Andy Kaufman Revealed! Read Free

seemed to be leading the chorus of oms. Even though the crowd was not hung up on affectations like names, the bearded guy introduced himself as Allen. Allen Ginsberg. As I shook his hand someone mentioned that Allen was a writer.
Cool,
I thought.
I’m stoned and hanging out with writers and girls without tops.
    After a few peaceful hours of grooving to the vibes and the music and the sweet smell of dope drifting on the night air, Abbie Hoffman climbed onto a wall and announced to the multitude that we had been commanded by the Chicago police to clear the park because it was closing. Now, I had relatives on the force and also knew that Chicago parks never closed, so I smelled a rat. Then a cop blared through a bullhorn that we had to disperse immediately or be arrested. As soon as his announcement ended you could hear the whooshing sound of about three thousand simultaneous tokes. And nobody moved. We were thinking there was no way they could arrest us all. We figured it was a hollow threat if we sat still, with safety in numbers being our salvation. We were wrong.
    The “Honorable” Richard Daley, dictator of Chi-town, was jumpy because of the proximity of our love-in to the Democrats’ big convention, so he decided we were not so much Illinois’s sons and daughters as crazed radicals bent on the destruction of all that he and his held holy. He took action. A midwestern Napoleon, he let slip his dogs of war, then set upon us his police, bristling with clubs and tear gas. In moments, our love-in became a scene from
Doctor Zhivago.
Surrounded by hundreds of panicked revelers, I fled, my new girlfriend in tow, smoke and gas and pandemonium reigning as we avoided the swinging billies and advancing walls of grimly determined storm troopers. Thinking we were safe, we rounded a street corner only to run smack into a phalanx of horse cops. My girlfriend slammed into the flank of an equine. She took a nightstick to the face, which knocked her senseless, and then was hauled off by several cops. I managed to push away to escape down an alley, running for my life.
    Just that balmy summer weekend forced me, along with thousands of other good, law-abiding, conservative kids, to deal with the shattered myth that the government was looking out for our best interests. Suddenly the words of Abbie and Jerry and Huey and Stokely were starting to ring true. Was the government the enemy? I’d seen it firsthand.
    My thinking changed. I started hanging out in the old town area, a bastion of radical thought, and eventually, for all practical purposes, moved in. My new friends weren’t greasers but rather members of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). I gave up drive-ins for coffeehouses, and though I still smoked dope I began to trade ideas,
philosophies,
with my new comrades. Though we were all middle-class kids we had just discovered that “that man behind the curtain” was not benevolent but instead was pretty scary. I joined a radical guerilla theater group. I traded my sharkskins for bell-bottoms and grew my hair long. I started saying “far-out” and “outtasight.” I swore off Vitalis for good.
    Every weekend, I would sneak into Second City, the famed satirical improv troupe, to catch their latest biting political shots. As time passed, the scales fell from my eyes and I began to realize that this was my country and it had to be saved from the conservative, corrupt fat cats who had sent us into a war merely to profit the “military industrial complex.” It was those men who had subverted the “system” to satisfy their own cravings for power, and, worse, it was those people who had given orders to someone who had whacked my girlfriend-for-the-day across the kisser.
    I was pissed. Mayor Daley had created not a “programmed” good kid in a short-sleeved white shirt with a pocket protector and a slide rule, ready to become a “productive” citizen, but rather a warrior, a radical commando, prepared to topple a system that