Karl Grossman
Karl Grossman is a journalist from Sag Harbor, New York. He is the author of Cover-Up, a book about the nuclear power industry, available from The Permanent Press, Sagaponack, N.Y. 11962.
— From March 1981Tales Of Politics
“What are you — a weirdo?” the man in the cowboy hat and plastic clogs asked me. For hours I had been hanging around the foul-smelling men’s room of the Greyhound bus station in Ishpeming, Michigan waiting for The Wizard. The Wizard was to tell me about the secrets of politics on this planet.
October 1976Mandrake’s Root
My academic career was in ruins. I had just been expelled from McDonald’s University having been caught in lewd acts with Ronald McDonald, that depraved clown.
September 1976Sex Is Not Strawberry Jam
My thumb was out and Interstate 86 out of Providence, Rhode Island was getting hot. Me and my St. Bernard, Roger, were thumbing across America. It had been a messy morning.
July 1976Fortune Cookies
I was looking up monasteries in the yellow pages when she knocked. I was living at this time in Jersey City, N.J., on top of a meat market. It was the dingiest of places. I got up from my fleabitten couch. I opened the door to a dazzling darkhaired woman.
June 1976Eat Your Heart Out
My friend, Arnold, is having a fight with the stewardess. “I will make you into salami!” he is screaming. I’m making believe I don’t know Arnold. I bury my face in a magazine, “Modern Maturity,” a few seats back from his. We are flying Astral Coach to Venus.
May 1976Lou, Turn Up Your Hearing Aid
Birth and death is a continual cycle. Like corn, you have a season. You grow, flower, give seed, fade away. But the energy within you keeps going — like the energy of corn. Have you ever been in a corn field and felt that energy?
April 1976When A Home Is Not A House, Or, News From Swamis Local 486
I was born and brought up in a cave. This was in a former life, of course. I remember to this day lying there in a dent in our kitchen wall, only hours after I was born, watching my dad throw stones at the wolves outside.
March 1976Spinach Wilts
It was The New Age and there I was on the elevator — 68th floor, 15th floor, 43rd floor — thinking: bongs will never totally replace joints. Bongs have their place, sure, a big place. But a joint is a . . .
February 1976Most Of All, I Remember Steeplechase
First he insults me, tells me I’m not a human being. Well, I tell him — this frog, this polka-dotted frog — that I just can’t control myself in the face of spaghetti.
January 1976or, not by canned peas alone
There are some who say all you need to survive is canned peas. I don’t necessarily agree with that. The human is extraordinarily complex. Ask yourself: when were jackets invented?
June 1975
