One Hand Jerking Read Free

like to dedicate this to Thomas Jefferson’s slaves,” I said.
    And then I played the only thing I felt competent enough to perform—“Twinkle,
Twinkle, Little Star.” While I was playing, I stood unobtrusively balancing on my left foot, and scratched my left leg with my right foot.
    It was a private joke between me and the god of Absurdity.

IRREVERENCE IS OUR ONLY SACRED COW
    Late one extremely hot night in the spring of 1958, alone and naked, I was sitting at my desk in Lyle Stuart’s office, preparing final copy for the first issue of The Realist . I had served my journalistic apprenticeship at Stuart’s anti-censorship paper, The Independent , where I had become managing editor, and now I was launching my own satirical magazine. The ’60s counterculture was in its embryonic stage, almost ready to burst out of the blandness, repression and piety of the Eisenhower-Nixon administration, Reverend Norman Vincent Peale’s positive thinking and Snooky Lanson singing “It’s a Marshmallow World” on TV’s Lucky Strike Hit Parade .
    I was supposed to have everything ready for the printer next morning. I felt exhausted, but there were two final pieces to write. My bare buttocks stuck to the leather chair as I created an imaginary dialogue about clean and dirty bombs. Then I borrowed a form from Mad and composed “A Child’s Primer on Telethons.” Our office was on the same floor as Mad in what became known as the Mad building, at 225 Lafayette Street.
    Mad ’s art director, John Francis Putnam, designed The Realist logo and also became my first columnist. Although Mad staffers weren’t allowed to have any outside projects, Putnam was willing to risk his job to write for The Realist . Gaines appreciated that and made an exception for him. Putnam’s column was titled “Modest Proposals.”
    My second columnist was Robert Anton Wilson. I had already published his first article, “The Semantics of God,” in which he wrote, “The Believer had better face himself and ask squarely: Do I literally believe ‘God’ has a penis? If the answer is no, then it seems only logical to drop the ridiculous practice of referring to ‘God’ as ‘He.’” Wilson’s column was titled “Negative Thinking.”
    This was before National Lampoon or Spy magazine, before Doonesbury or
Saturday Night Live . I had no role models, and no competition, just an open field mined with taboos waiting to be exploded.
    In New York, the son of the owner of a newsstand in front of Carnegie Hall became my distributor. In Chicago, The Realist was distributed by the manager of an ice-cream company. Steve Allen became the first subscriber, he gave several gift subscriptions, including one for Lenny Bruce, who in turn gave gift subs to several others, as well as becoming an occasional contributor.

    I never knew where I would find new contributors.
    One time I woke up at 3 o’clock in the morning. My radio was still on, and a man was talking about how you would try to expain the function of an amusement park to visitors from Venus. It was Jean Shepherd. He was on WOR from midnight to 5:30 every night, mixing childhood reminiscence with contemporary critiques, peppered with such characters as the man who could taste an ice cube and tell you the brand name of the refrigerator it came from and the year of manufacture. Shepherd would orchestrate his colorful tales with music ranging from “The Stars and Stripes Forever” to Bessie Smith singing “Empty Bed Blues.” He edited several of his stream-of-conscoiusness ramblings into article for The Realist under the title “Radio Free America.”
    At first the entire office staff consisted of me. I took no salary, but I had to figure out how to continue publishing without accepting ads, so naturally I got involved with a couple of guys who had a system for betting on the horses.