The Magical World of Shel Silverstein

He was everywhere. With shiny head and bushy beard and wry grin, he came at you from all directions. His cartoons appeared regularly in the early issues of Playboy. Perhaps, if you've been a reader long enough, you remember his days as the magazine's designated world traveler, armed only with his passport, expense account and sketch pad in Tokyo, London and Nairobi. If you're younger, you may have come aboard with his children's books, shots of delightfully twisted cynicism in a market awash in fey fantasy. Maybe you've heard his songs or seen his plays. Maybe you just remember him as one of the most extraordinary men you've ever encountered.

For half a century Shel Silverstein plied his trade in these pages and elsewhere. His work charmed or cut or seduced or startled; it still reverberates. With rhymes both internal and infernal, with wicked wit and gentle sentiment and a delirious joy in strutting his stuff, this freaky folkie jazzbo and best-selling tunesmith sang songs, told tales, sketched new worlds and worked words like nobody's business.

You know Silverstein. He's this: "We take all kinda pills to give us all kinda thrills/But the thrill we've never known/Is the thrill that'll get ya when you get your picture/On the cover of the Rolling Stone." And this: "Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout would not take the garbage out!" He's "My name is Sue. How do you do? Now you gonna die!" And "There's a polar bear/In our Frigidaire/He likes it 'cause it's cold in there." And "There's gonna be a Freaker's Ball tonight at the Freaker's Hall." And "There was green alligators and long-neck geese/Some humpty-back camels and some chimpanzees/Some cats and rats and elephants, but sure as you're born/The loveliest of all was the Unicorn."

But Silverstein was more than a list of famous lines, more than hits like Johnny Cash's "A Boy Named Sue," Dr. Hook's "Cover of the Rolling Stone" and the Irish Rovers's "The Unicorn," more than the classic books The Giving Tree, Where the Sidewalk Ends and 2005's bestselling Runny Babbit, published more than five years after his death in May 1999. He created 19 books, 800 songs, a few hundred published and unpublished plays, nine albums, four movie scores, one screenplay and 400 poems. (These figures are approximate and maybe even irrelevant; you can't pin Silverstein down with numbers.) He acted in movies and appeared on TV as much as he wanted and less than he could have. He drew cartoons and wrote humor for Playboy from 1956 until his death. He stayed at the Playboy Mansion and hung out wiht Lenny Bruce, Jules Feiffer, Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, James Baldwin and a good chunk of the other people worth knowing during the past 50 years.

"He was a true Renaissance man, a man of multiple talents beyond the art and the humor I initially saw in him," says Hugh Hefner, Playboy Editorin-Chief, who in 1956 jump-started Silverstein's post-Army career with a check for several hundred dollars.

In an article he wrote for The New York Times, playwright David Mamet, a fellow Chicagoan and a longtime friend of Silverstein's, got right to the point: "Where I come from," he began, "Shel Silverstein was a demigod." Country singer Bobby Bare, who had hits with Silverstein songs ranging from the sentimental ("Daddy What If") to the raucous ("The Winner") to the weird ("Marie Laveau"), says, "I think he's probably the best songwriter ever, in country music or any other field." Rik Elswit, a member of Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show--the beneficiary of three albums' worth of Silverstein Iyrics--once wrote, "He lived on his talent, wit and charm, and he was oversupplied in all."

But then, Silverstein knew that: "Tell me I'm clever,/Tell me I'm kind,/Tell me I'm talented,/Tell me I'm cute,/Tell me I'm sensitive,/Graceful and wise,/Tell me I'm perfect,/But tell me the truth." ("Tell Me," from Falling Up, 1996).

*

Silverstein didn't like to explain himself, and for the last 25 years of his life he refused virtually all interview requests. But in 1986 he sat down with Hefner and provided hours of unpublished reminiscences, from which his quotes for this story are taken. In a way, the clearest picture of Silverstein comes from his work: The gleefully deranged children's books, in which most of Uncle Shelby's fairy tales assuredly do not have happy endings; the sharp, skewed wit of the cartoons; the tear-jerking ballads and raucous hymns to excess and indulgence; the sheer bulk of his unclassifiable, uncategorizable, uncontrollable imagination.

"In some cases, what writers do on paper or onstage is a far cry from their other life," Hefner says. "But that's not the case with Shel. He was Uncle Shelby. He was the dreamer. He was his work."

*

Maybe the best way to proceed is to start with Silverstein's introduction to Playboy. It was 1956; Shel, the eldest child of Nathan and Helen Balkany Silverstein, a working-class couple from Chicago, was in his mid-20s. He had just come home from Japan, Where he'd been stationed in the Army and become something of a celebrity with his Stars and Stripes cartoons about military life; he even collected them into a book, alternately titled Take Ten and Grab Your Socks! In Chicago he was a scuffling civilian trying to sell cartoons to anybody--including a new magazine that was being produced out of a four-room office on East Superion Street.

"He brought some cartoons in and left them with a secretary," Hefner remembers. "And after not hearing from us for a few weeks, he came in and wanted them back." As Silverstein watched, Hefner found the cartoons, looked through them, bought more than half and wrote a check on the spot. Silverstein had his doubts about the new magazine's solvency, so he immediately searched for a place to cash the check. "I really thought at the time that I was meeting a guy who just woke up, which is a legitimate concern, you know?" he said, laughing about Hefner's disheveled appearance. "And it wasn't just a coincidence that he happened to give me the check at five minutes to five on a Friday. Of course not only will the check not be good, but when I get back, he won't be there."

He casjed the check and took the stack of small billy--about $500, more than Silverstein's father made in a week--home to his parents. "I threw the money in the air and then saw the sadness in my father's face," he said. "He was broke and had gone out of busines and had always considered me just a useless guy. And now my scribbles brought this, and a lifetime of work brought him nothing. What I wanted was an Andy Hardy solution, but I saw this face of bewilderment and disillusion. He didn't connect to the world anymore, where a kid could go out and bring this back."

*

"Listen to the Mustn'ts, child,/Listen to the Don'ts/Listen to the Shouldn'ts/The Impossibles, the won'ts/Listen to the Never Haves./Then listen close to me--/Anything can happen, child,/Anything can be."--"Listen to the Mustn'ts," from Where the Sidewalk Ends, 1974

*

It didn't take long for Silverstein to become more than just another Playboy cartoonist. "In effect," Hefner says, "he became our house humorist." He created cartoons and wrote poem and a feature called Teevee Jeebies. In his bestknown regular feature, he went around the world and sent back sketches illustrating his adventures. It was Hefner's idea to have Silverstein put himself in the cartoons, but Silverstein initially resisted. "I thought it was vain," he said. In fact he tried to turn down the assignment and give the money back, worried that he couldn't guarantee that Playboy would get what it wanted. Hefner refused. "It was the utmost expression of confidence," said Silverstein. "More than I had in myself."

The series helped make him one of Playboy's early stars, alongside luminaries ranging from Ray Bradbury and Ian Fleming to Jules Feiffer and LeRoy Neiman. "Shel and I were a team for years," Neiman says. "We'd go out and see a knockout girl walking down the street, and we'd go up and tell her we represented Playboy magazine and ask if she wanted to be a Playmate. Of course we had no official sanction to do anything like that. Most of the girls told us to get lost. But if they were at all interested, we'd pull out a tape measure and tell them we had to measure them on the spot to see if they had the qualifications. Shel was a master at that."

Hefner sought to reinvent himself, to define what he calls "a whole new iconoclastic sensibility that defied the status quo of the 1950s. It was a freedom to pursue your own particular desires and not be locked to the past." The men he gathered around him were doing the same. Silverstein started out as a frequent visitor to the Playboy offices and ended up staying at the Playboy Mansion, where he occupied the Red Room for months at a time. The kid who'd never had much luck with girls was surrounded by the most beautiful women in Chicago. He was becoming a star in his hometown.

"Making it big anywhere, when you had nothing, has to be a wonderful experience for a young man," said Silverstein. "Making it big in your hometown, on the streets where you scuffled, is beyond anything."

Particularly after the early 1960s, when he began publishing books such as Lafcadio, the Lion Who Shot Back and A Giraffe and a Half, Silverstein was a success in two disparate arenas. "He had one foot in the world of children's books and one foot in the adult Disneyland of Playboy," says his nephew, writer Mitch Myers. "Roald Dahl is really the only other person who did that." In fact, Silverstein was one of the most successful authors of children's books to come out of the 1960s. But he embraced the Playboy lifestyle, not the more sedate role of a children's author. When Ursula Nordstrom, his editor at Harper & Row, asked him over lunch if psychotherapy was responsible for his easygoing state, he loudly explained that he had no need for a shrink. "If I were hung up on goats," he said, "why, I would just find myself the sweetest, prettiest, cleanest goat in the world. That's what I'd do." (In a letter to a friend, Nordstrom wrote that she then quickly changed the subject.)

Silverstein enjoyed the company of Playmates and Bunnies and palled around with rising stars such as Bill Cosby and Lenny Bruce. In 1963, on the night before Bruce went to trial on an obscenity charge in Chicago, he took refuge with Silverstein at the Playboy Mansion, and the two stayed up all night, talking. The next morning, Silverstein provided Bruce with a shirt (Hefner lent a tie) so the celebrated defendant would look more presentable in court.

Talking to Hefner years later, Silverstein summed up the appeal of Playboy's life of reinvention. "You were always so supportive of the individual fulfilling what he had to do," he told Hefner. "Those of us whose dreams were different from yours were still able to have the kind of life we wanted. LeRoy Neiman's dream was to be in cafe society and have a long mustache. Vic Lownes wanted to be a country gentleman and could be a country gentleman. Those who wanted to go out and live quietly could take it wherever they wanted to."

At the time Silverstein said this, he didn't elaborate about the particular dream Playboy had allowed him to achieve or the persona he chose to adopt. But 20 years later, Hefner thinks he knows what Silverstein had in mind. "Look at the fact that while he was spending so much time at the Mansion, he also had a houseboat in Sausalito, a place in New York, a place he stayed in Nashville," Hefner says. "I think he wanted to be a folk hero, a Renaissance man, which is exactly what he was."

*

"I asked the zebra,/Are you black with white stripes?/Or white with black stripes?/And the zebra asked me,/Are you good with bad habits?/Or are you bad with good habits?/Are you noisy with quiet times?/or are you quiet with noisy times?/Are you happy with some sad days?/Or are you sad with some happy days?/Are you neat with some sloppy ways?/Or are you sloppy with some neat ways?/And on and on and on and on/And on and on he went./I'll never ask a zebra/About stripes again."--"Zebra Question," from A Light in the Attic, 1981

*

Silverstein was many different things. Here are nine things we know about him:

1. If he wasn't at his desk when inspiration struck, he'd write notes on his hand. When he ran out of space there, he'd continue up his arm.

2. He sported a full beard from the beginning of his career, but by the end of the 1960s he started shaving his head. "He was one of the first men who could pull off the shaved-head look," says Neiman. "He always complained that Yul Brynner and Telly Savalas shaved their heads because he shaved his." Neiman laughs and says, "Shel was jealous because these two guys had bald heads, even though he wasn't the first one to do it."

3. He admitted to having a tough time with people he didn't know and sometimes made himself scarce when famous people--say, the Rolling Stones--came to visit the Playboy Mansion.

4. He had a reputation for being cranky around kids, which he played up in works such as Uncle Shelby's ABZ Book, a twisted primer intended for adults but written as if it were addressed to children. And yet everyone has stories about how good Silverstein (who had a daughter in 1970 and a son in 1984) was with kids. He was a big hit when he read his stories to the (continued on page 151) Shel Silverstein (continued from page 78) kindergarten class of Hefner's two sons. He'd call Bobby Bare's daughter and talk for an hour in the character of Mrs. Mouse. He'd assume the voice of an ogre and ad-lib a new tale every time Mamet's daughter knocked on the door of his Martha's Vineyard house. Whenever a child asked for an autograph, he'd write his or her name and then deftly turn it into an animal of some sort. Much of Silverstein's affinity for children came from his feelings for his daughter, Shoshanna, who died of a brain aneurysm when she was 11. "It was the single most devastating event of his life," says Hefner, "and I don't think he ever really recovered from it."

5. In restaurants, he was known for sending back dishes.

6. When he heard something funny he'd usually shrug his shoulders, cock his head and grin. It took a lot to get more than that out of him. "Some of my fondest memories are of us making Shel laugh," says Dennis Locorriere, lead singer of Dr. Hook and a lifelong friend. "One of my prize moments of all time was the sight of coffee coming out of Shel's nose."

7. He liked fame--to a certain degree. "I wanted to be famous," he admitted to Hefner. "I wanted to have a beard and a trench coat, you know?" But once he became famous, he backed off. At one point he decided he didn't want to appear on TV anymore, though he'd been a guest on Johnny Carson's show and continued to receive offers. "I'm famous enough," he told Locorriere. Silverstein believed fame was like money: If you squander it, you have nothing left.

8. He was a perfectionist when it came to lyrics, but less so about music. "He'd sing the song, and he'd sing you a different melody every time," Locorriere says. "He'd say, 'Sing the melody that suits you, but don't change a fucking word.'" When he gave "A Boy Named Sue" to Johnny Cash, the song was nothing but lyrics. Cash read the words off a sheet of paper when he played the song for inmates at San Quentin in 1969 and scored the biggest hit of his career.

"He was untouchable when it came to lyrics," Bare says, "but he had only three or four melodies, which made my job easier. When you got a new song from Shel, you knew you could concentrate on those lyrics."

9. A teenage baseball fanatic and a big fan of the Chicago Cubs, he'd been a peanut vendor at Wrigley Field. "That's where he developed that voice of his," Neiman says. When Silverstein recorded audio versions of his children's books, he grunted, shouted, chortled and unleashed an array of sounds in his sly, gravelly croak of a voice. But when he sang, it was a unique sound. "We were rehearsing one night at the Holiday Inn because I wanted to make sure I had some phrasings right," Bare says. "We'd been going over stuff for about two hours, and finally he got frustrated with something I was doing. He said, 'No, I'll show you. It goes like this.' He sang a couple of lines, and right away there was a pounding on the wall from the room next door, and a woman screamed, 'Shut the fuck up!' I said, 'Shel, I've been sitting here singing for two or three hours and nothing happened. You open up your mouth once and that voice slashed through the wall and woke that woman up.'"

•

If you want to marry me, here's what you'll have to do:

You must learn how to make a perfect chicken-dumpling stew.

And you must sew my holey socks,

And soothe my troubled mind,

And develop the knack for scratching my back,

And keep my shoes spotlessly shined.

And while I rest you must rake up the leaves,

And when it is hailing and snowing

You must shovel the walk ... and be still when I talk,

And--hey--where are you going?

--"My Rules," from Where the Sidewalk Ends

Silverstein never married. He lived his life, often as not, surrounded by beautiful women, whose attention he accepted, as he once commented, with "surprise and gratitude." He claimed to have rarely pursued for long: After two rejections, he said, he'd give up. "I deeply believe that if she rejects me at first," he explained, "then I will never create the magic in her." Then again, he didn't have to do much pursuing. "He was very attracted to hippie chicks," says Hefner, "and they were very attracted to him."

To outsiders, the Playboy Mansion was a smorgasbord of delights for the handful of men--Hefner, Silverstein, Playboy Club executive John Dante and no more than a couple of others at most times--who played within its walls. But it was also a world with responsibilities and a few hard realities. "I remember one time I was in the Red Room when somebody else was in the Blue Room, and the closet was open. You could really hear it through the wall," Silverstein said. "It happened to be a girl I had fallen in love with at a distance who decided she didn't want any part of me. She wound up staying with my neighbor in the room, and all night long I heard the screams and groans. I remember lying there thinking, You better be able to take this, because this is a part of the dues. If you can't take it, go out where you're safe--where you'll never hear it, but you'll never have it, either."

Silverstein took it--relished it, in fact. He was, after all, living the revenge of the awkward, unathletic youngster who had never been too successful with girls growing up. (The Dr. Hook hit "Sylvia's Mother," about a guy who phones his girlfriend as she's leaving to marry someone else, is a true story.) "I believe that the guys who get it early never develop the qualities needed to get it for the rest of their life," he said. "If I had my choice, I would have been a great third baseman with three girls on my arm." It was his initial lack of success in that arena, he said, that drove him to develop other talents. "By the time I could get the girls, I already knew how to write poems and draw pictures. Thank God I was able to develop these things, which I could keep, before I got the goodies that were my first choice."

He eventually did get the goodies. "I remember him calling the front desk one night at the Ramada Inn in Nashville, where he had a room for a while," says Kris Kristofferson, who co-wrote a number of songs with him. "He was entertaining a lady in his room, and he didn't want to turn the lights on. But he wanted a little light, so he called the front desk and asked if they could turn on the red message light on his phone. They turned it on, and he used it as his mood light."

•

Valerie: You are destroying my sanity.

Leonard: You'll be better off without it. Mine got destroyed years ago--I don't miss it a bit.

--from Click, from Shel's Shorts, 2003

For a while Chicago was home, but that couldn't last indefinitely: Silverstein needed to leave the Red Room, however delightful it may have been, to realize all his ambitions. He got an apartment in Manhattan's SoHo district and became a part of the Greenwich Village folk scene. Judy Collins, the Brothers Four, the Smothers Brothers and even the Serendipity Singers recorded his songs. He also hung out with the playwright and screenwriter Herb Gardner (A Thousand Clowns) and the humorist Jean Shepherd (A Christmas Story). Silverstein helped Shepherd, a popular late-night radio personality in New York, get started as a writer, encouraging him to tape-record and transcribe his reflections on his childhood, which Shepherd eventually submitted to Playboy.

Later Silverstein set his sights on Nashville, where witty songs were always in demand and it was easy for a wild man on leave from the Playboy Mansion to distinguish himself. "He stood out, especially early on," Bare says. "People in Nashville were conservative, and Shel was kind of freaky looking."

For much of Nashville, though, Silverstein's history more than compensated for his freakiness. "Like everybody else I knew, I was in awe of Playboy magazine," says Bare. "In those first years of Playboy, I'd seen all the goofy things She did, traveling around the world and doing cartoons. I saw the picture of Shel naked in London with a guitar in front of him, and I was impressed."

Cowboy Jack Clement, a Nashville rebel who'd worked in Sam Phillips's Sun Records studio in the 1950s, remembers that Silverstein quickly charmed Music City. "I don't remember anybody not liking him," Clement says. "People really got a kick out of the fact that he was writing children's books and doing cartoons for playboy at the same time. But even more, he was a magical kind of guy. It was obvious he was some kind of genius."

When Silverstein came to town, Kristofferson was part of a gang of talented but scuffling songwriters who were trying to interest the Nashville pros in their material. "I was living in a tenement in a condemned building, in an apartment that cost me $25 a month," he says. "When shel got there, all the wheelers and dealers in Nashville--Chet Atkins and all of those big guys--wanted to hang out with him, mostly, I think, because of his relationship with playboy. But instead Shel hung out with me and this group of songwriters who were trying to make it. Of course he was a hero to us, because he had written 'The Unicorn' and 'A Boy Named Sue.' He had credentials, which none of us had." Silverstein's songs were recorded by Bare, Loretta Lynn, Tom T. Hall and many others. "He wrote all the time," says Kristofferson, who figures he co-wrote more songs with Silverstein than with any other songwriter. "He was on fire."

•

I went to find the pot of gold

That's waiting where the rainbow ends.

I searched and searched and searched and searched

And searched and searched, and then--

There it was, deep in the grass,

Under an old and twisty bough.

It's mine, it's mine, it's mine at last...

What do I search for now?

--"The Search," from Where the Sidewalk Ends

Hefner moved west in the early 1970s. Silverstein stayed at the new Playboy Mansion in Holmby Hills when he was in Los Angeles, but it was never home the way the one in Chicago had been. He had a place in New York and homes on Martha's Vineyard and in Key West. He bought a luxurious houseboat in Sausalito, an arty community across the bay from San Francisco. There he entertained such visitors as Bob Dylan, who dropped by in 1974, pulled out a guitar and asked for Silverstein's opinion as he played all the songs that would make up the classic Blood on the Tracks.

His lifestyle was not luxurious, but he was comfortable. "Shel was a millionaire, but he didn't live like one. He never showed off with money," Neiman says with a chuckle, "and he was the greatest freeloader I ever knew."

Silverstein increasingly moved into the world of theater, writing dozens of comedic one-act plays and befriending Mamet, who met him when the two were part of an evening of three one-act plays in Chicago. (Elaine May wrote the third.) The night they met, Mamet once explained, they closed down a fish joint and then quoted Kipling to each other all the way up and down North Michigan Avenue. They co-wrote the 1988 movie Things Change. In the late 1980s Mamet and Silverstein each wrote one-act plays that ran together for three months at Lincoln Center. Silverstein's was an hour-long monologue adapted from his story The Devil and Billy Markham, which was originally published in playboy. He prevailed on Dr. Hook's Locorriere to perform it because, he told the singer, "I don't want to explain myself to actors."

In 1986, when Silverstein sat down with Hefner in L.A. to talk about the old days, he was reflective. "I imagine myself in Chicago now, at this age, in this state of mind, and there would be no place I would rather be," he said. "It was the friendship, the camaraderie. There were my closest friends, there were the choice women. What more did I ever want anyway?" He thought back to his childhood, to parents who were approaching 40 when he was born, and to how at a certain point their friends started dying. "It was a part of me that was going," he said, adding that the older he got the more he valued his own friends and was willing to forgive slights. After all, he said, the harm that other people had done to him "was nothing compared with what I did to myself and do to myself daily."

Travel, he said, meant less and less to him. Instead he was turning to the time he spent with his son and other loved ones. "Closeness with real friends is becoming the most valuable thing of all," he said. "It always was valuable for me, but in my younger days getting the new fuck that night would break up any conversation." He thought for a moment about what he was saying and clarified his thinking. "Not that it still wouldn't, but she might not be invited two out of three nights."

All this domesticity went against the image Silverstein had cultivated for most of his life. But at a time when, he said, he was "counting the years, counting the friends gained and the friends lost," the man who had reinvented himself three decades earlier was unapologetic about his new set of priorities. "When fighting all the systems and all the guardrails, breaking down barriers and getting rid of the images other people are laying on you--those of us who do that find we then create our own," he said. "If I've created an image of a world traveler, an adventurer, and the fact is that I fucking want to sit down and grow roses and live with Suzie Q, then I'm going to do it. It's funny that that's the hardest fight to win, but I have a right to do that. I'm not going to be bound by my own shit."

•

I've got a couple more years on you baby, that's all

I've had more chances to fly and more places to fall

It ain't that I'm wiser

It's just that I've spent more time with my back to the wall

I've picked up a couple more years on you baby, that's all.

--from "A Couple More Years," recorded by Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings, 1977

The songs and plays and stories and cartoons kept coming. Silverstein lived in Key West during the winter and Martha's Vineyard during the summer. He headed to his other homes when the mood struck him. He wore baggy pants, unbuttoned shirts and an old leather jacket. He turned down invitations to most parties and events. He helped friends like Mamet when they needed a quick joke. He won an Oscar nomination for the song "I'm Checking Out," from Postcards From the Edge. At one point he wrote a batch of raucous new tunes ("Greasy Grit Gravy," "Elvis Has Left the Building," "I Don't Do It No More") and rounded up Bobby Bare, Waylon Jennings, Jerry Reed and Mel Tillis--four old-timers with great voices and keen senses of humor. When they weren't laughing, they recorded two albums' worth of material. They called it Old Dogs. "It was the most fun I ever had with my clothes on," Reed said.

At Christmas in 1998, Locorriere and his son were walking in Greenwich Village when they ran into Siverstein. "He was halfway down the street, looking real bohemian," he says. "He had words written all over his hand and up his arm, which he always did. We talked for a little bit, and I told him I was going to England. He said, "Do you think they remember me over there?'" Locorriere recalls that the winter night was dark, cold and gray and that Silverstein seemed far away.

Five months later, in early May, Bare had one of his daily telephone converstions with siverstein, who was in key West. "He said, 'I've got a feeling I have a flu bug or something,'" Bare says. "I said, "Where are you?" And he said, 'I'm in bed.' I said, 'Damn, you must be sick.' It was six o'clock there, and there was no way Shel would be in bed at six o'clock. The next day Herb Gardner called me and said, 'I've got some bad news.'"

Silverstein suffered a fatal heart attack on May 10, 1999, at the age of 68. The news hit his friends hard; Bare says it took him a year or two to get over the depression. "Shel was the only person I knew who took care of himself," he says. "He ate right. He wasn't doing drugs of alcohol."

Then again, Silverstein had already explained things in "Still Gonna Die," a song he'd given to Bare for the Old Dogs Project. The intro laid out the sad truth:

So you're taking better care of your body,

Becoming more aware fo your body,

Responding to your body's needs,

Everything you hear and read about diets, nutrition and sleeping position

And detoxifying the system, And buying machines that they advertise to help you exercise,

Herbs tto revitulize you if you're traumatized,

Soaps that will sanitize, sprays to deodorize,

Liquids to neutralize acids and persticides,

Free weights to maximize your strength and muscle size,

Shots that will immunize, pills to reenergize you.

But remember, that for all your pain and gain,

Eventually the story ends the same.

But of course the story didn't end. In 2002 Silverstein was posthumously inducted into the Nashville Songwriter's Hall of Fame. Gardner wrote the speech, and Bare delivered it. In 2005 Runny Babbit became a best-seller. Locorriere recorded the audio version, navigating line after line of torturous spoonerisms the way he thought Silverstein would have. This past August, Legacy Records released The Best of Shel Sivlerstein: His Words His Songs His Friends, which contains 15 of Silverstein's own recordings, plus tracks by Cash, Bare, Dr. Hook, kristofferson, the Irish Rovers, and Jennings and Nelson.

More will follow. In the works are re-releases of Silverstein's recordings, all the way back to his first, 1959's aptly titled Hairy Jazz. Simon & Schuster plans a compilation of his Playboy travelogues. His other books, meanwhile, aren't going anywhere--they're mainstays in bookstores and libraries.

Silverstein left behind a patchwork of relationships, of friends and relations, cohorts and colleagues, aiders and abettors. One of them, Locorriere, remembers looking around the memorial service held for Silverstein in Nashville. "it struck me," he says, "that a lot of us knew about each other, but we didn't really know each other, We knew only Shel. We were connected but only through Shel." He laughs. "Shel knew Jules Feiffer, Shel knew Bobby Bare. you think Jules Feiffer and Bobby Bare would have a lot to talk about over dinner? Or me and Hefner? I looked too disgusting to get into a biker bar back then, but Shel got me into the Playboy Mansion."

•

In the end it comes down to Silverstein's humanity, his heart. In 1981 he wrote a poem called "How Many, How Much." It reveals the sentimental side of a man who didn't always show it:

How many slams in an old screen door?

Depends on how loud you shut it.

How many slices in a bread?

Depends on how thin you cut it.

How much good iside a day?

Depends on how good you live'em.

How much love inside friends?

Depends on how much you give 'em.

It's Dark in here

I am writing these poemsFrom inside a lion,And it's rather dark in here.Which may not be too clear.But this afternoon by the lion's cageI'm afraid I got too near.And I'm writing these lines From inside a lion,And it's rather dark in here.

The Acrobats

I'll swingBy my ankles,She'll clingTo your knessAs you hangBy your noseFrom a high-upTrapeze.But just one thing, please,As we float through the breeze--Don't sneeze.

"Just think of it, comrade--under the Communist system of equal distribution, once every eight years the White Sox would win the pennant!"