in the "Chicago Seed" and in the "Chicago Mirror", and with the "Bijou Publishing Empire"? How did the idea merge?

I'd corresponded with Jay Lynch since we were 15 or 16 years-old. Also with Art Spiegelman since he was 14. We published humor/satire fanzines. So we met each other through that network. I was going to college in Canton, Missouri, a Mississippi River village and Jay was going to the Art Institute of Chicago. He'd visit me, and I'd visit with him in Chicago. It was time to get out of the small town and into the city. This was 1967 and the world was on fire and high as a kite.

It wasn't so much that my life changed as it was that the World changed. The post-war bland, conformist 1950s World I grew up in was way different than the multi-colored, drug-addled, twirl-dancing naked in the streets 1960s World I came of age in.

I moved to Chicago to publish magazines with Jay Lynch. So from 1967 through '68 we published three issues of the "Chicago Mirror", a magazine of psychedelic satiric observation. Robert Crumb had just published the first issue of "Zap" and got a free ride to Chicago on a bus of protesters coming to the Democratic Convention in August of 1968. So we decided to change the "Chicago Mirror" to "Bijou Funnies". And with the Democratic Convention raging around us Crumb, Lynch and I put together "Bijou"#1.

I'd also contributed comix to the "Chicago Seed", the local underground newspaper. So I got to know the Seed people, mainly transplant hippie radicals from NYC. It was through them that I got to know Abbie Hoffman and did illustrations for "Steal this Book".

- In these times, did you was linked with the social and political situation?
Have you been in "The Democratic Convention" in Chicago in 68? And how was? Have you seen the "Revolution" or riots on the streets? And MC5 music group, did you see the "Festival"? Do you think that the art of the comix and the rock and roll was a way to express the feeling of a generation?

I don't know if there's a connection between rock and roll and comix as much as it is that people who like comix tend to enjoy rock and roll. But rock and roll has a connection my life because, in 1970, Blue Cheer, the first band to use Marshall amps, blew out 75% of the hearing in my left ear.

I was a happy participant in the rioting at the Democratic Convention in 1968. Up early and out the door for a day of pitched battles with the police. Stumbling home in the evening, beat down and stinking of C-S gas, to draw comix with Jay Lynch and R. Crumb. So it went for a week. I had many exciting adventures battling the police.

I'd hang out with the White Panther Party people in Detroit and Ann Arbor. I knew the MC5 and John Sinclair. John is still a close friend of mine I'm happy to say. Rob Tyner, the lead singer of the MC5, was a cartoonist and contributed to the "Chicago Mirror". The White Panther Party guys were crazy and a lot of fun. The White Panther Party slogan was "Dope, Rock 'n' Roll and fucking in the streets." These guys were blasted on acid (The good shit...not like the speed and strychnine that's passed off as acid these days.), horny, armed, and eager for urban warfare.

I think, in general, the music and art of any generation defines it. Our music just happens to be rock 'n' roll and our art is comix.

- Do you think usually the comix and rock and roll are closer? And, do you
listen music when you draw? What groups are your favourites? Sometimes there are comic artists that are very influenced with the musical scene...

I've found that a lot of musicians love comix. Some are even cartoonists. Graham Nash collects comic art. My friend Augie Meyers (keyboard player for the late 60's band the Sir Douglas Quintette. Later played with the Texas Tornadoes. And most recently played keyboards on Bob Dylan's last two albums) is a frustrated cartoonist. Joey Ramone was a Snappy Sammy Smoot fan. And Lowell George was talking to me about animating Little Feat music. But he overdosed on heroin and that was the end of that.

Recently I've been listening to Miles Davis as I draw or paint. And the Ramones. But with the Ramones I have to dance around and bang the furniture a lot. So I get more work done with Miles Davis.

My personal musical taste is all over the place. Here's a quick list. MC5, The Clash, Jimi, Anthony Benedetto, Blue Cheer, the early Stones, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Black Flag, Howlin' Wolf, DoubleDrive, Dylan, Sam Cray, John Prine, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Tom Waits, the Ramones, Igor Stravinski, Frank Zappa, the Fugs, R. Crumb and the Cheap Suits, Spike Jones, Shel Silverstein, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Robert Johnson, Screamin' Jay Hawkins, Koko Taylor, Louis Prima, Gustav Mahler, Janis, Duke Ellington, Wagner, ol' Ludwig Van, Cole Porter, the Sex Pistols, Patti Smith, Wayne Kramer, Marvin Gaye, the Rev Al Green, Johnny Winter, John Lennon, Wilson Picket, ZZ Top, Count Basie, Ella, Aesop Rock, Public Enemy...and a million others.

- How did you live the yippy movement? Do you feel that the "revolution" or ideals are failure?

I've always been more of an observer than a participant. Of all the radical movements -- and there were many -- of the late 60s the Yippies appealed to me the most. They weren't somber like the Trotskites or the Maoists. And they weren't schoolyard revolutionaries like the SDS. The Yippies had an anarchistic sense of humor toward life and politics. They believed in Revolution for the hell of it. Principles and fun were equal on their agenda. Their name was an expression of glee. Yippie!

Humans are willfully paranoid, bloodthirsty over-achieving sheep. Governments are highly-organized murdering, lying thieves. There's a reason we're at the top of the Food Chain. Redemption is impossible because of the nature of the Beast. This particular Revolution failed because of an embarrassment arms. And a lack of balls. The other side had all the guns. When the heat was up and -- as government policy -- people began dying in the streets and on campus the Boomer generation capitulated honor by embracing the American consumer culture. The Revolution was cancelled because nobody showed up. Everybody was at the mall.

- How was your experience with LSD? Did you influence in your creation? How was your relationship with psicodelic movement? And what kind of "images" do it inspired to you in your drawings?

I enjoy the psychoactive drugs -- LSD, STP, DMT, MDA, Peyote, Mushrooms and Salvia Divinorum and I smoke weed every day -- but they haven't affected the style of my art very much. But if you look at the art of Rick Griffin or Moscoso there's a lot of the surreal imagery one experiences while skinnydipping free-style in the Intergallactic World Brainpool. But as for me, not so much. However, revelations and truths revealed while under the influence find their way into my writing.

- Why was produced the change of Chicago Mirror to Bijous Funnies? Was only a change of the name or was a change of ideas, too? And did you think that will be so important and one of earliest and longest-runnig underground comix title?

Jay Lynch and I changed the Chicago Mirror to Bijou Funnies because we decided to concentrate our energies in the direction of the comic strip. We had no idea comix would be as popular and influential as they would become. But we became famous fairly early on. I think we were all pretty much aware that this was something more than just hippies cranking out comic books. It was an Art Movement. And not only that, it was the most interesting of the American art movements of the last half of the Twentieth Century. More depth than Abstract Expressionism, more varied than Pop Art, more accessible than Conceptual Art.

- And, was in this period that you started with Snappy Sammy Smoot? We are Snappy fans, you can speak some thing about him?

Snappy Sam is me. All of my characters are autobiographical. Ragtime Billy is my angry Fascist side, Necropolis Keester is my substance abuse side, Neon Vincent is my sleazy side. But Smoot is closer to my heart. He's an optimistic backwater bumpkin who moves to the Big City and is amazed by the tall buildings. Constantly assailed by Modern Life, Smoot remains the blithe idealist. He's a dreamer living in a nightmare world. There's a lot of information about Smoot on my website. Skipwilliamson.com

- And, as well, in this period, you meet Crumb and Art Spligman. How were your experiences with them? And do have now good relationships with them? What do you feel to be a "Garbage Pail Kids"?

Jay Lynch, Art Spiegelman and I knew each other since we were kids. We knew of the Brothers Crumb -- Charles and Robert. We all published fanzines. I published "Squire", Artie published "Blase" and the Crumb bothers published "Foo". Jay, Art and I published humor/satire fanzines. Charles and Robert Crumb's fanzine was all about Funny Animal comics. So we were all connected as teenagers.

I think that any artist of any worth has an out-of-control ego. Certainly Robert Crumb does, as does Artie. As do I. We all get along as friends and we battle common enemies. I'm closer to some and not as close to others. Jay Lynch is my oldest and deepest connection. We're often confused with one another and we've been partners in this insanity forever. We'll always be historically linked and we're very close. I'm also connected art to heart with Zap artist S. Clay Wilson. I'm not as tight with Robert and Artie, but that's just a matter of chemistry.

Artie was working for Topps, a gum and collectable card company. He came up with the idea of Garbage Pail Kids. Art, Jay and I have a deep connection with Topps. I was writing "Wacky Packs" when I was in college. So, Jay was writing Garbage Pail characters and based one on me. Hippy Skippy. I'm honored. Now I am truly immortal.

- In 69 you created "Conspiracy Capers", how was this experience?

Abbie Hoffman gave me the advance check he got for "Steal This Book" to pay for the production of "Conspiracy Capers", a comic book I edited to help raise money for the defense of the Chicago Seven.

I was there for the trial. It was one of the first media blitz trials, there are so many of them these days. So it was impossible to get admitted to the courtroom unless you were related to a defendant. Abbie pointed to me and said to the bailiff "Dis is my sistah." And I was allowed entry and I sketched in the courtroom. Did portraits of the Judge, the bailiff and all the defendants and their attorneys.

The comic book, Conspiracy Capers, was my domain. I solicited artists, put the book together and got it off to a printer. But not without difficulty. The government, as you would image, had its eyes on us. We were under surveillance, our phones were tapped, our mail was opened. It was thrilling to be outlaws in the eyes of the Powerful. One of the artists turned out to be a Naval intelligence officer and the original printer we sent the book to was visited by guys in dark suits and sunglasses who told the printer that he was free to publish Conspiracy Capers but they'd make sure he was put out of business. So...we had to find a printer who wasn't such a chickenshit. And the book was published. It's silly really, all that government attention over a comic book.

- And was in this period that you went to California. Why did you decided to
change the place? Was very different the comic's world there than in Chicago? Have you been influenced of new art production?

I never moved to California. A lot of people think I did. I was always Chicago-based. I lived in Chicago from 1967 to 1994,

- What do think about Nixon period? Did it influence in your own work?

Well...it was a great time to draw seditious comix. And Nixon -- like Elvis and Jesus (for other artists) -- has become an icon in my art. He pops up all the time in my paintings. But I think all of us who created underground comix were influenced by the Nixon Years even if some of us didn't speak directly to it. Artists are defined by their times, especially in their youth when they are aflame with passion and indignation. My problem is I never grew up. I'm still, I'm happy to say, passionately indignant. And the mob of politically retarded miscreants who steal our money and kill our children still rule the roost. The names have changed. Instead of Nixon/Agnew we have Bush/Cheney. Same shit, new day.

- In 70', how did you meet to Hugh Hefner? Explain us the day that you visit to Playboy "Palace" with Crumb and Lynch. And how did you start to work with Playboy magazine (the "Playboy Funnies")? Explain us about your new characters how Neon Vincent, Neil 'n' Void...

When I moved to Chicago in 1967, I enjoyed the life of a young firebrand but I also realized I needed to make a living. So all the time I was creating underground comix I was also gainfully employed. I worked in small advertising agencies. Eventually (I think in '69) I was hired as a junior designer for Playboy Press, a division of Playboy Enterprises that primarily repackaged cartoons from the magazine into paperback books.

During those days Playboy's headquarters were in Chicago. The magazine was published from there. Hefner lived there. The Playboy Mansion was in Chicago.

So was working as a junior designer for a book-publishing wing of Playboy Enterprises as I was becoming famous for my comix. I got to know the art directors and staff at the magazine and an article was in the works at Playboy about the underground comix. I was asked to illustrate the article and that was the first time I published in Playboy magazine.

Hefner wanted Robert Crumb as a cartoonist for Playboy. And Robert was having a grand time telling Playboy he wasn't interested. As part of the ploy to enlist Crumb, Hefner invited Harvey Kurtzman, Crumb, Jay and me to an evening at the mansion.

We arrived via limo at the Playboy Mansion in the early afternoon. Our host wouldn't be awake and moving around for a few hours, so we were invited to enjoy whatever food and drink we desired. I began an assault on Hef's liquor supply. After awhile I stripped down to my love beads and dove naked into the Playboy Mansion swimming pool, but word had gone out to Mansion security that I intended to take a shit into Hef's pool. So I was locked out of the grotto pool. Rage at being locked out of the pool fueled by alcohol impelled me to storm out of the Mansion before Hefner was on the scene. Angrily I kicked a suit of armor in the shins as I left.

Crumb, Lynch and I did a strip about our trip to the Playboy Mansion titled "Hef's Pad".

I didn't go to work on staff at Playboy until 1975. From '75 to '85 -- the disgraceful Disco Years -- I was an art director for the magazine. I was also a contributing illustrator and cartoonist for the magazine. I came aboard as an Assistant Art Director and left as Special Projects Art Director. I designed pages every month, read manuscripts and concepted illustrations, hired illustrators, photographers and models, laid out the pages and followed the process through production. After a time my specialties became special stock features (dye-cuts, embossing, the bells and whistles), humor features and Playboy Funnies.

I was enlisted, because of my cartoon celebrity, to solicit artists for Playboy Funnies. And I produced some strips for the section and developed a couple of new characters for the Funnies. There was "Neon Vincent's Massage Parlor". Vinny is a sleazy insect-like chain-smoking Sicilian who's the proprietor of a whorehouse. And then there was "Nell 'n' Void" a post-modern couple attempting to balance exemplar hipness with routine domestication.

I didn't, as people assume, edit the section. That was up to Hef. But when I left the magazine in 1985 they retired the Playboy Funnies section.

- In 80's and 90's you've been editing your own work (Gag Reflex, Naked
Hostility, Pighead, Class War Comix, Drawl...), two anthologies (Halsted Street, The Scum Also Rises), and in 2000? What can you explain about "My Bitter Agenda"?

I'm working on a collection of comic strips, drawings and paintings of women titled "XX". You know...for the two chromosomes. I like women and prefer their company. They're not always leaving the toilet seat up. I've been surrounded by females my entire adult life. Three wives, four daughters, many friendships. I think I have a strong female side. It's called Multiple Personality Disorder.

I'm also working on a 300-page-plus collection of unanthologized art and autobiography titled "My Bitter Agenda". It has everything. Sex, violence, lies, revolution and funny cartoons.

- And finally, can you explain us about your recently work (your pictures, your exhibitions...)? And do you have any plans to a recent future (about your own work)?

I've been painting for the last ten years. Large cartoon canvasses depicting social and political abominations. And 3D art that's constructed from toys glued into depraved configurations , gold paint, red glitter, hanging chains and beads. I've had many exhibitions at many galleries and I've discovered that the Arts are as pallid and uninteresting as those who govern them.

My life is an ongoing art project.