Holly Tomolly

Holly's first word was more. Her second word was titty. After my marriage to Jeanne broke up, I continued to be haunted by the memory of her nursing Holly with one breast while I suckled the other. It was one of the sweetest feelings of my life, and my heart would flash on that memory every time I witnessed Holly's childhood innocence fading away.

The first time it happened we were having lunch in Greenwich Village at a sidewalk café across the street from the Women's House of Detention. From behind the barred windows of an upper floor, inmates were shouting curses at their fate and tourists alike. Holly asked, "Daddy, were there supposed to be jails?"

It happened again at a peace rally. "Isn't war stupid?" she asked. I was carrying Holly and a placard with a large illustration of The Realist's worried-looking, birdlike symbol. She observed a group of young people with tambourines singing "Hare Krishna" over and over. "It sounds like they're saying my name," she said, and then we started singing "Holly Krassner, Holly Krassner...."

•

Valerie Solanis served as an angry harbinger of the feminist revolution. She wore a man's outfit and her hair was stuffed under a Bob Dylan cap. When she walked into Andy Warhol's office to persuade him to make a film of a rather raunchy play she'd written, he accused her of being a cop. "And here's my badge," Valerie replied, unzipping her fly to expose her vulva. Previously, she had telephoned him, and he invited her up to his famous loft because he thought the title of her play, Up from the Slime, was so wonderful.

Originally, she had sent her manuscript to The Realist. I rejected it, but we met at the Chelsea Hotel and had lunch. Valerie hated men. She told me of her organization called SCUM--the Society for Cutting Up Men--and her plan to herd all the men in the world and keep them caged up for the purpose of stud farming. She had written The SCUM Manifesto, a document of heavy-handed proselytization. Sympathizing with the anguish of a pamphleteer, I lent her $50. That was on Friday, May 31, 1968.

On Monday, June 3, I went to Jeanne's apartment to pick up Holly for lunch. She was four years old. First we stopped at Woolworth's on 14th Street. Holly had seen a propeller beanie advertised on Romper Room and I promised to buy her one. There was only one beanie left, but one of its two propellers was broken off. I told Holly, "We can wait and get one that's not broken another time, or we can fix the broken one now, if you don't mind."

"I mind," she said, meaning she didn't mind.

We headed east--Holly wearing her new broken beanie and carrying the other propeller in her hand--turned left on Union Square and happened upon Valerie Solanis at 16th Street, just a block from Andy Warhol's place. She seemed less tomboyish than usual. Her Dylan cap was gone, her hair had been cut and styled in a feminine fashion. She seemed calm, friendly, in good spirits. We talked for a little while about nothing special, then said goodbye, and I took Holly to Brownie's, a vegetarian restaurant. Valerie headed west. Five minutes later Holly and I were seated at a table and Valerie walked in.

"Do you mind if I join you?" she asked.

"Well, yeah, I do mind, actually, but only because I don't get a chance to see my daughter that much."

"OK, I understand," she said, and left.

Holly was confused by the use of the word mind. "That lady wanted to join us," she observed.

"I know. But I want to be alone with you."

Holly smiled. "And I want to be alone with you."

That was at 11:30 in the morning. Three hours later Valerie went looking for Andy Warhol, but he wasn't at his place. Two hours after that she found him and shot him.

For all I knew she had bought the gun with the money I'd lent her. If I had known when Valerie wanted to join us that her intention was to shoot Warhol, who knows, I might have been able to talk her out of it. Could my quasi rejection of Valerie have been the final straw? Maybe Andy Warhol was just a victim of her displaced hostility.

Then again, she could have shot me--and Holly--right there in the restaurant. "Whaddya mean I can't join you for lunch?" Bang! Bang! That easy. That absurd.

•

One day Holly unintentionally inflicted a severe emotional wound on me. She simply said--referring to the guy Jeanne was living with--"I have two daddies now." A terrible sense of loss went searing through my psyche.

After I moved to California, whenever we talked on the phone we would always end with a big "wowee" hug. She would write to me about how she went to Central Park and climbed on the rocks like a monkey, and how she dressed as a witch on Halloween. She signed all her letters Holly Tomolly.

One afternoon during the first summer she came to stay with me, when she was seven, she said, "Daddy, let's kiss the way they do in the movies and on TV."

"Well, what do you mean?" I asked, trying to hide my nervousness.

"Like this," she answered, putting her arms around me, her little lips directly on mine, moving her head around just like they do in the movies and on TV. Then we both giggled, and that was all there was to it, but somehow I felt grateful that nobody had walked in on us. "Listen, this was her idea," I would've had to say. "She was the aggressive one."

When Holly was eight, a man exposed himself to her. The police asked her to describe him. She said that he was cross-eyed. The cops wanted to know if she remembered anything else special about him. "It was big and hairy," she said.

By the time Holly was nine, she was a true anarchist. She wouldn't even accept the rules of games. She liked to play checkers with each participant's checkers half red and half black. She also insisted on playing ticktacktoe blindfolded. But her supreme moment came when she wanted to play hide-and-seek while riding in a taxicab.

She would also ask me great questions such as, "Is laziness a form of hypochondria?" When Holly was ten, on one of my visits to New York, I took her and Jeanne out for dinner. "Mommy told me all about sex," Holly announced in the restaurant.

"Oh, really? What did you learn?"

"Oh, she told me about orgasms and blow jobs." They laughed. I blushed.

In 1975, when Holly was 11, she decided to stay with me in San Francisco for an entire year. This was a courageous move for her--a new city, new school and new friends. Her best new friend was Pia Hinckle, whose father, Warren, was editing City magazine, published by Francis Coppola. It was the film director's foray into print journalism. The girls used the office color-copying machine at City to reproduce dollar bills.

Our apartment was halfway up a long, steep hill, and in the back was what Holly called "our magic garden." States Street was just off the intersection of Castro and Market--the heart of the gay ghetto--and there was a Chinese laundry at the foot of the hill called the Gay Launderette. Even though it had changed owners several times, it had always kept that name out of goodwill.

Holly took classes in computer math, trampoline, chemistry and gymnastics, played clarinet in the orchestra and took pantomime lessons, and on Saturdays fed the animals at the Junior Museum. Once, an iguana bit her on the hand, and I worried that Jeanne would think I wasn't taking proper care of her. Holly and I enjoyed walking around and exploring the charms of San Francisco. She would read aloud the signs in store windows: Yes, we're Open. Sorry, We're Closed. But she would cover her eyes to avoid memorizing the phone number on the side of a delivery truck--something I had done as a kid, though she was imitating her mother. Another time we crossed a street and she made the same philosophical observation that sages across the ages have made: "No matter where I go, I'm always there." If I would spit in the gutter, she would not only imitate me, she would spit backward over her shoulder. We would walk along harmonizing the Grateful Dead song Ripple--not the lyrics, just "Wa, wa, wa, wa...."

Holly was thinking about getting a kitten, but she didn't want to have it spayed.

"If you'd had Mommy spayed," she explained, "I wouldn't even be here today."

When I was Holly's age, I didn't even know where babies came from. But she had learned the basic facts of human reproduction when she was three, and now we were discussing the implications of abortion. Holly was a very physical girl. She loved to have her back scratched, and we would always hold hands when we walked. Of course, men in the gay ghetto felt free to be equally affectionate.

"How come it feels strange to see two men holding hands?" she asked.

"I guess because they don't do it in your old New York neighborhood."

"That's true," she said.

"When I moved here, it seemed strange, and then I just got used to it."

"I guess I will, too."

Eventually, Holly and Pia planned (continued on page 133) Holly Tomolly (continued from page 88) to visit a glory hole. These were establishments where a man would stick his dick through a hole in the wall and an unseen man on the other side would suck him off. The girls planned to disguise themselves as boys, with rolled-up socks in their crotches.

•

On my wall there was Paul Avery's photo of a Vietnamese child and his mother, both severely burned by napalm, staring out at you with a look of disbelief and horror.

"Daddy, how come you keep that picture there?" Holly asked.

"Well, because whenever I have a problem, I try to explain it to that little kid, and he gives me perspective."

"What's perspective?"

"It means by comparing my problem with his, I just can't feel sorry for myself."

Holly observed my eccentricities, which, in my hermitlike lifestyle, I had come to take for granted. For example, I didn't have any liquid dish soap. She found it very odd that I would wash dishes using only hot water and my fingernails. She also noticed that I didn't have a vacuum cleaner. She wasn't completely satisfied with my explanation that I would just wait for enough dust to gather so I could sort of wrap it around my hand and roll it away like a tumble-weed. And yet I would request that she throw her banana peel into the kitchen garbage can instead of my office wastebasket.

Naturally, there were certain eccentricities that even Holly wasn't aware of. Occasionally I would pick up the phone and say "I love you" to the dial tone. And often I would be a model of efficiency by simultaneously using one hand to brush my teeth and the other hand to urinate. But I would always put the toilet seat back down out of respect for Holly. It was a simple exercise in consciousness.

I had my limits, though. Holly was a skateboard enthusiast, to the point of evangelism. She loved skateboarding down the hill, and even though she showed me how she could stop before she came to the corner, I couldn't stop worrying. She urged me to try her skateboard. "No, thanks. I'm too old to start scraping my knees."

"Oh, come on, Daddy, if you want to have fun, you gotta get bruised."

For fun Holly and Pia skipped down the street arm in arm singing, "We're off to see the Wizard, the wonderful Wizard of Oz. . . ." For fun they dressed up as prostitutes on Halloween and went door to door, saying "Trick or treat?" For fun they pretended that Holly was having her period by leaving ketchupstained tissues floating in our toilet. One afternoon they were going to see the film Carrie, in which Sissy Spacek is surprised by her first menstrual period. Holly had read the book and was curious to see how it translated to the screen. As she was leaving to meet Pia, I said, "Hey, Holly, wouldn't it be funny if you had your first period right in the middle of the movie?"

"Very funny, Dad." And she went on downstairs. Then she came back up the stairs, smiling, "You're right, it would be funny."

•

Our favorite neighborhood restaurant was named Island, after Aldous Huxley's Utopian novel. Holly would sit there quietly reading Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov's novel about a pedophile, and if I felt at all embarrassed, well, that was my problem.

We often went to the movies together. Her favorite was Paper Moon, with Ryan O'Neal and his daughter, Tatum, playing a father-daughter con-artist team. Holly saw that movie nine times. She relished the scene in which they're sitting in a restaurant and Tatum tells her father very loudly, "I want my two hundred dollars! I want my two hundred dollars!" So it didn't come as a total surprise when Holly and I were sitting in a restaurant that she started shouting, "I want my two hundred dollars! I want my two hundred dollars!" Holly resembled Tatum O'Neal. Her friend Diane--daughter of conspiracy researcher Mae Brussell--resembled Linda Blair, who played the young girl possessed by Satan in The Exorcist. So there they were, Holly and Diane, sitting poolside in Carmel and pretending to be young actresses, graciously signing autographs--Tatum O'Neal and Linda Blair. Diane was chewing bubble gum, wearing platform shoes and talking about Neil Diamond.

"He's good, sure," she said, "after they've knocked off thirty other singers."

While Holly was at school I covered the Patty Hearst trial for the Berkeley Barb. Patty had been kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army, led by Donald "Cinque" DeFreeze. Patty was kept in a closet. Then she joined the SLA, changed her name to Tania, adopted radical rhetoric and robbed a bank with them. The philosophical question that had plagued the history of human consciousness--Is there is or is there ain't free will?--was finally going to be decided by a jury. While the jurists were deliberating, I took Holly to the empty courtroom and she sat in Patty's chair. Mae Brussell called, worrying that our daughters might be kidnapped. I passed her warning on to Holly and offered to accompany her to school.

"Oh, Daddy," she said, "that's not necessary. Mae's just paranoid." Then Holly bought a gift for me--a plastic clothes-pinlike paper holder labeled Threats.

On the one hand, there was Mae Brussell, busily documenting the rise of fascism in America. On the other hand, there was Holly, standing on Pia Hinckle's front porch yelling "Hitler! Hitler!" That was Pia's cat, so named because of a square black patch under its nose, just like Adolf Hitler's mustache.

I asked Holly, "Do you know who Hitler was?"

"Didn't he lead the Jews out of Germany?"

"Well, not exactly."

I had become involved with Bread and Roses, an organization founded by folksinger Mimi Fariña to provide free entertainment at institutions ranging from juvenile centers to retirement homes. I was scheduled to perform at a drug rehabilitation center in Marin County, and Holly came with me. I had been developing a routine about the Deaf Mute Liberation Front. Until Henry Kissinger's image as a harmless womanizer had been established, President Nixon's chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, would not allow the audio portion of Kissinger's statements to be broadcast--and the electronic media complied. It was my contention that lipreading viewers, who could tell that Kissinger had a German accent, were passing the word that Henry Kissinger was a Nazi. So I became a fake ventriloquist, and Holly sat on my lap, playing a hearing-impaired dummy simultaneously translating into sign language whatever I was supposedly making her say.

"Well, Holly, how are you today?"

"Just fine, thank you. Would you like to hear a riddle?"

"OK, sure. How does it go?"

"All right. Why is Anita Bryant like a Polish lesbian?"

"I give up. Why is Anita Bryant like a Polish lesbian?"

"Because she fucks men." Then Holly switched from her facsimile of official sign language to that universal gesture, making a circle with the thumb and fingers of one hand while pushing the index finger of her other hand in and out of that hole.

We may not have been politically correct, but we were a team.

Holly and I spent Thanksgiving with the Hinckles, and Christmas with Ken Kesey and his family at their farm in Oregon. The entire family lived in a huge, sectioned-out barn, with a metal fireplace that hung from the living-room ceiling. Outside, there were cows and peacocks and a dog that dropped stones on your foot because he wanted to fetch them. There was a swarm of bees to provide honey, and there was a beautiful colt that we tried to catch, but its mother kept running along and blocking us like a football player. Chuck Kesey, Ken's brother, ran a creamery, and he brought over homemade ice cream with liquor in it. I ate so much--the coldness and the sweetness covered up the taste of alcohol--that for the first time in my life I got drunk, unintentionally, on ice cream. I threw up and passed out.

"I'm not used to taking legal drugs," I explained.

•

In April 1976, on the same day that the Pope announced he was not gay, I received a registered letter from the FBI informing me that I was on a hit list of the Emiliano Zapata Unit of the New World Liberation Front, but that "no action will be taken, since all of those who could carry it out are in custody." But I was more logically a target of the government than the NWLF--unless, of course, they happened to be the same. Was the right wing of the FBI warning me about the left wing of the FBI? A communiqué from the NWLF charged that "the pigs led and organized" the Zapata Unit. Jacques Rogiers, above-ground courier for the underground NWLF, told me that I was on the hit list because I had written that Patty Hearst's kidnapper, Donald DeFreeze, was a police informer.

"But that's true," I said. "And it's a matter of record. Doesn't that make any difference?"

Not to him, it didn't. "If the NWLF asked me to kill you," he admitted, "I would."

"Jacques," I replied, "I think this puts a slight damper on our relationship."

I kept the FBI letter in that plastic Threats holder Holly had given me. She was in Oregon, spending her Easter vacation at the farm with the Kesey kids.

At the drug rehabilitation center where we performed our ventriloquist act, I had met a musician, Doreen, who later told me that she was so inspired by our visit that she gave up dope. After she was released she contacted me, we began to date and she turned me on to snorting heroin. I got high on the irony but sick from the smack, neglecting to feed Holly's goldfish in the process. They died, their bloated bodies floating in the tank, and I had to flush them down the toilet. Perhaps because I knew them as individuals with names--Jaws and Lily (after Lily Tomlin)--I never even considered replacing them with substitute goldfish.

When Ken Kesey flew back with Holly, I met them at the airport. "Listen," I told her, "I have some bad news and some good news. Which do you want to hear first?"

She cringed. "Which is worse?"

"Well, the good news is that I was on a list of people to be killed, but the FBI captured the group that was planning to do it. The bad news is that I got very sick and neglected to feed Jaws and Lily, and they died. Holly, I'm really sorry." She started hitting me mock-hard with her little purse, a poignant mixture of frustration and affection.

When a drug rehabilitation counselor gave a guest lecture at Holly's school, he informed the students that they couldn't fool their parents about smoking marijuana because it was obvious from their dilated pupils, slurry speech and short-term memory loss. Holly couldn't resist asking, "What about if somebody's parents have those symptoms?" The counselor had to admit that was sometimes a problem.

The drug counselor's visit had one other side effect. Holly asked me if I had ever tried heroin, and I finally gave her the details of what happened with Jaws and Lily.

She said petulantly, "That drug rehab guy told us that people would kill for heroin, but he didn't say that it would be my goldfish!"

•

Her year with me was coming to an end. "When I go back to live with Mommy," Holly said, "I'm going to call you more often."

"Oh, yeah?" I teased. "How come?"

"Because I know you now."

"Well, who did you think that I was before?"

"Fred Astaire."

She had intuitively understood the symbolism of Fred Astaire as a romantic figure in tuxedo and top hat who danced across tabletops and walls--as opposed to me, this funky daddy who did not have a vacuum cleaner and who accidentally killed her goldfish.

When Holly left, I started leaving the toilet seat up again.

•

When Holly was 14 she went to Mexico to learn Spanish at a school where no English was spoken. The next year, in the summer of 1979, she served as my translator on a three-week expedition to Ecuador that focused on shamans and healers. She was the only adolescent among a dozen adults, so the experience would have elements of an archetypal rite of passage for her.

In the jungle I had an affair with one of the women on the trek. Holly was observing us very carefully. On July 23 she wrote in her journal:

Today's my half birthday. I'm exactly 15 years old. Oh, yeah, I haven't written anything about the only romance on the trip--Daddy and Florence. They are sharing a room, and Daddy says that if he and Mommy had treated each other as good as he and Florence are treating each other, they'd still be together. I know that's bullshit, but it's a sweet thing to say and it's nice to know things are working so well for them. Daddy seems like a kid again, holding hands in the taxi, and when we're eating, little kisses on the cheek, and he's so happy. Florence is 29, really pretty and intelligent. Daddy says she reminds him of Mommy. She lives with her boyfriend. She and Daddy really make each other laugh. I'm so happy for Daddy! For my "birthday" they gave me a rhinoceros beetle's shell that they found.

Because Florence and I both knew--and had agreed in advance--that we would go our separate ways when the expedition ended, our affair had that much more intensity.

The journey would climax with some of the group ingesting ayahuasca--a hallucinogenic vine similar to yage--which is used by shamans throughout the Amazon basin to have visions of and communicate with jungle spirits during their healing ceremonies. Holly hoped to participate. Wanting to be a responsible parent, I gave her some literature to read, including an article by Dr. Andrew Weil, author of The Natural Mind. "Vomiting is the first stage of the effect of yage," he wrote. "It is not fun, and I say that as someone who likes to vomit in certain circumstances." He suggested fasting after breakfast, but our group ate lunch, anyway, rationalizing that so long as we were all going to vomit that night, we might as well put something into our stomachs now to throw up later.

Ayahuasca means "vine of the dead." It is innocent-looking enough, an inch or two thick, curving into and beyond a complete circle. Who can imagine how its psychedelic use was discovered? First it is chopped vertically, then horizontally and then boiled. In Wizard of the Upper Amazon, Bruce Lamb wrote: "Drinking a carelessly prepared extract would only cause violent vomiting, acute intestinal cramps and diarrhea. Ayahuasca must be handled with care and reverence, simmered slowly in a special earthenware pot over a low fire under constant, proper attention." However, ours was being boiled in an aluminum pot by a young Canelo Indian couple in the midst of a lovers' quarrel. But we couldn't very well tell them that they were preparing it the wrong way. A leaf, datura (which has an effect similar to belladonna), was added to the potion, an unappetizing, rust-colored, muddy liquid that tastes so putrid, a bottle of rum must be held in your other hand for an instant chaser.

Eventually, the sounds of our violent retching would echo through the jungle. One by one we would vomit, as though we were wet towels being wrung out by invisible demons. They should have used a clay pot. An old Peruvian healer had said that if the ayahuasca was boiled in aluminum rather than earthenware, it would make you more sick than visionary. I passed around the butter-rum Life Savers I had brought especially for this occasion. When Holly's insides declared that it was her turn to throw up, I accompanied her outside. It was a minivolcanic retching that temporarily took over her body. I hope I'm doing the right thing, I thought. When she finished, I began. The power of peristalsis possessed me so thoroughly that I vomited and farted simultaneously. Holly's tears turned to laughter at my involuntary duet, which in turn made me laugh. There I was in the middle of the jungle with my daughter--vomiting, farting and laughing.

"I think this is known as quality time," I managed to say.

As we were walking back to the shack with our arms around each other and feeling weak, Holly said, "It's nice to be near someone you love when you're in misery."

Under the influence of ayahuasca, the local people traditionally have visions of jaguars and anacondas. But instead, our group saw elephants and mice, spiderwebs of memory and a woman in an 1890s gown and large hat, eating a loaf of French bread. The corrugated metal ceiling was moving like ocean waves for me. During the healing ceremony, two shamans kept sucking the poisons out of a patient's head. Then, though they didn't actually vomit, they did make these awful sounds of regurgitation to get rid of the poisons. All through the night we were forced to divert our psychic energy away from exquisite visionary flights in order not to throw up again. A flash of paranoia convinced me for a moment that some kind of sorcerer's trick was being played on us. The shamans laughed at us whenever anyone succumbed to vomiting.

Before we left, one of the shamans asked our medical doctor for Lomotil, to be used for diarrhea, and the cultural exchange was completed. Our return hike through the rain forest was accompanied by a tremendous rainstorm. While getting thoroughly soaked, Holly and I harmonized Singin' in the Rain over and over as loud as we could.

•

Holly and Jeanne had moved to Los Angeles, so our visits were much more frequent than when they were living in New York. They both came to a show I did in L.A., and just before I went onstage to perform, Jeanne said, "Paul, I have to tell you something. Holly's not yours." It was Jeanne's way of saying, "Break a leg."

Holly was attending Fairfax High School and working at a Baskin-Robbins just off Sunset Boulevard. She had come to know her hooker customers by their favorite flavors, and she pointed them out to me as we walked along. "That's Rocky Road. That's Pralines and Cream. That's Strawberry Shortcake."

Holly was taking on an almost scary sophistication. In a book report for her English composition class, she wrote: "The most important and interesting news that I found from reading The Victims was the statistics. They show that nine out of ten rape victims are emotionally unable to have sexual relations with men for at least one year after the assault. The time between the assault and when the women may want to participate in sexual activities is known as the Seul period, meaning 'alone' in French. The length of time of the Seul period may vary depending on the intensity of the attack and the previous mental stability of the victim." But not only was there no such book as The Victims, Holly had also invented the Seul period. I was really quite proud of her.

One evening, when Holly was 16, she called me. "Hold on a second," she said, then held the telephone receiver to the speaker of her stereo. And I heard Carly Simon singing, "Daddy, I'm no virgin, and I've already waited too long." Then Holly hung up quickly. I began to laugh and cry simultaneously. I was laughing at the creative way she had chosen to tell me this news--my generation had avoided communicating with parents about sex--and I was crying because I never got any when I was 16. The sexual revolution had still been just a horny dream back then. I was delighted to see its legacy in action now, but I also felt a certain vestigial resentment. "Why, these young kids today just don't appreciate the joy of yearning." I had to be careful not to let the memory of my own blue balls turn into sour grapes. When Holly visited me that Thanksgiving, I teased her, "Did you bring your diaphragm?"

"Oh, Daddy, even if I fall in love with someone, it doesn't mean we have to go to bed right away." She had found her place on the spectrum between abstinence and promiscuity. Still, she got into trouble during a gymnastics competition for having a hickey on her neck. When Holly graduated from high school, she was designated Class Flirt in the yearbook, exactly the title that Jeanne had earned when she graduated from high school. It gave one a sense of continuity.

•

My friend Scoop Nisker managed to maintain his balance between current events and the infinite void. He was the news director of KSAN, and his slogan was, "If you don't like the news, go out and make some of your own." He was also a practicing Buddhist, and another slogan was, "Stay high, but keep your priorities straight." In 1981 Scoop persuaded me to attend a ten-day meditation retreat where I would have to do without any of my usual media distractions. I was afraid at first and decided to go only in order to confront my fear. But then Holly called. She was now 17. She wanted to go to college in San Francisco and live with me again. So--keeping my priorities straight--I immediately canceled out of the Buddhist retreat.

I liked the way she challenged me. Once, I was smoking a joint early in the day, and she said, "Dad, how come you have to escape reality first thing in the morning?" When I was a kid, my parents would refer to "a colored guy" and I would tell them that "Negro" was correct. When I would refer to somebody as "Oriental," Holly would tell me that "Asian" was correct. She didn't like small talk. "Oh, Dad, that's trivial bullshit," she would say. The old-fashioned parent in me wanted to chastise her: "Hey, you can't talk to me that way. I'm your father." But the New Age parent in me knew that Holly had made an accurate observation. What I had said was trivial bullshit. I took a deep breath. "I'll tell you something, Holly. I'm glad you feel free enough to tell me that what I'm saying is trivial bullshit, but I hope you're glad I'm free enough to recognize my own trivial bullshit when it's pointed out."

Nobody I knew had ever said "trivial bullshit" to his parents. Certainly I never said it to mine, even though they specialized in it. I had learned to pretend that my parents were a Buddhist monk and nun whose sole purpose on earth was to test my patience with trivia. So when they showed me how many electrical outlets were in the kitchen, I eagerly examined them. "Oh, look, here's a three-pronger." That way there was no friction between us. They felt good, I felt good and what a commendable goal that was. So when my mother opened up the bread of a sandwich--while I was eating it--and put more food inside, I could only smile with gratitude for this whole new form of generosity. And when my father gave me his old parka--and showed me how to put on the hood--I didn't remind him that I was no longer five years old and accuse him of freezing in his parental role. I just said, "Let me practice that a few times."

Holly, on the other hand, gave me a pair of red cotton long johns for Christmas, and she didn't show me how to put them on. I wore them for the first time when I was performing on a cold night in Sebastopol, and at one point in my monolog, I decided to show them to the audience. But when I turned my back and pulled down my jeans, the long johns stuck to the jeans and I found myself accidentally displaying my bare buttocks, in a spotlight, to a large group of strangers. This was a very dreamlike moment, but I couldn't very well flap my arms as a reality check--not without resembling a human bellows. I was merely a victim of static cling. I had heard that phrase before in fabric-softener commercials, but I had never actually experienced it. Recovering my composure I said, "You see, I really came here to join the Moonies, and this is my initiation." After that, I began to moon audiences deliberately, but only once in each city, because I didn't want it to become a comedy gimmick. When I mooned the audience in San Francisco, Holly reminded her friends, "That's my dad."

•

One afternoon Holly and I were waiting at a bus stop, on our way to a movie, and there was a luscious teenage girl also waiting for the bus.

"Oooh, yummy," I whispered.

"Daddy, she's my age!"

Her words echoed in my cranial cavity. Lust for teenagers permeates the culture. I had slept with four 17-year-olds, but now found myself caught between the lines of dialogue in Stripes, when Bill Murray mentions getting "wildly fucked by teenage girls," and Tempest, when John Cassavetes says, "If you touch my daughter, I'll kill you."

When Holly got involved with a new boyfriend, they cooked spaghetti in my kitchen. They threw a few strands at the ceiling, where the spaghetti stuck, thereby passing the gourmet-chef test. She spent a lot of time at his place, and my moment of truth arrived in the form of a question from Holly. She wanted to know if her boyfriend could spend the night at our house. I pretended to be nonchalant. I prided myself on being a permissive parent. Holly and I had agreed that I wouldn't tell her what to do unless it involved health, safety or the rights of others. And now she was calling my bluff.

"OK, sure," I said, "but tell him that he can't smoke cigarettes in the house."

At least I felt justified in exerting some parental authority. When I was Holly's age, I used to lie in bed wondering if my parents did it. Now I lay in bed knowing that my daughter was doing it. She was no longer my little girl saying, "Daddy, would you scratch my back?" She was no longer that innocent youngster standing on a porch calling out for a cat, "Hitler! Hitler!" Since then, she had read The Diary of Anne Frank and seen Holocaust on TV. Now she was going to audition for a New Wave band called The Vktms. The lyrics to one of their songs went, "Hey, you know I ain't no martyr, but I ain't no Nazi." She also wanted to change her name to Holly Hard-On, but she had the flu that week, so her audition and name change became moot. Ah, yes, she would have been following in my footsteps. Introducing Rumpleforeskin and his daughter, Holly Hard-On. How proud could a father get? And whenever I found myself looking lustfully at a teenager, I would automatically hear Holly's voice saying, "Daddy, she's my age!"

•

I continued to perform occasionally. When I was booked in Minneapolis, I spent the afternoon hanging around an indoor mall, soaking up atmosphere and gathering last-minute material. One of the men's rooms had a long one-way mirror in front of the urinals, so that while I stood there peeing, I could watch people casually walking by. It was surrealistic to be shaking out those last few drops of urine while a woman who couldn't see me appeared to be looking right at me as she applied her lipstick.

When I returned to my motel, there was a message that Holly had phoned. I called her back. She was about to be taken to the hospital by a neighbor. She had been bitten by a spider and her arm was painfully swollen. I called again later, right before my show, and she was crying because a doctor had told her that if the infection reached the bone, her arm could be paralyzed. Somehow I went onstage and did a surprisingly good show, perhaps because I had to concentrate so hard in order to keep my emotions on hold.

The next morning in my motel room, I got a call from Jeanne. "I've raised that girl for seventeen years, and now you're killing her." I could see my jaw drop in the mirror. I was speechless. "Paul"--I heard Jeanne's voice--"you're not laughing."

Jeanne had zeroed in on the core of my vulnerability, but the relief that she was only joking was worth the tension of that brief moment when I thought she was serious.

•

There was a line I sometimes used onstage: "Pope John Paul has issued a pronunciamento that, under extreme circumstances, a one-night stand may be considered a form of monogamy." And sometimes that's exactly what happened when I performed in another city--instant intimacy. A few months after one such encounter with a young woman named Bernadette, I got a call from her. She was planning to visit San Francisco and wanted to stay with me. She confessed to having fantasies of being spanked by me.

When I was a kid my father bought a cat-o'-nine-tails, which he used to punish my brother, my sister and me. I was lucky enough to understand on some gut level that he was a victim of his own conditioning. When he finally realized he couldn't break us, he broke the cat-o'-nine-tails and threw it away. After Holly was born I began researching child abuse for The Realist and learned that parents who abuse their offspring were consistently abused by their parents. That practice is passed on from one generation to another, as if it is in the genes rather than imitative behavior. But I never had the slightest doubt that I would break that pattern.

When I was a guest on the Mike Douglas Show in Philadelphia, I mentioned that I didn't spank my daughter, and the matronly audience started booing me. During a commercial break, another guest, Minnie Pearl of Grand Ole Opry fame, said to me, "I'm a-scared of nonconformity."

I was surprised. "Are you kidding?" I said. "You're wearing a bonnet with the price tag still hanging from it."

So now here was Bernadette on the phone saying, "I've been having fantasies of being spanked by you. Would you do it?"

"But," I protested, "I'm nonviolent."

"So am I," she said.

"Were you spanked as a child? I have this theory that when kids get spanked, but then the parent feels guilty and hugs them, the kids begin to associate pain with warmth."

"I wasn't spanked as a child," she said.

"Well, there goes that theory." Women were asserting themselves and saying out loud what pleased them sexually. And men were expected to do those things that women were now free to tell them they wanted. "All right," I said, "when you visit, I promise I'll spank you. But when you say stop, I promise I'll stop."

"No, no--don't say that. It's the vulnerability that turns me on."

"Yeah, but it's fake vulnerability, because you trust me. I mean, you didn't call Melvin the Mauler."

She never did visit, but I fantasized about it. I imagined that in my room I would be spanking a 27-year-old woman, while in another room slept my 17-year-old daughter, whom I had gotten booed by the audience on the Mike Douglas Show for not spanking.

•

Economic security had always been very important in my family. My father moonlighted as a short-order cook, and he used to put three piles of change from his tips on the floor, for my brother, my sister and me. When my parents came back from a vacation in Las Vegas, my father gave each of us a silver dollar, with the admonition, "You are never to spend this. It's a reminder that you can always come to your mother and me if you ever need money." So I passed on my silver dollar to Holly with that same admonition, thereby carrying on my father's tradition.

The year 1982 became a turning point for both Holly and me. She was celebrating her 18th birthday and I was mourning my 50th. On January 23rd I presented her with one of those novelty newspaper front pages bearing the headline Holly Krassner becomes legal! On April 9th she presented me with a foot massager, a gift certificate for ice cream and several pads so I could write down all her telephone messages. I had been somewhat melancholy as I approached the half-century mark, brooding over projects that had long remained undone and regretting relationships that had never been properly nurtured. I was rationalizing my current period of celibacy when Holly gave me some advice.

"Dad, have fun while you're young. Not having fun is what makes you older."

So I started going out again. One afternoon Holly came home with her new boyfriend, only to find me in bed with my new girlfriend, who felt slightly awkward.

"It's all right," Holly reassured her. "I'm a liberal daughter."

"I'm glad you guys are here," I said. "My cock is about to fall off."

"I'm glad that we're here," Holly's boyfriend replied. "My cock is about to fall off."

We all laughed heartily, but I felt some kind of archetypal discomfort at this reference to his sexual prowess with my daughter, as though some unspoken primordial taboo had just been shattered.

•

Holly began to remind me more and more of her mother. The way she walked, the way she said certain words--such as "wonderful"--even the way she prepared food, biting the ends off string beans, then spitting the ends into the sink. One day I noticed that the wedding photo of Jeanne and me was missing from the wall behind Holly's bed. At first I thought it might be a symbolic gesture of independence, but she explained that a friend had brought over some cocaine and they had chopped it up with a razor blade on the glass in the frame. "But you can't write about that," she quickly added. We had an agreement that Holly would have to approve anything I wrote about her, because, after all, you can't tell your own daughter, "Nyah, nyah, you forgot to say that was off the record."

"Too bad," I said. "It would show how you don't have any false sentimentality, and that we communicate with such honesty."

"I just don't want people to think I'm a dopehead."

"What difference does it make what other people think? You know, there was a time when John Lennon and Yoko Ono were getting a lot of bad publicity, and they were really upset about it. So I gave them this little strip of paper from a Chinese fortune cookie that I'd been carrying around. It said, 'If you are standing straight, it doesn't matter if your shadow is crooked.' But, of course I'll respect our agreement."

However, Holly had a heavy date that evening and she couldn't find her car keys. She was starting to panic. "Dad," she said, "if you can find my car keys, you can tell the coke story, OK?"

I found her car keys, but I told her that she didn't have to keep her part of the bargain.

Holly was 19 when she decided to leave San Francisco and go to school in London. I could finally remove the spaghetti from my kitchen ceiling. It had been stuck up there for two years. Ken Kesey came over and removed from the wall my photo of the napalmed child and his mother. It had been there for 12 years.

Before Holly left I did a show at the Roxie Theater. She checked the sound system, made sure there was a stool and that I had a glass of orange juice. "Dad," she said, just as I was about to go onstage, "I have to tell you something. I'm not yours."

•

I was going through some sort of mid-life crisis. I missed Holly, I missed publishing The Realist, I missed having a girlfriend. Then I met Rachel Hickerson. She was a writer who used the pseudonym Pheno Barbidol. We were both scheduled to be in New York at the same time and we arranged to spend a few days together there. When I returned to San Francisco, I called and asked her to marry me, and she said yes. Alex Bennett agreed to perform the wedding ceremony on his morning radio show, and Herb Caen announced it in his column. This all sounded like great fun in the media, but in reality it was a terrible romantic illusion. We hardly knew each other. I kept asking myself, "What have I done?" I had apparently lost my sense of cause and effect. Rachel stayed at my apartment for six schizophrenic weeks, with me serving as the source of both her pain and her comfort.

Right after Christmas 1983, Arnie Passman booked me as the opening act for Professor Irwin Corey, the 72-year-old "world's foremost authority," in a four-day run at the Julia Morgan Theater in Berkeley. Backstage, Corey told me how he used to read Nazi hate literature to get himself in the mood to perform. Rachel came to the theater with me a couple of times, but not on closing night, when I met Orli Peter, a graduate student in psychology. Although we talked only briefly, there was a spark between us. We were supposed to get together, but Rachel was still living at my apartment, so I kept postponing my first date with Orli. Finally, on the day before Rachel was going to leave, Orli called, insisting we meet either that evening or the next. Naturally I chose the next evening. Rachel left at 4 p.m. the next day, and Orli arrived at 8 o'clock.

I was amazed at my own resilience.

Orli and I ended up living together. Our relationship was confrontational but fun. One time we were having an argument and I flashed my middle finger at her and said, "Up yours!" She made a circle with her fingers and thumb and said, "In this!" There was an age difference--I was 52 and she was 28--which was not really a problem, but she wanted to have children someday and I was extremely ambivalent about starting a family at this stage in my life. Jeanne gave me her blessing. "Good luck," she said. "You'll just be an old fart with a young kid." I sent a letter to Holly in London, and this was her response:

Dear Dad,

I received your "father-to-daughter-turning-21" birthday letter. Thank you, it made me laugh and cry. Only moments before the mailman slipped the letter through the door, I was telling my friend what wonderful parents I have and how much I miss them--what timing. I think it's wonderful that you and Orli have been together a whole year now. She must be an incredible lady. I love you very, very much, not only because you are my father but because you are also a wonderful friend. What a surprise to find out you are actually considering raising a family. I know that I've always wanted to be your only child--but that's pure daughter selfishness. I've always been my daddy's little girl, in all the years I didn't live with you, in the few years I did, and even now, living so far away, I am and will always be your little girl. I guess I'm now at an age that I can take care of myself and I guess you are, too. As you said, your kids could play with mine--what a funny idea. Just make sure that's what you really want before you do it. I suppose this is my daughter-to-father lecture. Regardless of the fact that I grew up with my parents separated and slightly crazy, I can't imagine anyone loving her father and mother more than I love mine, nor can I imagine having grown up differently.

So if I'm about to have brothers or sisters, I want them to have the same happiness and the same strength (without needing it so much) that I have had. They couldn't ask for a better father, though I can hardly picture you changing diapers and playing baseball in the park. I'm sure Orli would be a wonderful mother, though I haven't met her yet. I know what you're like, so I can only guess what a woman living with you would be like. I also know that out of all the girlfriends you have had, you couldn't have picked anyone better to be my mother. I just don't want you to do anything rash. I do remember a wedding announcement a little over a year ago that has long since been forgotten. You must realize by now that us kids, well, we're a lifelong commitment. You're right, it is a hard but enjoyable process to know what you really want (sometimes). I have complete faith in you and I'm sure you'll make the right choice. Don't worry about my daughter selfishness; my support is with you whatever you do. I think I had to write all this down because your letter was such a shock to me, not a bad shock, more of a surprise. The idea had just never come into my head that the idea of raising a family would ever come into your head. So you can see, having never thought about it, it was a true surprise. No matter what happens I love you lots and it will be a real trip for both of us to see what I do with my life....

Holly's letter forced me to admit that I really didn't want to be a new daddy. Us kids are a lifelong commitment. I realized that I simply didn't want to make that commitment. Orli and I loved each other, but we had different goals in life. Despite the bond between us, we would have to go our separate ways.

That summer I worked at Winnarain-bow, a camp for the performing arts run by Jahanarah and Wavy Gravy. I was the comedy counselor. At the end of the season I made love with another counselor on the outdoor trampoline. The next morning I noticed a stain on the trampoline from my semen. I found a piece of chalk and drew an outline around the stain. It was, after all, the corpse of Holly's sibling.

Holly had gone to visit a Greek island and stayed there, working as a dishwasher and cleaning squid for a dollar an hour, eight hours a day, seven days a week. To take a bath she had to climb into her kitchen sink. But now she was back in London and planning to return to America. She sent a photo taken in one of those booths where she held up a handwritten card with each of the four poses, so that you could read this vertical message in front of her smiling faces: Dear dad send money!

Six years later Holly was the manager of community and government relations at KQED, the PBS and NPR affiliates in San Francisco. I was performing in town and staying at her apartment. One day, because it was raining hard and she traveled by motor scooter, I was tempted to call her at work and tell her that if the ground was too slippery to drive on, I'd be glad to pay for a cab. But Holly was now 27 (old enough to spank), and I realized that if I were in Venice and it were raining in San Francisco, I wouldn't phone her. So now, even if she were to die because her motor scooter slid in the rain and I would have to live with that horror for the rest of my life, I still had to let go of my paternalism and trust her judgment. I decided not to call. When Holly came home, I told her how I had resolved my dilemma.

"Oh," she said casually, "if it had been raining too hard, I would have taken a bus home."

Over dinner we were talking about the way you realize how dependent you are on appliances only when the electricity goes off.

"Speaking of appliances," she said, "do you ever use that microwave oven Mom and I gave you last Christmas?"

"Yeah, once in a while, to heat up soup and things. You know what, though, I left the little door open and I found a few mouse turds on the tray inside. If I ever actually caught a mouse inside the microwave, I'd try to shut the door before it could escape."

"Dad, I can't believe you'd nuke a mouse."

"No, I'd never do that. I would just unplug the microwave and carry it outside, and let the mouse go free."

"And then you'd race it to see who could get back to the house first."

"And the mouse would win."

"I asked, 'Do you know who Hitler was?' 'Didn't he lead the Jews out of Germany?' 'Well, not exactly."'