◆ SpookStack

. pues rr ee a I'‘Was a Poet for the FBI - Murder, suicide, mayhem. Wow! The stories { could tell See my agent. Even before God was insulted at Vale I was at the U of I picking up . ppondees and trochees in the Co-op and counting the condoms in the oo: boneyard on Monday morning, % I was Ed Hoover's man at VMCA College collecting free verse in the ledies” room and once, disguised as Oscar Wilde, in -the men's toilet. Cash McCall is my co-pilot. At the Green Mask, in the very shadow of the Tribune Tower—may I speak freely? the beard of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was burned in ritual orgy, hair by hair. In Chicago I joined the Escalator Movement under the name of Gertrude Stein and nobody suspected anything. From a poet named Rexroth J learned about six different kinds of sex, sll of them subversive. In dives on Rush Street we [ay on divans in mixed company and talked about modern art, waited on by aaked African pygmies. We sat on the floor aod read Edna St. Vincent Millay, aloud. I could name names and places. . ; On orders from Ezra Pound I infiltrated the Saturday Evening Post and planted excerpts from Edgar A. Guest. One night I broke into the Saturday Review and lopped off Literature from the masthead. Nobody noticed it. Four times T escaped from behind curtains—ircan, bamboo, dimity and - shower, and once I barely made it by way of a bedroom fire escape clad only in pajama tops. Danger is my business. I foyod ao atheist in a foxhole and reported him to General MacArthur. Twice I was shot down in missions over Union Square, Waldorf Cafeteria, Camp Nitgedieget and the League of American Penwomen. Arthur . Godfrey is my co-pilot. ; ; I joined the Brownian Movement before it splic with the Fourth Dimensheviks, Big Jim Openheimer was its Party boss. I would tell you about my affair arith Tiltie Zilch hue that's acill slaceified Ht igre frich Bul thats stil crassine a. I was there when they dubbed the Communist Manifesto into the movie of Charlie's Aunt, and nipped the conspiracy to smuggle quotations from Karl Marx into the popcorn bagx. Now they're plotsing to foul up the rhymes in the singing commercials. - -- Ten grand buys my tale of horror at the Cotton Club when Louis Armstrong gang EG Elt on secree orders from the Elders of Zion, and the borschtcapades in the Holland Tunnel with Mickey Katz on Walpurgis- pacht. Commander Whitehead is my ¢o-piles, . For an extra grand Uli tefl ail T know about free verse, free love, free lunch, free wheeling and free pop at barbecues of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Dadaist front ¢ontrotied by Tristan Tzara and Ogden Nash. ay Now, back in the free world, with my unexpurgated copy of Ann Morrow Lindbergh's The Unicera and the complete files of the Soviet Ministry of Culture 1 am Poet in Residence at Time, Life and Fartuar, Zsa Zsa Gabor is, my co-pilot. Lawrence Lipton. Reprinted with his permission. ‘ BRATS IE PAV DION . 4 ay a U + r* ee | ie Pe Pe ee _-