A Question of Lifestyle : Fond memories of my old roommate, Stewart Brand
When “The Whole Earth Catalog” was first published in 1968, not a single entry about the invasion of privacy was included. But now “The Millennium Whole Earth Catalog” devotes four entire pages to the ever-increasing political and corporate encroachments upon our privacy. What was once deemed paranoia turns out to have been prophesy. Nevertheless, this Catalog--edited by Howard Rheingold with a global network of experts--is a veritable Yellow Pages of Optimism.
In a foreword, founder Stewart Brand proclaims: “Here are the tools to make your life go better. And to make the world go better. That they’re the same tools is our theory of civilization.” Those tools range from safe sex to computer technology, from mushroom growing to pirate radio, from alternative medicine to urban ecology, from aging to computer “zines.” In 25 years the Catalog has evolved from servicing hippie communes to establishing virtual communities.
In 1971, Brand invited Ken Kesey and me to co-edit “The Last Supplement to the Whole Earth Catalog.” One day I sensed that there was something vaguely different about my papier-mache Donald Duck with eight arms. Then I realized--he had 10 arms now. The additional two arms were actually two pairs of shoelaces. Kesey had bought a pair of shoelaces, but they came in packages of three. I learned that such pranks were his way of sharing intimacy, along with practical hints like pouring cornstarch into his crotch because it “works better than talcum powder and you don’t smell like a nursery.”
A couple of years later I was living in a room in the basement of a yellow-painted San Francisco townhouse. At the time, Brand’s marriage was breaking up, and he moved to another room in the basement. We shared a bathroom. I gave him a key to my room so he could have access to the refrigerator, invited him to use my phone until he got his own and offered my king-size water bed whenever I was away. I hadn’t intended for this to be bread cast upon the water bed, but when the townhouse was sold and everybody had to move out, Stewart found an apartment on Rose Street--actual roses were embedded in the tar along the street--and he agreed to let me rent a small room that he used as a library.
“It’ll be on a trial basis,” Stewart said, “as long as our lifestyles don’t conflict.”
I had been publishing the work of conspiracy researcher Mae Brussell in “The Realist”--from the J.F.K. assassination to the Watergate break-in--and in the process I had undergone a paranoid freakout from information overload. Now she was warning me against sharing an apartment with Stewart. “I can smell a rat,” she said, “and for sure Stewart Brand is a government pig. Be really careful how much you tell him of yourself or your business. His kind can really hurt you in many ways. And do not put it past him. You are working in a dangerous area now, and certain precautions are necessary.”
“What are you saying? Am I in some kind of physical danger?”
“No, but he’ll try to psych you out.”
I defied my conspiracy guru and took the room anyway. Three of the walls were lined with bookshelves that Stewart had built. One night the heaviest shelf collapsed with its contents falling all over my narrow cot. Had I been there, I might have been killed by his double-volume set of “The Ancient Art of Warfare” alone. On the available wall I taped a photo of my daughter, Holly, and a couple of posters. One was a Native American. The other was President Nixon, with a quote from his inaugural address: “I think of what happened to Greece and Rome and you see what is left--only the pillars. What has happened, of course, is that great civilizations of the past, as they have become wealthy, as they have lost their will to live, to improve, they then have become subject to the decadence that eventually destroys the civilization. The United States is now reaching that point.”
Stewart and I were a touchstone of contrast. He was tall; I was short. He had closely-trimmed straight blond hair; I had long curly brown hair. His craggy features resembled a Nordic god; mine a friendly gargoyle. He wore a wristwatch even when he slept; I didn’t wear one even when I was awake. He was neat, threw stuff away and kept organized filing cabinets; I was a sloppy pack rat with a filing cabinet that remained empty. He was carnivorous and ate meat; I was a vegetarian and ate meat, but only once a weak, usually his leftovers while he was at the Zen Center a block away. He had a strange sweet tooth. In college, his favorite snack was a slice of white bread with butter and sugar on it. Now he preferred chocolate chip yogurt and sesame-graham cookies and unbaked frozen-cookie dough. He occasionally smoked cigarettes and drank wine. I never did any legal drugs, but he turned me on to hot-buttered rum and gave me a jar of batter for Christmas.
We would each entertain our own guests. I would be in my room, interviewing Manson family member Squeaky Fromme, and he would be in his room, interviewing renowned anthropologist Gregory Bateson. I would share with Stewart my latest conspiracy theory, and he would give me a copy of Scientific American with an article on the mathematics of coincidence. And we inadvertently affected each other’s sensibilities. Once I came home, looking forward to a relaxing carrot bubble bath, but the tub was filled with his potted plants, nourishing themselves on water while he was away, and I didn’t have the heart to disturb them. Conversely, when he was driving and stopped to help a stranded motorist with a jump-start, he admitted that he wouldn’t have done so if I hadn’t been in the car, and recalled the time he noticed me absent-mindedly turning over thumbtacks on the windowsill so nobody would stick their fingers.
There was, however, one particularly perverse idiosyncrasy that we had in common. I kept my awards--from the Feminist Party Media Workshop (for journalism) and from Playboy (for satire)--buried in a desk drawer. And Stewart kept his--the National Book Award for “The Last Whole Earth Catalog” (first prize in the contemporary affairs category)--hidden in his closet, an especially ironic gesture since there was resentment in the publishing industry that this non-literary effort had received the highly coveted award. One of the three jurors on the selection panel resigned in anger. Roger Strauss, president of Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, complained: “Look, it’s a book I would have loved to publish for all the obvious financial reasons, but it’s a mishmash for coffee tables.” I asked Stewart why he didn’t display the plaque on his wall.
“Um,” he explained. “I’ve observed that when I visit people whose offices are adorned with awards, diplomas and photos with famous names, my opinion of them goes down. My National Book Award stays in the closet so I can retain self-respect.”
It was as though I deliberately kept testing the boundaries of Stewart’s declaration that the duration of our living arrangement depended on the non-conflicting nature of our lifestyles.
I had been experimenting with THC, the ingredient in marijuana which gets one high, in powder form. On the night that the improvisational ensemble, the Committee, was to have its final performance, and while Walter Cronkite was concluding the news with his customary, “That’s the way it is,” I snorted all the THC I had left, in preparation for a personal pilgrimage to the Committee theater for the end of a satirical era. The last thing I remember was brushing my teeth, talking to Stewart and being overwhelmed by the drone of his electric saw. I woke up in a strange bed at 3 a.m. Since I was out at the time, here’s his description of what happened:
“I had been building a bed while you stood in the hall doorway reporting the latest turns in your hassle with Scientology. After a prolonged peculiar silence, I peeked in the hall to find that you were gone, replaced by a vacant-eyed robot which opened and closed its mouth, made a drifty gesture with a tube of toothpaste and said, ‘Nn. . . . Gn. . . .’ Terrifying. All I could think was that the Scientologists must’ve finally zapped you. After a while the thing--you--toppled like a tree, crashed and commenced baying into my buffalo rug. I phoned a friendly shrink for consultation. He listed to symptoms--you were by now into a howly slow-motion laugh, ‘Haaaaaa haaaaaa haaaaaa haaaaaa’--and the shrink suggested I take you to the UC hospital for evaluation. Which I did, with the aid of a couple of students from the Zen center. I would’ve put you to bed, but I thought you were having an epileptic fit.”
“Did you stick a TV Guide in my mouth like you’re supposed to?”
“You were doing fine with the buffalo rug.”
On another occasion, I read that six members of Vietnam Veterans Against the War had been charged with conspiracy to use a variety of bizarre weapons, including fried marbles, to attack the 1972 Republican convention, and I immediately assumed it was a frame-up by provocateurs. Fried marbles? Of course! My perception of the logic of those in power was that if they accused the veterans of having fried marbles as a weapon, the public would think it was too bizarre not to be true. When I first learned that Richard Nixon’s favorite meal was cottage cheese with ketchup, I tried that, so it was only natural that I would now fry me up some marbles.
“Just don’t use my Teflon pan,” Stewart requested.
I went shopping and found a place that sold marbles. I asked for the kind that were best for frying. The clerk laughed at what she had to believe was my idea of a joke. I returned home and melted butter in my saucepan. Then I fried two marbles. Apparently the purpose in weaponry was that when a fried marble is catapulted from a slingshot it will shatter upon hitting the target. The poor person’s cluster bomb.
“Paul!” Stewart said in his best prissy Tony Randall voice. “You sauteed those marbles. A warm buttery marble is hardly an instrument of aggression. You should’ve added sliced mushrooms. At least follow the correct recipe: Deep-fry the marbles in fat hot enough to smoke slightly and then plunge them in cold water. ZZkk! Ornamental little weapons.”
While Stewart and I were roommates, I wrote “Tongue Fu,” a fable serving as an allegory for my conspiracy research and as a catharsis for my paranoid freakout, but the exorcism went into reverse when Nixon’s Vice President, Spiro Agnew, resigned in the face of a tax scandal, Gerald Ford was appointed to replace him, then Nixon resigned, Ford became President, he selected Nelson Rockefeller as his Vice President, and for the first time in American history we had a pair of executives in the White House who were not elected. I had a slight relapse of paranoia. In keeping with the trickle-down theory of conspiracy, I became suspicious of Stewart.
Specifically, he had decided to publish “Tongue Fu” (with an apologia for its bawdiness) in “The Whole Earth Epilog,” and now I managed to convince myself, without the slightest rational basis, that he had changed my ending. I decided to confront my paranoia. On an afternoon that he was staying home, I took a bus to Sausalito. I walked to his office-on-a-houseboat and checked out the galleys. Nothing had been changed. I felt silly, but I was OK again.
Back in the apartment, I didn’t mention my little journey to Stewart. But I sensed that there was something vaguely different in my room. Then I finally realized what it was--my Richard Nixon poster. The President’s eyes, which were usually looking toward the right, were now looking toward the left. I examined the poster more closely and was able to discern that the original eyeballs had been whited out from the right side, and new eyeballs had been drawn at the left-hand corners. Then I checked to see whether the eyes in Holly’s photo had also been changed, but no, she was still looking directly at me. So was my Native American guide. Only Nixon’s eyes had been altered. It seemed out of character for Stewart to have done this, but I asked him anyway.
“No, I didn’t do it,” he said. “But Kesey was around for a while.”
“Kesey! Aha! I should’ve recognized the telltale trail of cornstarch.”
