Gonzo Instructs

Jane Fonda walked to where I stood in the aisle of the Liberal Caucus room and put her hand on my arm. For a moment, I thought it was a kind gesture.

"Miss Fonda," I said, reaching for the notebook in my jeans pocket, "Do you have a second?"

"No," she snapped and used my elbow as a fulcrum for shoving past me.

At that moment it was clear that I was a nobody. We had driven five days across country, Proton and I, doing our best to stay loaded all the way. We were intent on mirroring our Gonzo journalist idol Hunter S. Thompson. No matter that we had gone to see Thompson at Stanford and the guy was too drunk to speak. He wobbled at the microphone, uttered a barrage of profanity in a garbled rant, and left early. Nonetheless, Proton (a fellow newshound from the East Bay daily where I worked) and I packed our clothes, an assortment of illegal drugs, and a road atlas into his Volkswagen van, and drove to New York City where we had press passes to cover the 1976 Democratic Convention.

Now, spun out in the aisle of the Liberal Caucus room, I watched the aft end of Ted Turner's future bride disappear into the crowd and fell, crestfallen, into my seat. I wasn't much of a newshound anyway and the week of mindless driving had left me a dumb spectator. Proton had raced off after Candace Bergen, a strikingly beautiful actress who, cameras draped around her neck, was working the convention as a photojournalist.

I sat in my seat, listened to Rep. John Conyers review platform planks that in no way would ever be supported by Jimmy Carter. After the Nixon horror-show and brain numbing Ford years, you'd think the country was ready to try liberalism again, but the way the caucus was headed, it was clear that Reaganism was a suggestion away from reality. The liberals would have to accept a plate of leftovers here in New York, a reality that rinsed away whatever ambitions I had left to write anything of my experience.

I found Proton and we left to tour the streets of Manhattan. We went along the central post office, past buildings with lion statues and colonnades draped with patriotic bunting. We passed the throngs of protesters and lobbyists--signs proclaiming everything from legalizing prostitution to tirades against abortion--and made our way to Times Square. I had thought the convention floor a zoo, but walking the New York streets was more entertaining.

We came upon a movie theatre showing a crime drama. In those days there were no video trailers, so it was enticing to see a scene from the film played out on an outdoor screen. In the clip, a man had his victim pinned against a wall and was running the bit from a power drill in and out of his thigh. A closeup showed the bit corkscrewing into the man's bleeding leg.

"No big deal," said a passerby in a thick Brooklyn accent. "You see that stuff all the time."

Later in the afternoon we returned to the convention floor, sated with pizza and pretzels dipped in mustard that we rounded up from sidewalk peddlers. Reporters crowded around Senator Kennedy, who held forth, ruddy as a beet, at a corner of the hall. At the platform a speaker from Florida rambled along in tinny monotone about objections to the welfare plank.

That night in our motel room, Proton and I divvied up the four-way hit of paper acid that we had ferried out from the Bay Area. In the morning, Carter would announce his running mate, which everyone expected would be Walter Mondale, so there was nothing to miss. We would have breakfast, then gobble the acid and walk the convention floor for a while. I had already bought a ticket on the afternoon Metroliner to Washington, so I wasn't staying anyhow. I planned to take the high-speed train to D.C., where I'd stay with a member of Rep. Don Edwards' staff. Edwards was a powerful liberal--had led the Judiciary Committee's call for Nixon's impeachment. Edwards had an office in part of the Bay Area that I covered, and I had come to know his staff. In fact, I had come to really know two of his secretaries, which fully demonstrated my commitment to narcissism.

After breakfast, Proton and I loaded up the ponies of transcendence and went our separate ways. I would be flying home to the Bay Area while he would drive the VW to his family in Kentucky. I must admit, I never really liked LSD. The first hour of giddiness very much appealed to me, but the subsequent hours of melting at the whim of a drug I couldn't control scared me to death. I typically spent most of the time wishing it was over. But we had agreed to do Gonzo journalism and I wouldn't wimp out.

And during the hour of giddiness I found myself in front of the bank of microphones when Carter dragged Mondale on-stage. Mondale's face waxed and waned in acidic throbs. Mondale had a lion's head, huge and shaggy. My body rang like a struck temple bell. The blare of spotlights and the sudden bursts from motorized cameras made me dizzy. I had to go.

After a few hours wandering with dubious judgment through Times Square, I found my way to Grand Central and found my seat on the Metroliner. I had done well to book a plush chair by a picture window. Waiters came up and down the aisles with cocktails and snacks. And I raced along between New York and Washington at a furious clip, the countryside streaming out the window like a painting in rain. In fact, it had begun to rain. And when we pulled into D.C. there was a furious summer thunderstorm, lightening forking down atop the Capitol Building and all across the Mall.

I found the phone number to Edwards' staffer at the Rayburn Building and called from the station. Sadly, the staffer wasn't there. The Congressman himself answered the phone. I was dumbstruck. He was delighted to speak with me. He wanted to know the latest scoop from the Convention. I could feel another door of great opportunity closing on me, slammed shut by my own idiocy.

I told him I would come see him in the morning, that I couldn't talk now as I was under the weather, which was amazingly true on many counts. The storm crashed down around me and after I hung up, I took a cab to the staffer's home in the Virginia suburbs.

What had seemed so glamorous in Thompson looked shabby on me. Of course I would not go see the Congressman in the morning. I had nothing to report, save to say that in the name of God I would never try acid again. Even so, I still had plenty to experience in a long career of self-sabotage. It was July 1976, the nation's birthday.

From the Balcony

Elizabeth Anne Bloomer was born in Chicago in 1918, the daughter of a traveling salesman for a rubber company. An Episcopalian tomboy, Ms. Bloomer took a job teaching the fox trot to young girls when she was only 11 years old following the stock market crash. Four years later, her father died of carbon monoxide poisoning--an apocryphal occurrence that may have been a suicide. Later she studied dance with Martha Graham, actually appeared at Carnegie Hall, and following a disastrous first marriage and divorce in 1947, she met a veteran pilot and former Michigan football star named Gerald Ford and married the future President in October the following year.

Megan Ruth Marshack was born in Sherman Oaks, California in 1953. She had wanted to be on the boys football team, and kept her aggressive edge long after she completed her two year degree at Valley College and her journalism degree at California State University, Northridge. Tenacious, she took at job with Associated Press radio and worked her way into White House coverage, where she undoubtedly met First Lady Betty. Not long after presenting Vice President Nelson Rockefeller with a individually-wrapped supply of Oreo cookies, Megan came back to her apartment in Chevy Chase with his gift of the elegant sculpture of a Chinese jade horse.

I know, because I was staying there that week. I had been in college with Megan and admired her quick success. She was exceptionally talented, a voluptuous stunner with striking long hair and yummy lips...and the temperament of a bulldog on your cuff. She was brilliant, knew art of the Ancient Near East, and conversed with White House reporters on their own turf, on their own topics, mano a mano. She was great friends with Helen Thomas. And that summer, the summer of the Bicentennial, she had finagled a White House press pass so I could stand the following morning with the media on the White House lawn during the visit by Queen Elizabeth.

The next day, I put on my suit and caught a bus from Chevy Chase to Pennsylvania Avenue, NW. It was a stunning, sunny day with a light morning breeze. You stopped at the security kiosk on the side facing the Executive Office Building and presented your credentials, then walked the circular drive toward the press entry and the south lawn.

The entry to the south portico was roped off and the press corps crowded against the apron. Press Secretary Ron Nessen appeared on the balcony briefly, summarizing the schedule for the visit, then out came the Queen, Ford, and Betty into the brilliant sunshine. The Queen wore a blue suit, white gloves, and matching pillbox hat. As the cameras flashed, the Queen issued her stiff royal wave and plastic smile, then posed between the President and First Lady. Betty had a wide grin plastered to her face as she waved, her body uncomfortably stiff as they stood together.

After the photographers had sufficient opportunity, Ford put his hand at the Queen's elbow and steered her back toward the open door to the White House. The pair ducked inside and for a moment we were stunned. The First Lady, who apparently had no idea she had been abandoned at the rail, continued to wave and smile at the press corps. Reporters began to twitter. After a deadly odd moment passed, Ford reappeared, took his wife by the arm and escorted her off the porch.

Later in the White House press room, a reporter from the Detroit Free Press explained to me that Betty had a bad back, had been on a course of pain pills which, perhaps, accounted for her quirky trance. Later, of course, the nation learned the truth about Betty.

She had long been an anomaly among Republican First Ladies, speaking candidly about CB radios, mood rings, divorce, abortion, and drugs. Her breakthrough candor about her struggle with breast cancer and 1974 mastectomy made her a national heroine. But I am more impressed about her open struggle and victory over drugs and alcohol and her founding of the Betty Ford Center in Rancho Mirage, not far from where she and President Ford retired and lived up until his death in 2006. Renowned as a treatment center for Hollywood personalities and other wealthy people, Betty's center has flat out saved families, saved lives, and brought peace to countless others.

Here's sufficient irony if you need it: On February 8, 1940, financier John D. Rockefeller hosted a dinner for Bill Wilson, co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous. The watershed event helped publicize the organization's new treatment for alcoholism while lending it credibility among New York's highest social circles. Unfortunately, Rockefeller fell ill that evening, so he sent son Nelson to host the event.

As for Megan Marshack, when I finished my Bicentennial Tour I lost touch with her forever. What I do know is that she was hired as a research assistant to Nelson Rockefeller and was the woman who called 911 as he lay dying from a heart attack. Her New York co-op was only two doors down from where the former Vice President was living, and she suddenly disappeared from public view shortly after his death, fueling suspicions in cities where suspicion is king.

It could not be as easy or simple for Megan to have escaped the limelight and achieve the peace that Betty found following that awful day on the balcony. Her name flickered briefly in the news during the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky scandal. I'd rather associate her bravery, intellect, zest, and panache with the angels of Betty Ford's highest nature. After all, albeit briefly, Megan played tackle football with the big boys.

My Life as a Beatle

“There is more felicity on the far side of baldness than young men can possibly imagine” -- Logan Pearsall Smith.

My hairline began receding in my senior year of high school. It must have begun then, because I remember the morning Martha Louise reached up her hand and brushed back the locks I had combed forward. I was annoyed, which is sad, because today I fully understand her gesture.

That summer I had a near-fatal bout with myocarditis, a viral infection of the heart lining, after which the recession resumed in earnest. By the time I entered San Jose State, I had a partial comb-over that was so shameful, I slept with my head under the pillow.

My utter sense of despair grew proportionally to the pace of departing strands in the dormitory sink. So did a flagging sense of sexual prowess. Today, shaving your head--even if you have a full shock of hair--is commonplace and considered sexy; but in my adolescence only Yul Brynner and Telly Savalas had acceptable crowns, and they were distinctly odd and exotic men. I was whiter than white. (Oh, and there was the bald Genie on the soap bottle, too.)

The last of the comb-over supply was progressively knotted and, by my senior year, it was a matted clump held in place by thinning strands. It rattled in the wind. Following the lead of another young man who confided his secret to me, I went shopping for a wig. At that time, the since-defunct May Company store offered a wide selection of apparel and accessories. In their wig department you could find a brilliant array of styles and colors--for women! There was a single model for guys and it resembled the late-era Beatles mop-top. I took one home, along with a Styrofoam head (which my friends called "Spike") where it would rest all night on the dressing table.

The wig had a tight mesh lining that left a angry red pattern on my scalp when I took it off at night. It was hot, which was fine in cold weather, but unpleasant in the summer. It made my skin crawl. And it did little to allay my fear. It might be the end of a luscious evening over candles and Chardonnay when my date would run her fingers through my nylon, dislodging the entire facade. Surely that time would come, so I avoided women altogether.

After graduation, I went to work for a daily newspaper in a small college town near Sacramento. Each morning I would pull on my loud, double-knit sports coat and tie, brush my mop-top into shape, and drive off for the newsroom in my Buick convertible, the wig stirring in the breeze. I walked about town, gathering stories from my sources, sure that I looked suave and confident. I was probably the only person who thought I had hair.

When spring rolled around, I volunteered to coach football for the local Pop Warner team, the Cowboys, with a head coach who had played defensive back in college and hit you like a falling piano. In those days, everyone wore knee-high white athletic socks and hippie-generation headbands while playing sports. So I bought a bandanna and tied it around the wig. I looked studly.

Toward the middle of practice the coach and I were showing the boys how to pounce on a fumble. I beat him to the ball, but he slammed into me and the wig went flying. It flew about ten yards, then rolled--still held in shape by the headband--down a grassy hill, our young charges gazing in horror at what must have appeared as a clean beheading.

Then there was a twitter, and another, and then came cascades of laughter that I could hear all the way to my car.

A few months later I landed a job at a newspaper in the Bay Area and decided to make a clean break of things, vis a vis Spike and company. Besides, I had scorched the front of the mop-top attempting to light marijuana at a party and the wig remained crispy and smelled of disaster. The wig ended up in a dumpster, and I grew out the sides of my hair, glad to have it all out in the open. I could date again.

In 1975, I got brave and shaved it all off in the shower. I liked the look, complemented by my thick, black Rasputin beard. I was a trailblazer.

For a short time, I had a job writing advertising copy for a company that made pharmaceuticals said to grow hair. No way I would try them. The side effects include a dramatic loss of libido. Why stiffen your self esteem to loose tensile strength elsewhere? It seems a perfect metaphor for our culture.

There is nothing worse, I think, than male-pattern blandness. I'd rather leave it to nature to decide what grows--and where. Meanwhile, I can shave without cream, without a mirror--even wield a double-bladed razor in the dark. I know the tucks and curves of my head with profound intimacy. And despite the insane prejudice against baldness in our society, I find that many women -- at least the kind that interest me -- will still need me, will still feed me, when I'm sixty-four.