HOWARD HUGHES: "WHEN ELECTED, MY FIRST ACT WILL BE TO CURE CANCER."

The other night I received one of the more bizarre telephone calls of my journalistic career. It was from an entity who identified himself to me only as a friend of the Billy Zig Zag. To understand who the Billy Zig Zag is, I refer you to an article by me name of “Das Hip Kapital” in the March, 1971 number of this journal, where-in the following passage made its debut:

III | : |! ; i||‘

“In the Marin driveway, a silver Porsche. Through the glass doors of the living room, a floodlit pool among the eucalyptus trees. Two women and a man, swimming naked. The^ man climbs out, shakes himself, puts on a kimono and walks dripping into the living room. A kid walks in with an armload of wood, and begins to make a fire in an enormous free-standing copper hearth. Panama Red sits down cross-legged on an Isfahan carpet near the fire. He is a muscular freak in his mid-twenties,, clean-shaven, auburn hair to mid-back. The kid comes back with an open bottle of Chateau Margaux ’61. He walks over and puts on a record: $5000 worth of gleaming McIntosh Ampex and Altec sound-presence and brilliance. It is Dave Mason’s “Only You Know and I Know.”

“There are five Panama Reds in the Bay Area,” says Panama Red with presence and brilliance.

Which one are you?

A long draught of Margaux. Why sip it? There’s plenty more. “The Panama Red.”

Only you know and I know. ..

“Dig it, if the Man picks up a runner for a dealer who has scored off my runner and they threaten to put him away for good unless he tells the name of his connection, say he cracks and says, “His name is supposed to be Panama Red.” And they say, *Which Panama Red? — there are five of those bastards.’ So he says, *1 don’t know fellas, the Panama Red, I guess.’ So the Man is right back where he started from.”

In this article, for reasons of confidence I gave Billy Zig Zag the nom-de-CREEM of Panama Red, because he/they was/ were the biggest distributors of smoke in the history of Western Civilization Cl 101X and I wasn’t about to be the first person to utter his/their name in public. Since that time, however, a lot of forensic avoirdupois has come down in the Greater Baghdad-by-the-Bay Metro area (e.g., the Rohan fandango, the Metzer overvamp, the rout of the Trident lounge z^xdsj~et cetera, ad infinitum) and suffice it to say that I am allowed to utter the phrase, “the Billy Zig Zag” without fear that instant-karma-gonna-get-me.

So, as I was saying before I interrupted myself, I was sitting in my mountain eyrie before a crackling fire, mutating fruit flies when the phone rang and it was quote a friend of the Billy Zig Zag unquote and he spake to me, saying:

“Billy Zig Zag says hello-to-you, Jim the Penman.”

Same to him, I said. Who am I speaking to?

“The person on the other end of the line from you. ’’

“I mean what’s your name.”

“Don’t got one.”

“You don’t got one?”

“It’s like, when you meet a movement person and you say, hey man, and they say, uh, Bob or Tom or something, but they don’t tell you their last name ’cause it’s too fuckin’ bourgeois to have a last name, okay? Well, we were into this thing of like, there was this dude who was lending people money in New York and you knew him only as The Snake. Better get the money out of the mattress, mother, one of The Snake’s boys gonna be here, seven peeyem. All of a sudden, he’s busted and they got his picture in the paper, and it says, Carmine ‘The Snake’ Persico! Holy shit, all these people are say in’ so that’s who The Snake is! Carmine Persico! Far out, let’s go down to the D.A. and pitch a bitch. Carmine Persico! Far out!

“Well, we been havin’ this same sort of trouble with pseudonyms here, man. They pop you and you take the rap for everything your fuckin’ pseudonym’s done! So while it may be too fuckin’ bourgeois to have a last name, it’s too fuckin’ mortal to have a first name. So. a lot of us are just ditchin’ the whole name concept as counterproductive. Only thing your name’s good for is so people can find you and so you can be famous and make a lot of money. Well, anybody want to find me either better fuckin’ know me, in which case he knows where I live at, or don’t know me, in which case he’s a condensed pig fart and better’ve had extreme unction before he rounds the turn of the driveway of my picturesque hippie commune. There are two former human beings who persist only as notches on my fuckin’ Armalite. And as far as makin’ money, that depends on my not being famous, okay? I don’t need a name, man, rtiaybe you need one, but I don’t.”

Isn’t it confusing trying to deal with other people who don’t have names?

“No, it’s like when you call up the phone company about your bill, the lady always tells you her name but you don’t really care, do you? People I deal with don’t really care$ ’cause the dope trade is like the phone company, it’s not who in particular you’re talkin’ to makes the difference, it’s whether you’re plugged in at the right place in the network. Like, cats used to say, ‘My connection, dum-de-dum-de-dum.’ ” *

Well, what’s happening?

“Yeah, well, I’m glad you finally asked me that man, ’cause the reason I’m calling you right ncfw is bye now.”

Click. And I’m left sitting there holding a dead phone. Boy, journalism sure is big fun.

About ten minutes later the phone rings again: a familiar voice.

“Sorry about that, I’m at this rather plush restaurant usin’ a public phone and there were some people waitin’ to use the phone so I let ’em, cause I discovered when I was impatient to use a public phone I found myself studying the features of the dude keepin’ me waiting. I don’t want nobody studying my features. Anyway — ”

Well at least you ’re not paranoid.'. .

“Yeah, well, funny thing, I am paranoid, that’s why I called you, I figured if I told you about a scene some sorta scary people ran on u$ last week and you published it, me and some of my friends would feel a little safer — I mean, if they wanted to ice us for talking about it, they’d have to ice you, too. ”

Gee, thanks!

“You’re welcome. So the faster you get this story out, the safer we’ll all be.

“I won’t burden you with all the boring details but let’s say word got around that a lot of us were getting together at this ranch in Boulder Creek. Personally, I didn’t want to go ’cause I’m kind of antisocial anyway and the idea of the entire embroidered-Afghan-moneybelt set of the Bay Area partying together begins to sound a little too much Idee a set-up for a youth-market re-make of the Apalachin Barbecue. But I went, ’cause I heard this particular dude was gonna be there, legendary dude named ...”

“He’s got a name?

“Got to have a name to be legendary, smartass. But it’s like, not the name he called himself, it’s the name other people called him. Besides, if you stop buttin’ in, I’ll tell you what he’s called and then you tell me if you think that’s the name he called himself. Okay?”

Okay.

“ ‘The World.’ ”

What?

“ ‘The World.’ ”

What about the world?

“What about him? That’s his fuckin’ name, man, ‘The World.’ ” -

You mean, like ‘The Snake?’

“Now you’re cookin’.”

You mean people actually call him ‘The World ’ to his face?

“You think people called Carmine Persico ‘The Snake’ to his face?”

Okay, I see what you mean. Anyway ...

“Anyway, this legendary dude known as ‘The World’, the reason they call him that is in Viet Nam, they call America, ‘the world,’ like they say, man I can’t wait to get back to the world. Well this cat is supposed to have been the biggest smack pusher in Southeast Asia. I’m not talking about the smuggling trade as it relates to Laotian smack being imported to the U.S. I’m talking about in-country military smack-freaks and their sources of supply within Laos, Viet Nam, Cambodia and Thailand. Apparently, ‘The World’ is supposed to have gotten really fucked up by a land mine, and they had to keep him so doped! up on morphine that when he got out of the hospital in Hawaii he had a habit and next thing you know he’s shooting smack and next thing you know he turns up in Bangkok running the biggest smack wholesale-retail operation there ever was.”

You mean he was still in the Army?

“Never was in the Army. The Marines, but he was mustered put, man, that mine really mangled him. Well, Bangkok is where all the hustlers and whatever that are parasiting the war in Viet Nam hang out, right? And this cat manages to put a lock on all the smack scams by buying into a ring of sergeants who are raking off the PX’s and enlisted men’s clubs and using their people as couriers and coming in under their umbrella for protection.”

But wasn’t Marshal Ky . ..

“No, that was strictly international scams. I’m talking about shall we say the domestic franchise. Anyway, ‘The World’ was in on the ground floor of smack as far as the U.S. armed forces in Southeast Asia were concerned. He was there when morale really broke in ’68 and he stepped in with his freeze-dried albino monkey shit and really made a pseudonym for himself, the fucker. I mean, I don’t relate to smack. Heavy Karma, snot rot, double-tracking, feh, man, smack pushers kiss my ass. But this brother, this one’s something else, a horse, if I may, of a different color. I mean, any man who more-or-less turns the American genocide squad into a bunch of nodding, scratching, hepatitic zomboids can’t be all bad.

“They called him ‘The World’ cause when they got there, they thought what they wanted most was to go back stateside but after runnin’ into the sergeants hangin’ around the schoolyard and sayin’ what-the-hell-one-gonna-turn-me-intoa-fuckin’-DRUG-ADDICT, well it begins to seem to a lot of these pathetic wretches that they’d trade ‘the world’ for a hit of heroin. ‘The U.S. ain’t the world, man, that dude there’s The World. He controls everything.’

“For example, toward the end, ‘The World’ is supposed to have begun throwing his weight around a little too much to suit the people who were supplying him — now’s where you come to your intercontinental scam-mongers, the Kuomintang, the CIA, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. ‘The World’ began to see that by putting a squeeze on the flow of smack to our boys he could determine how effective they’d be as a fighting force during any particular period of time. So he started auctioning off the U.S. troops’ morale to the highest bidder. The N.L.F. and North Viets said fuck you, but he had the fuckin’ CIA and the Army bidding against each other. His attitude was, ‘All I want is an income of $1,000,000 a week in Swiss franc deposits; frankly, I don’t give two mouse turds whether I get it by putting on a squeeze at my level or jacking up prices in the field or by shaking hands with Green Beret colonels.’ He was pretty bitter, there were rumors that he wasn’t much fun to look at and had to piss and shit into a baggie.”

Did you get to meet him in Boulder Creek?

“Yeah, well, no, I didn’t. You see, the word was ‘The World’ had been elbowed out of the Bangkok smack picture by some pretty nasty people and that we was nosing around the West Coast seeing whether he could go legit, so to speak — become an acid distributor. But when I got down to Boulder Creek, there was about thirty people there, of whom I’d say I didn’t recognize a third, but none of that third looked like he’d been creamed by a land mine.”

Weren’t you introduced to each other?

“No, what point would there have been in that? We either knew each other or didn’t, and if you were there it was assumed you were on the up and up, ’cause you were invited by a brother and besides, like I’m trying to convey to you, if he were there and you were introduced to him he wouldn’t say, ‘Hi, my name’s Randy, but my friends call me “The World.” ’ Besides nobody there gave off vibes that heavy. I’d say the heaviest vibes on the premises were on the order of, ‘$100,000 a week and I don’t have to know the name of the name of the name of the name of the person who signed for the railroad carload of shit goin’ East, and vice-versa. Pardon me, but I gotta split ’cause one of my horses is running in Florida tomorrow and I gotta get to the airport.’ Heavy but not heavy, if you can dig it.”

So what happened at this meeting?

“Party”

What happened at this party?

“Nothing, we’re just sitting around getting ripped and listening to records, until finally one of the dudes I don’t know says, ‘Come on outside, I got a new toy I want to show you.’ And I’m thinking, what, does the 'whole fucking overworld have to be there so this motherfucker can show off his new toy?

“Well, we go out and walk across this bridge that crosses a stream, then a path that leads to a ridge, and we walk along the ridge — stumbling around stoned in the moonlight, mind you — until we come to a clearing and lo and behold, there in the middle of it is the brother’s new toy. And I say to myself, shit, I must really be stoned, because if I’m not, and that’s really a flying fucking saucer, I’m going to have to bring my head in for a tune-up ...”

A flying saucer?

“Well, it sure looked like a flying sacuer, Fll tell you — you know, funny noises, and portholes and shiny metal, what would you think it was?”

A flying saucer.

“Well, all reet! But our eyes get adjusted to the light and it’s not a saucer at all but a helicopter, a Cheyenne type mother, real big with no markings. So I .say to the brother, well, it looks like you’ve really scored. What did you do, carry it off an aircraft carrier under your coat? And he says, ‘No, it doesn’t belong to me, it belongs to some friends of mine, and we’re going for a ride.’

“You can imagine how some of us felt. Like on the one hand, what is this shit? But on the other, if you were offered a night ride in a super-huge helicopter to you-knew-not-where, how could you refuse?”

Didn’t you thihk it might be some sort of a setup for a bupt?

“A bust for what, man? Except for the dope we were smokin’, we were clean, and the man doesn’t need a helicopter in a hidden landing zone in the Santa Cruz mountains just to bust a bunch of dope dealers. No, it was apparent to everybody that this was something. . . exceptional. I mean, there are cats with helicopters, but strictly up to and including the Bell Jet Ranger level. I mean this toy had two fucking rotors, man. This was not a refugee from the rush-hour traffic report. This was a regular flying boxcar.

“So we climb aboard and there’s a crew walking around with clipboards and they’re not paying any attention to us at all, just going about their business.”

What’d they look like?

“Looked like bank tellers and office copier salesmen, I don’t know. Well, we strap in and a few minutes later, we’re up in the air a few thousand feet and I’m sayin’ to myself, ‘I hope I’m very stoned and that this whole thing isn’t a ploy to give somebody time to rip off the stereo from my Jensen. I mean, one hubcap alone ...”

Where did you go?

“Well, don’t hold me to it, ’cause it’s pretty hard to figure out where you’re going in the dark, and we were sorta ripped, but we ended at what I’m pretty sure was an airstrip at Lockheed Sunnyvale. I’m not exactly sure.”

Then what happened?

“Then we get but and there’s a plane on the runway, like a small airliner, a business-type jet. At that point some of the guys start saying, this is where I check out, I ain’t goin’ on any magical mystery tours, besides I got people to see. Well, that seems to be cool, and those people get back on the Cheyenne and the Cheyenne takes off and disappears in the direction we came. Now there’s about 25 of us, and we get on the plane. By now I’m getting curious what is this, some kind of practical joke by Hugh Hefner? Only there’s no bunny on the side of the plane, no nothin’. Midway through the flight, they bring around food, not airline food, take-out Chinese food, in soggy cardboard containers, but still warm, right?

“We land at a regular airport, flashing blue lights, the whole bit, but only none of us has the slightest idea where we are, all we know is we must be a good 1000 miles from ‘Frisco, ‘cause we been in the air three hours and change. And we’re in mountains. We taxi over to where six other planes similar to ours are parked.

“We get out and are met by, he looks like an insurance management trainee, okay? And he says, ‘Good morning, please follow me, and if any of you need anything just ask.’ So we follow him and he leads us out of the airport area and then a fifteen minute walk into a sort of, I’d describe it as, college campus area. At no point do we see another soul besides the insurance man. Finally, we arrive at this two-story building, sort of looks like an annex to a suburban high-school, all the lights off, only he takes us down an outside stairwell to a basement door and through a corridor to a set of double doors on the other side of which is what looks like a small college lecture hall that’s half-filled with freaks, about 60 to 75 people. And all of a sudden it’s like freshman week at Fungo Tech — hi, where are you guys from? ‘Philadelphia,’ ‘Lawrence,’ ‘Vermont,’ ‘Laguna,’ ‘Jamaica,’ ‘Culican,’ ‘Michoacan,’ ‘Zacatecas,’ ‘Tucson’ — shit, I’m saying to myself, where am I,, at the fucking convention of the fucking International Cannabis Sativa Association?

“When all of a sudden — I swear this is just like there’s going to be a University Lecture number with F. R. Leavis or somebody — in from stage left file half a dozen older people and one young freak, only instead of going up on the lecture stage the insurance man sets up folding steel chairs in front of the rostrum and they sit down there. And that’s where I notice that the freak — he can’t sit down alone. Two of the men have to help him sit down. Funny, he walks perfectly normally but getting him into the seat must have taken nearly a minute, and he was biting his lip the whole time.”

'The World. ’

“Yeah, I’ll get to that. Something funny about his face, too. He’s wearing very dark glasses and you couldn’t see his eyes at all. Underneath, it looks like one half his face is made of like a different material from the otherv— sort of the same texture as silly putty after it’s been sitting for a while. Not a bad color but the consistency’s sorta yucky. Next to him are these two guys in golf-type knit shirts and they just pay total attention to the freak. For example, every once in a while, the one on the right holds up a handkerchief to the freak’s mouth and the freak clears his throat — awful gagging sound — and spits into the hanky. Or the guy on the left gets up from his chair and steps behind the freak’s chair and reaches down and starts massaging the freak’s neck from back to front — real professional masseur moves.”

What did the freak look like?

“Sort of medium biker-length hair, clean white shirt and black chinos. Looked like he was trying to make a court date. But let me tell you about the guy directly to the left of ‘The World’s’ masseur. He’s sort of beefy, reddish wavy hair, and is wearing a turtleneck sweater in sort of a shiny, snythetic tan and Daks-type slacks, you know, with a waistband? And I’m looking at this guy for a full minute before it registers and I get goose bumps on the soles of my feet, man. Reminded me of the time I was trippin’ and I met the Exterminating Angel, and he said the only way you can avoid death is to be Death. Here I was afraid of falling into that hole, and there He was telling me the only way I could keep from falling into the hole was to be the hole. So, for a second I felt relieved, that I say to myself, Christ, if it’s bad to fall into the unknown, it’s gotta be worse to be the unknown and I really freaked and got goose bumps on the soles of my fucking feet, man. Until I realized that I was the unknown already, and death would simply mean accepting what I was.”

So who was sitting in that folding chair, the Exterminating Angel?

“No man, Henry Kissinger was sitting in that chair.”

The Exterminating Angel.

“Whatever, man, I swear sitting right there in his Daks slacks, as big as life.”

Are you sure?

“Well, at no point did he ever say, Hi gang, I’m Heinzie. But it looked like every photograph I’ve ever seen of Kissinger, except his hair was a little longer and he had a really dark suntan. It was Kissinger, take my word for it.”

What did he say?

“He didn’t say a word the whole time. The one who spoke was the freak.”

‘The World. ’

“You got it.”

What about the other three men?

“One took notes on a steno pad. The other kept scanning our eyes like they were looking for a false move or something. They struck me as security types.”

Were any of you armed?

“I wasn’t.. . I’m sure a lot of us were, though.

“Anyway, after a while ‘The World’ starts to talk.”

Does he say anything to indicate who he is?

“No, man, the minute we see him, we know who he is. He says — ”

What did his voice sound like?

“It sounded — funny you should ask that. It sounded like as if Mission Control had become a junkie, been through hell, kicked and was now the head of all the Synanori programs on Earth. He had this enormous vibrational intensity, you wanted to stay out of the way of, like a cobalt ray or something. A couple of the Laguna people said he reminded them a little of Manson. He reminded me of if Bill Graham operated out of the bod of a 24 year old Texarkana ex-junkie. His voice was, if you can imagine anything like this, military hip. I don’t mean be-bop-a-doo, and all that jazz or eyes right or any of that shit.

I mean like a kid who was at the same time superaware and superprecise. Implacable dude. How many southern kids that you’ve met could you describe as implacable. It was like he seemed capable of torture because he was hip to pain. Like I told you in the first place — sort of scary.

“Well he launches into this thing of, ‘You must be all the righteous dealers I been hearing so much about.’ And then he goes into sort of this Whole Earth Catalog howdy-stranger tone of voice. ‘Ah been burned, man, but ah never burned no one.’ And all of a sudden his voice goes hard as a carbide bit and he leans forward in his seat and says, ‘Waal, in Nam when I hear that scud, I have that motherfucker rubbed the fuck out! I don’t want no one around me who thinks he’s Timothy fuckin’ Leary, the acid fuckin’ Pope. Every deal is a burn, dig it? ynless I fuckin’ hand the shit over to you at my cost plus enough for me and mine to survives off, I burned you. And I don’t know about you righteous dealers but I can’t afford to survive. So I’m gonna do you a favor and stay outta your business affairs.’

“Well needless to say this tirade isn’t what we come a thousand miles to the middle of nowhere for, and in the back of the room one dude is saying under his breath, ‘Who the hell is he, King Shit?’ and ‘The World’ catches this and mimics him, mincing his words, ‘Who the hell does he think he is, King Shit?’ Well that’s exactly who I am, gentlemen: His Majesty King Shit, live and in person. King Shit, and anyone who can’t relate to that can leave right now, no hard feelings. Just don’t never again try to move an ounce of contraband in or out of this country to you or anyone you know. I’ve said this before to people and they went through the whole who does he think he is routine and they found out. ’

“Then there was five minutes of absolute silence. I clocked it. Man, try clocking five minutes of absolute silence sometime. Whew. King Shit indeed!

“Then he says, ‘When I arrived on the Indochina hard drug set it was just as mealy mouthed and spineless as this cancer you’ve created here. It was a cancer because it was growing and growing without any sense of its constructive and reconstructive power. It had created what amounted to a secret society within the army of the most powerful nation in the world and instead of using the power of that secret society to master that nation through its army, it simply metatasized and glugged and clotted and coughed and choked the army to death. A cancer that could have organized itself into a vehicle for superhuman consciousness contenting itself to be nothing but a squishy tumor. A cancer is simply an aggregation of growth that is incapable of seeing itself as an organism. It is a parasite, not an organism. An organism is a cancer with an axe to grind, a cancer with an angle, a cancer with a chip on its shoulder, a cancer with a beef, a cancer with enough sense to differentiate so as to be capable of meeting and greeting the public.

“ ‘I purged the smack trade among our troops of its cancerous quality. I made it conscious of itself as a secret society that was capable of controlling the energy level, the bioeconomy, of the American military force by controlling the flow of energy-robbing chemicals at the source. I began by making being hooked on smack so ridiculously cheap that any soldier could afford a habit. Then I ransomed these troops back to their command for — for a substantial sum of money. If the ransom wasn’t paid, I’d cut off the smack and the world would have been treated to the spectacle of an entire expeditionary force going cold-turkey.

“ ‘I HIJACKED THE WHOLE FUCKING U.S. ARMY, do you understand?’

“ ‘Why did you stop?’ one of us asked.

“ ‘Because another level of government stepped in and bettered the military’s bid. I make more money now and don’t have to spend all my time arguing with gooks. And now I’ve been asked to eradicate this cancer I’m sitting here squinting at.

“ You are a cancer because you burgeon economically and don’t have the faintest idea what to do with yourselves. You’re so busy trying to build nest-eggs for yourselves so you can retire to hippie heaven that you can’t see that you are at the pinnacle of an enormous secret society, the American soft drug culture organized from the bottom up, with the consumer knowing only his dealer, and his dealer knowing his dealer apd that dealer knowing only his wholesaler and that wholesaler knowing only his distributor and that distributor knowing only his smuggler. It’s a nearly perfect pyramidally structured secret society with yourselves at the top and you don’t even know it’s there, much less how to use it.’

“ ‘O.K., how do we use it?’ one of us said.

. “ ‘You use it by thinking of it as an enormous communications system. You have something you wish to communicate to 20 million people. You don’t have to go on television. You don’t have to go ringing doorbells. You simply tell the people you sell to, to tell the people they sell to, and before this has happened seven times, every last acidhead and dopesmoker in the country has gotten the message.”

“ ‘And what’s the message?’

“ ‘And what’s the message?’ The World mimics. What’s de message, King Shit? We wanna know de message. Fuckin’ buricha righteous dealers wanna know the message. I’m righteous, I’m hooked into the truth, but you tell me the message!!

“ ‘Well, I’m gonna tell you the message. The message is that Howard Hughes is the righteous dealers choice for President. The righteous dealers’ favorite son!’

“Motherfucker began to laugh so hard he keeled over and it took both his attendants or whatever they were to get him up straight again. Combination of laughing and howling with pain. Meanwhile, we’re pinching ourselves, mumbling ‘Howard Hughes for President’ and shaking our heads in disbelief.

“ ‘Howard Hughes is your favorite son because he’s a freak himself — you’ve all seen, those drawings of him with long hair and a beard — and is being kept captive by a bunch of fanatic Mormons who are using him to authorize their control of Hughes Tool Company to cover the domestic operations of the CIA. The Hughes empire is the largest institution in the country that doesn’t have to make its affairs public, so there’s room in it for every form of covert operation imaginable. All of Hughes’ resources have been used by the CIA to fight the Mafia’s control of Las Vegas. Hughes himself has tried to escape several times. The whole Irving business was an escape .plot that failed — Hughes thought that if enough of a stir was created around his supposed autobiography the government would subpoena him to testify against Irving and when he failed to appear, the FBI, which is the archenemy of the CIA, would be mobilized to rescue him. Instead, Irving copped to never having met Hughes, so Hughes’ testimony isn’t needed. The only hope now is electing him President — if he’s elected President, he falls under the protection of the Secret Service, which has nothing to do with the CIA and which will have a mandate to find him and protect him from the people who are now using him. When Hughes is free he’ll devote his whole fortune to revolutionizing the country. Every freak who has his own best interests at heart will vote for Howard Hughes in ’72/.

“ ‘Is this story you’ve been telling us true?’ says orife of us righteous dealers.

“ ‘Of course not. It is simply the myth you are going to create and which is going to percolate through the entire drug culture pyramid below you. Every freak in America is going to be told by his dealer to write in the name of Howard Hughes.’

“ ‘What’s the point of getting them to do that?’

“ ‘The point of getting them to do that is to split the youth vote away from the Democrats and ensure the re-election of Richard Nixon.’

“ ‘Why should we want to ensure the re-election of Richard Nixon? Richard Nixon is a fascist pig.’

“ ‘Precisely. Therefore, you can rest assured that if Richard Nixon is re-elected, you don’t have to worry that marijuana will be legalized during the ensuing four years. In fact, I can promise you that if Richard Nixon is re-elected penalties will be stiffened at the federal level, regardless of what happens at the State level. On the other hand, if a Democrat, a liberal Democrat wins, you fellows may just righteously find yourselves out of a job. If the Democrats legalize smoke it won’t be so people like you can prosper, you can bet your golden coke spoons on that.? ”

What was Kissinger doing through all this?

“Just sitting there. Every once in a while he’d whisper something to the pud who was taking notes. So then The World says, ‘That’s the stick, now here’s the carrot. Now that the war is winding down, we got a lot of Laotian smack we don’t quite know what to do with. As an interim measure we’ve been using pretty much the same infrastructure here as we developed in South Viet Nam, only now they’re vets instead of grunts. But we don’t have the sergeants, who were the executive level there, to work with; they’re not organized good enough here. Well, we’ve got several choices. We could let the black heavies have it, we could let the Cuban heavies have it — or there’s you righteous dealers. We could cut you righteous dealers in on it. I can see some squirming around out there in the peanut gallery, but you get a taste of some of that smack money and you’ll see how fast you settle down. A lot of you altruists who’d never touch a load of smack — you never seen a fuckin’ pound of the shit, man. And this ain’t fuckin’ quinine powder USP, this is 100 percent diacetylmorphine and if you can’t dig it, snort a line and see where it takes you. Righteous dealers, indeed! It’s easy to be righteous if you ain’t been tempted. You give us enough bullshit votes for Howard Hughes to shoe Nixon in and we’ll guarantee dope’ll be illegal til January 19, 1977 and front you all the smack you can get rid of. Take it or leave it. Get me out of here.’

“And with that his two nurses or whatever they are start pulling him out of his seat and he’s way the hell up in the air before I notice that he’s still in a sitting position. Well, they’ve got his arms around their shoulders and they sort of wrestle with his hips and thighs and get his legs down to where they touch the floor. Then The World shakes himself loose from the two dudes and walks to the door and out like there was nothing wrong with him at all. Kissinger and his people hustle toward the door like they’re rushing to make a plane and the door slams behind them and there’s just us and the insurance trainee and about four other dudes Who look just like him.

“ ‘Would you please step this way?’ one of them says, and we file out and are walking down the path toward the airstrip and it’s beginning to get light. We walk past a chain link fence onto the field toward where the planes are parked.

“As we pass this one hangar — not a hangar, really, more of a large shed, the insurance trainees stop and one pushed the sliding door open and switches on the light and we’re standing there blinking at what looks like a cross between a pink elephant and a Cheyenne helicopter.

“ ‘Go in, take a look around, we thought it’d interest you,’ they say.

“It was like a half-taken-apart Cheyenne with scaffolding around one side, and tables where different assemblies have been spread out to be repaired. The entire other side of the ’copter is encased in what looks like a Disneyland version of an elephant in hot pink fiberglas. I mean, big ears, a long trunk, a little screwy tail, the works. Then while we’re standing there shaking our heads in disbelief the lights go off but there are lights behind the plastic casing of the helicopter so the whole thing glows pink.

“ ‘What the fuck is that?’ people are asking the insurance trainees. ‘We don’t know,’ they say. ‘We just thought it would interest you.’ I never seen so much shrugging of shoulders and shaking of heads in my life. ‘Weird,’ is all anybody can think of saying.

“So we walk outside and they close the door behind us and we board the planes and take off. Some of the people on the left-hand side of the plane thought they could make out the words ‘Los Alamos’ of the rooftops but I didn’t see anything.

“We didn’t fly back to where we’d come from — this time we landed at Fort Ord and were flown back to Boulder Creek in several smaller helicopters flying in a flotilla. When we got back to our cars there were slips of paper under the windshield wiper blades. Each one consisted of a candid photograph of the owner of the car printed next to what looked like a fingerprint and underneath that the license number of the car.

“Then about a week after this fantasy went down, one of my people arrives with an envelope addressed to me with my real name on it. I snatch it out of his hand so fast I got to apologize to the dude — I mean, even my old lady and partner don’t know my actual, official, birth-certificate-type name. ‘Where’d this come from?’ I ask. ‘One of Blanco Herbie’s trucks is coming through at Enseneda and he gets pulled over by customs and the mule nearly freaks and they take him inside and he says, “What is this shit, the fix is in and you people know it,” and they say “Relax, we’ve just got something we want you to give to your man on the other end,” and he says, “I don’t even know who that is, like I’m dropping this shit and taking a walk,” and they say, “That’s cool, you just make sure you leave this with the drop,” and they hand him the envelope.’

“So I open the envelope and inside there’s a snapshot of my mother and father and my sister-in-law having dinner in my parents’ kitchen, one of my fuckin’ birth announcements, I mean, blue border with a blue ribbon for the day I was born, and a note. The note read as follows:

Teddy and Mary Jane

Drive toward the bridge

Stopped by, would you believe,

A dozen leprechauns

In green homespun suits

And green beaver toppers

Carrying blunderbusses and torches.

They are not nice leprechauns.

They point their blunderbusses

At Ted and Mary Jane

And make them get out of the car.

They hand Teddy a bottle

Of Dewars White Label

And tell him to drink up

In a squeaky brogue

Teddy hesitates,

So a leprechaun triggers

A burst of silenced automatic fire

From his blunderbuss.

Teddy drinks up.

Meanwhile another leprechaun

Slams Mary Jane in the back of the head

With the butt of his blunderbuss.

Mary Jane falls down.

The leprechauns take Mary Jane,

Shove her in the back seat,

Close the doors

And push the car into the water.

That’s enough, laddie,

They say to Teddy,

And take the bottle from him.

Teddy isn’t feeling too steady on his feet,

Staring into the muzzles

Of a dozen automatic blunderbusses

And rubs his eyes in consternation

As out of the night sky

Come to pick up the leprechauns

And take them to their mountain home

Drops

A large

Pink Elephant

Which hovers as one by one

The leprechauns climb in

Then rises

Chiming

The Mister Softee Jingle

Leaving

Poor Teddy

All alone

Tottering on the bridge

Warmest personal regards,

CITIZENS FOR HOWARD HUGHES.

Silence. Might’ve been five minutes, but I didn’t clock it.

So what are you going to do now, I asked my caller.

“Hang up, Jim. Somebody’s waiting to use the phone.” Click.

Now as far as I know this entire phone call may have been a crock of bat mung. I can’t check it out through Billy Zig Zag, ’cause to all intents there is no more Billy Zig Zag. Blanco Herbie is incommunicado in the way that only those of the Mexican persuasion can be incommunicado. Teddy and Heinzie don’t return my calls. Howard Hughes is in Nicaragua or Las Vegas or L.A. or somewhere. Nobody seems to want to talk about ‘The World.’

I guess the only thing to do is keep a tight bunghole and see how many people write in Howard Hughes for President come November. Personally, I think it’d be a great rallying point regardless of ‘The World’ and his megalo-depressive program. I mean, if we elect Nixon, we get illegal dope and if we elect McGovern, we get legal dope. Dope is dope, legal or illegal.

But if we elect Howard Hughes, we get to see his face — I mean, he’d really have to be a recluse to refuse to be inaugurated, right? And as it happens the only issue masses of Americans could rally around, things having come to the pass they’ve come to, is the common desire to sneak a peak at that old Texan face of his ... So —