I think it was 1963.
“What is this, we’re huddled together like in a fuckin’ ghetto, afraid to watch a fuckin’ parade,” Abbie Hoffman was saying.
We’d decided to confront the Armed Forces Day Parade coming down Fifth Avenue. There were a lot of us.
But then a police captain approached someone in our group and said, “I’m gonna have to give you a summons for holding a meeting without a permit.”
“We’re merely having a conversation, Officer. And why are you singling me out?”
“You seem to be leading the meeting,” the captain replied.
Although I was there as a reporter covering this action for the Realist, at that moment I crossed the line that separated observer from participant: “Excuse me, Officer, we’re both leading the meeting. You’d better give me a summons too.”
Right away, Abbie looked around and spoke up: “Who else is leading this meeting?”
Hands went up.
“I am.”
More hands.
“I am.”
“I am.”
It turned out that about fifty people were leading the meeting.
“Okay, I’m not gonna give you a summons, but the next time you hold a meeting—”
“You mean,” I interjected, “the next time we don’t hold a meeting—”
“—you better have a permit.”
“I’m sorry, Officer, we can’t continue this meeting any longer without a permit.”
The Armed Forces Day Parade began making its way down Fifth Avenue. The marines marched by and we chanted, “Get a girl, not a gun.”
The navy marched by and we sang “Yellow Submarine.”
Green Berets marched by and we shouted, “Thou shalt not kill!”
The Red Cross marched by and we applauded.
A missile rolled by and we called out, “Shame!”
Military cadets rode by on horseback and we advised, “Drop out now!”
The Department of Sanitation swept past and we cheered.
Then this horde of pacifists and hippies left the area and entered Central Park, followed by what seemed like a whole division of police. We romped past the statue of Alice and her friends playing around a giant mushroom; some lingered to present flowers to the Mad Hatter. The cops ordered them off the statue, surrounding Alice as if they were guarding a fortress.
When it was all over, I left with Abbie. Our paths had crossed at various meetings and events, but we’d never really hung around together. Now, over soup, he was telling me about the time he had taken one of my “Fuck Communism” posters to a symposium on communism, and how influenced he was by the Realist, the satirical magazine I had founded.
I asked, “Do you think it’s an ego trip for me to be concerned about whether the readers of the Realist think I’m on an ego trip?”
He laughed and said, “You only ask a question like that because you’re Jewish.”
“But I don’t think of myself as Jewish. I’m an atheist. I mean, Christ was Jewish.”
“When I was at Brandeis,” Abbie said thoughtfully, “I asked this professor, ‘How come in one part of the Bible Jesus says to God, “Why hast thou forsaken me?” But in another part of the Bible, Jesus says to God, “Forgive them, for they know not what they do”?’ And the professor says, ‘You gotta remember, the Bible was written by a lot of different guys.’”
Abbie tempered his fearlessness with a gift for humor that was sharp and spontaneous.
On a particularly tense night on the Lower East Side, we were standing on a street corner when a patrol car with four police in it cruised by. Abbie called out, “Hey, fellas, you goin’ out on a double date?” These were some of the same cops from the Ninth Precinct that he liked to beat at pool at what I call the “laughing pool table” because of how Abbie made the cops laugh.
Run Run Run: The Lives of Abbie Hoffman does a meticulous job of capturing the marvel that was Abbie Hoffman as I knew him. It’s an indispensable book about an indispensable hero of the sixties’ near-revolution in America that Abbie helped lead with such incredible imagination. Dan caught the tale end of the movement as a red-diaper baby growing up in Boston: his mom taught with Howard Zinn at BU, and his dad once joined a mission to deliver medical equipment to Bach Mai Hospital after it was bombed during the Vietnam War. With Abbie as one of his heroes, Dan worked with the Attica Brothers Legal Defense while in high school. Later, he edited and published The Best of Abbie Hoffman, Abbie’s last book. Jack of course was Abbie’s little brother and sidekick through the years, more a businessman than an activist, but he loved his older brother and lived in his shadow.
Back on that first day of our long friendship, I told Abbie, “You’re the first one who’s really made me laugh since Lenny Bruce died.” Lenny Bruce had been in many ways my closest friend, and I had written his autobiography with him.
“Really?” Abbie replied, genuinely impressed. “Lenny Bruce was my god.”
—desert hot springs, ca, july 2019
paul krassner (1932–2019) was co-founder with Abbie of the Yippies and one of Abbie’s longest standing friends and collaborators. The founder and longtime editor of the Realist and the author of many books, including The Winner of the Slow Bicycle Race, One Hand Jerking, and Impolite Interviews, he lived with his partner, Nancy Cain, in the desert in Southern California. Paul Krassner died on Sunday, July 21, 2019, in Desert Hot Springs, California.