In my never-waning efforts to keep you all sane and productive, I find periods in which the Antichrist attempts of the World-At-Large to drive you bananas press me to even greater efforts. This is one of those periods. You poor, sad things…they’re really trying to do you in, aren’t they? As if it weren’t enough that you’re barely healing from a 23-year involvement with the Vietnam War (it went on so long, most of you blissfully forgot that we entered the fray on 27 June 1950, when Harry sent in “a 35-man Military Assistance Advisory Group to advise the troops there in the use of American weapons”), they’re hitting you with skyrocketing prices on everything, the unnerving Watergate mess that’s guaranteed to make you so paranoid you think your Mother is on the take, a total absence of meat from the markets, the demise of Life magazine, a return of awful Fifties music, Dr. Atkins’s crazy new diet that pillories you for being comfortably overweight, a gas and energy crisis, higher personal and property taxes, a reeling sense that you’re spinning back in time with the reappearance on tv of the NEW Perry Mason and the NEW Dr. Kildare, rotten mail delivery but a greater flood of junk mail, another Jacqueline Susann novel, Egg McMuffin, ersatz Vernor’s ginger ale, the death of Bruce Lee, a tv Special starring Kate Smith doing rock music…
Now take it easy. Come on, now, stop whimpering like that. Uncle Harlan is here to soothe you. You remember, I told you I’d protect you, I wouldn’t let all dem nastie old mans hurt oo. All it takes is realizing there are still areas in which we are all human, all subject to the same vagaries of Fate.
Look: I’ll make it all better right now…
Think of this:
When you’re done making ka-ka, you know how you check the paper to make sure everything is spiffy back there? Well, just consider this: Richard M. Nixon checks the paper, too!
There! Now doesn’t that make it all a little easier to bear?
What’s that you say? Nixon is too anal retentive even to make a ka-ka? Come on, now, you don’t believe that, do you?
You do.
Well, then how about this:
Ehrlichman is up living in Seattle, right? Okay, so one night he’s out driving up toward Vancouver on some dumb errand or other, trying to find a roadside stand that sells fresh vegetables for a decent price, and it gets very late, and he’s miles from anywhere, and he blows his right front tire and manages to get the car stopped without hitting a tree, and he opens the trunk and finds the spare is soft, and he starts to cry. But he pulls himself together just as it begins to drizzle one of those hideous Washington state rains that soak through to your interbron-chial lymph nodes and, pulling his collar up and hunching his bullethead down into his sopping shirt, he starts trudging down the road, looking for a telephone. Well, this is a section of countryside that has been purchased on the sly by a dummy corporation owned, on the q.t., by Bebe Rebozo, because he’s gotten a tip from the Secretary of the Interior, Rogers Morton, that this whole stretch will soon be picked up by the Federal Government as the future site of a combination SST landing field and Chicano Internment Camp, and all the farmers have been badgered off their land, and all the farmhouses have been bulldozed into the ground like something out of THE GRAPES OF WRATH, and there isn’t a lit window for six miles. By the time he finds a commune where there’s a dry spot to sit down, he’s already well on the way to pneumonia, dropping into pleurisy. And the dropouts don’t have a phone. But one of them kindly offers to take his bicycle and ride up the road to the next town, which is three miles off, and call the Automobile Club. So Ehrlichman sits down and waits, and while he’s waiting they offer him some navy bean soup which is laced with peyote, but he doesn’t know it, and he gets stoned out of his mind so that when the AAA truck finally arrives and picks him up, he’s bagged and doesn’t remember where the car is. But the AAA guy—who is pissed at having to come out in the rain, anyhow—figures he may make a buck or two selling this nerd a new spare tire, so he puts him in the truck and drives back up the road to the car, where a Washington State Highway Patrol car is stopped beside Ehrlichman’s vehicle. The Trooper is busy writing out a citation because Ehrlichman half-blocked the road when he skidded to a stop after the tire blew. And Ehrlichman is so miffed, he stumbles out of the AAA truck, slips on the muddy road, falls on his ass and ruins a $300 Savile Row suit, but gets up and tries to pillory the Trooper, who, sensing Ehrlichman is stoned, throws him in the back of the meat wagon to take him in for questioning. Ehrlichman, desperate, tosses his wallet through the window to the AAA guy, screaming, “Call that number on the ID card and tell Dick I’m in trouble!” The Highway Patrol car takes off, even as the wallet hits a mud puddle and sinks half out of sight. The AAA repairman lifts it out with two fingers, flips it open, sees Ehrlichman has no Auto Club card, and drops it back into the puddle…and drives away. Ehrlichman is tossed into a cell and, the next day, at his arraignment on dope charges, makes such a screaming ass of himself that the judge, a canny rustic type wholly out of touch with the world and its vices, remands him to the custody of the local insane asylum.
Which is where he is to this day.
Now. Doesn’t that make you feel better?
Come on, there are still a few things around that make it all worthwhile, that can keep you from opening your wrists. Just to prove it to you, I’ll give you a few of the ones I’ve fallen back on recently to keep my spirits up:
Maxim freeze-dried coffee. It’s a damned sight better tasting than 99% of the perc stuff I get when I go to friends’ homes for dinner. Johnny Hart’s B.C. and The Wizard of Id. Bette Midler. The new (and, sadly, last) Bruce Lee martial arts film, Enter the Dragon, which is, I grant you, mindless violence, but so ballet-like graceful and impressive in its depiction of how the human body can exceed its limitations that if you ignore the silliness of what the plot is, you can derive the same kind of joy one gets at a fine performance by Nureyev. The Swamp Thing comic book by Len Wein and Berni Wrightson. Eli Wallach. Pipes by Erickson. Print Mint T-shirts with Mercs and other neat stuff on them. Stevie Wonder’s new album, Innervisions. M*A*S*H, which breaks me up every Sunday. The retrospective of 20th Century-Fox films now going on at the L.A. County Museum. My gardener Alfred Takeda’s kids, Willie and Aileen, who are sensational. The return to the real world of Brian Kirby, now that The Staff has died and released him from his pathological dedication. Walter Koenig and the rediscovery of Big Little Books. The completion of two new stories, one of them a Jewish science fiction story.
These may all seem to be frivolous, but for God’s sake, we have to take our joys where we find them. It’s an ever-increasingly more complex and crushing world through which we are expected to move, and those who condemn others for “not working or not being productive” need only examine their own existences to see that there is far less pleasure and satisfaction than even ten years ago. So take your little pleasures where you find them, friends. And surround yourselves with joyful people. Downerfolk can kill you quicker than the bite of the asp.
For my part, I’m presently surrounded by nice people, for the most part, led in their upliftiness by my secretary, the incomparable Mariana Hernández.
I’ve had a batch of secretaries over the last six or seven years, beginning with Crazy June Burakoff, whom you all remember from my frequent mentions in The Glass Teat columns. When Junie moved on to a high-paying job at Universal Studios I went through two or three temporary associates who either were too spacey to get the work done necessary to keeping my addlepated existence in order, or who frankly couldn’t stand me, and then Sandy Nisbet came on the job and it was a perfect merger of personalities. But then Sandy and her husband moved up to Tumwater, Washington, when he got a new teaching assignment, and I was back to scrounging. Mona Vakil was here for a while, and though she was as deranged as me, she was conscientious and everything worked well till she had to return to Iran, or wherever it was, with her husband. Then I had a couple of bummers, whom shall go nameless whom, and then…ta ra!…in came the Chicana Queen of the barrio, Mariana the Wise.
When mh came to work for me, I was just getting rid of a secretary who had driven me berserk, and Mariana now confesses that the bestial way I treated that former secretary led her to believe she’d be back looking for a job in a week. But since the 24th of December 1972, when mh hove on the scene, we’ve been doing very nicely, thank you.
Mariana is a remarkable creature, folks. Not only is she slick and quick and intelligent and feisty, and takes no shit from me, but she has a quite separate existence and career in that she is a perennial runner-for-office, having first attempted to get elected to the office of U.S. Senator from Texas (against the now-famous George Bush) in 1970. She lost. Then she ran for Mayor of Austin, Texas, and lost. Then she ran for Congress in L.A.’s 30th District, and lost. Then she ran for the Community College Board of Trustees in 1973, got 44,000 votes…and lost. Part of the problem may be that mh runs on the Socialist Workers Party ticket.
Not only does she run, but she delivers periodic lectures here in my home—not to mention in the world at large—on socialism, populism, feminism, humanism and acupuncture.
She even does a little typing, once in a while.
Most of all, she answers the door and snarls at those intent on stealing my writing time with their impositions. And if you want to keep sane, as I’ve said, you have to keep all that lunatic stuff on the other side of the door.
So, until you get your mh to keep you inviolate, I hope this week’s good news column has cheered you sufficiently so you don’t do yourself in…and can return next week, when we’ll deal with The Ethical Structure of the Universe, or something else equally as lighthearted.