In 1969 I was working as a junior book designer for Playboy's book division. My boss was Don Myrus, who'd later become editor of Gallery magazine when Playboy closed the book division. He would hire me as his art director at Gallery in 1973.

These were the 60s and they were volatile years. In Chicago, Black Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark had been murdered in their sleep during a police raid. And the police riots at the Democratic convention in '68 was fresh in all out memories. As were the Days of Rage, perpetrated by the SDS.

It was another world in a different universe.

The Democratic convention had been a defensive action. The Days of Rage, offensive. The Days of Rage was fundamentally guerilla units of radical firebrands run amok, breaking car windows in affluent neighborhoods and skirmishing with the authorities. The police were in force, in the street. Nearly as heavy as during the convention a year earlier. Small groups of malcontents would pop out of an alley and toss homemade firebombs and bricks at the police. There were not nearly as many kids running in the street as there at been during the '68 convention. And it was an event largely dismissed as foolhardy by the radical press. But the Weathermen had broken off from the Students for a Democratic Society and had gone underground, and they'd formed cells that built bombs they used to blow up (mainly) Bank of America branches and military recruiting stations. In 1970 there were over 300 bombings across the country.

In '69 I'd attended the last SDS convention at the Chicago Coliseum. The Coliseum, built in 1899, was on Wabash Avenue, between 14th and 16th Streets. It was a cavernous old building originally used as a sports arena and exhibition hall. Entering the building during the SDS conclave I passed through a great hall, on either side there were tables covered with seditious literature, administrated by stern and grumpy young apparatchiks. Behind the tables, from floor to ceiling , were giant poster images of Trotsky, Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Ho Chi Min. And other Communist dictators irrelevant to the fitful political jostling going on in 20th century America.

By '68 the SDS membership was at 50,000 strong but in '69 the Movement was coming off it wheels. There was bickering between factions espousing one preposterous totalitarian communist dictator over another. And each faction was riddled with agents provocateurs, government spooks assigned to insure chaos and create discord. They did their job well. The whole thing was splintering.

I was in the room when Bernardine Dohrn stood at the microphone in a red mini-skirt, her fist raised and, quoting a Bob Dylan lyric from "Subterranean Homesick Blues, said "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows!" It signaled that the Movement was headed underground. SDS had collapsed into itself and the Weathermen launched a wave of domestic bombings, bank robberies and jailbreaks that lasted into the 70s.

I once visited a Weatherman safe-house. A safe apartment, really, in a southside Chicago neighborhood. I remember it being a very dark space that smelled of human sweat and burnt food. We were let into the place by a grim woman in her 20s. The people living there stayed in the shadows and said nothing.

Part of the indoctrination in these underground cells was a process that was intended to break down the dominant male sexism and the sexual mores of the Amerikan State. Ornery feminists were put in charge and all members were required to forego the normal male/female coupling instinct. If you were a guy, you were required to have sex with other guys in the group. If you were a woman you were required to fuck other women in the group. And there was no possessiveness allowed. If someone wanted to pork someone else in the group, then so be it. As long as it was politically acceptable to the truculent alpha female of the house.

My wife Cecilia's brother, Old Weird John had moved to Chicago from rural Missouri in order to enjoy hippie excesses. He'd gotten a bit involved politically and had injudiciously decided to participate in the Days of Rage. He promptly got himself arrested, tossed in the lockup at 12th and State and forgotten about for a week. When he managed to get a call to us we went down and bailed him out.

During his stay in jail he was knocked around a bit by cops. And he spent a long time being interrogated by Federal Agents who told him that if he didn't cooperate with them and become their operative, they'd make life tough and painful for him.

John came out of jail terrified, older and weirder. He immediately moved back to rural Missouri, never to return.


Because of my art being published around the world in underground papers, I'd caught  eye of international commies and revolutionaries. I received a letter from the government of North Vietnam. Enclosed with the letter was a 3,200 ring, a ring fashioned from the fuselage from the 3,200th American warplane shot down over North Vietnam. The letter invited me to participate in a cane sugar harvest in Cuba in order to show solidarity with revolutionary peoples around the world. The North Vietnamese had selected what they considered "important" cultural figures from the American radical community to invite and exploit as propaganda.

A couple of weeks later I received another letter uninviting me to the cane harvest. Apparently someone had taken the time to actually look at my work and thought better of their original offer. I was no longer qualified as an "important" cultural figure. Because I was a politically undisciplined cartoonist (Didn't follow the Party Line.) I didn't have the status of a Jane Fonda or Eldridge Cleaver.

I suppose I was a bit disappointed until one of my anarchist friends pointed out that harvesting sugar cane was hard fucking work.


The turmoil of the streets permeated Playboy and its ancillary businesses. Including mine at Playboy Press. My work there was to produce paperback books -- mainly collections of cartoons reprinted from the magazine.

Don Myrus wanted to produce a coffee-table book that would show President Nixon as a liar using his own words. And maybe knock out a book of political relevance. The title was "Thank You, Mr. President".

He assigned me the task of art directing and designing the project. On the cover we photographed a lit candle carved in the likeness of Richard Nixon. And at each chapter head there was an image of the candle progressively melting down, until the last chapter all that was left was a pool of melted wax.

We produced the entire book on boards so Myrus could run it past Hugh Hefner for approval.

Unfortunately Hef went all chickenshit and decided not to publish "Thank you Mr. President" because of fear of political recrimination. It was the first -- but certainly not the last -- time that I was excited and energetic about a creative project at Playboy, only to have it killed at the last minute.

At this time I was talking with Abbie Hoffman about illustrating "Steal This Book". He'd call me almost daily, exciting the secretaries answering the phones and giving me considerable cashe' around the office. Abbie was a bit like a bad-boy movie star in some peoples' minds. He was on television every day and he was funny, flambouyant, improper and dangerous. Women around Playboy started regarding me as "that cool guy who's friends with Abbie Hoffman".

Also Playboy magazine was preparing an article about the Underground Comix movement, one of the first major media acknowledgments about what I did after hours. And it went a helluva way toward creating a mythological aura around me in the workplace.

There was plenty of dissent going on in the Playboy building, a hive of liberal sentiment. Most was George McGovernesque bed-wetting. But in the lower ranks a few radical hearts beat fervently.

One of the executive assistants (secretaries) was a pretty blond woman named Shelly. Shelly liked to stop by my office regularly for conversation, talks that would invariably revolve around radical politics and our mutually insubordinate sentiments.

There was a sexual chemistry between us. We seemed to always be on the cusp. But I had a wife and new-born baby at home and, even though we had an open marriage it seemed an inappropriate time for me to be fucking someone else.

Shelly was an ardent feminist. She'd cover women's liberation issues in the Chicago Seed.

On April 15, 1969, the day of the Moratorium against the war in Vietnam, Hugh Hefner opened the Playboy Mansion for a $50-a-head benefit for the anti-war movement. Women's lib brought out the troops in protest and set up a picket line outside Hef's digs. In their minds the war in Vietnam and Playboy's exploitation of women were part of the same corrupt system. Shelly, in dirty bell-bottoms, an oversized leather jacket and a women's lib button proudly displayed attempted to get into the fete.

"I'm a Playboy employee and I want to go in!" she demanded at the door. She had a little difficulty getting in, but once inside hostility erupted at once. "Mainly from the women," she said.

Writing about the event in the Seed Shelly said "The first to stop me was a woman who had helped organize the benefit. We were, she said, spoiling the solidarity of the people inside against the war and alienating many people sympathetic to women's liberation...I next encountered Candace Bergen, asked her why she had crossed the picket line, and was answered with a sneer, "I think the whole thing is utterly absurd."

Shelly told me "Many inside, especially the women, felt more threatened by the demonstration outside than by American violence in Vietnam."

I produced an illustration for Shelly's Chicago Seed article about the feminists picketing Hef's anti-war event. It depicted Hugh Hefner with a whip in his hand training a Playboy Bunny branded with a meat inspection stamp that read " MEAT. Inspected by HMH Publishing Co." Talk about biting the hand that feeds you.

 

 

One afternoon Shelly dropped by my office. She was a bit breathless and excited.

One of the men she worked for was a Playboy vice-president. She told me he'd received a memo from Hef. It was a particularly misogynist document that, in the end, described feminists as a bunch of dykes. She wanted to smuggle a copy out and get it published in the Seed, but she needed my help getting the thing out of the building. She could snatch the memo off his desk at an opportune moment and bring it to the Xerox machine, but she needed me to take the document copy and skedaddle with it while she replaced the original on her bosses' desk.

I met her at the copy machine at the appointed hour. She came out of the office with the purloined paper, made the copy and was about to hand it to me when her boss appeared and asked "Just what the fuck are you doing, Shelly?" He grabbed the document and asked her to step into his office. He turned to me and hissed "Get back to your lair!"

It took a few days but Shelly was fired. We both knew she would be.

As for me, I was called on the carpet and warned that if anything like that happened again, I'd be out on my ass.

It pissed me off. We were equal partners in a seditious act but she lost her job because she was female. It occurred to me that I should demand to be fired, too. But I didn't. I wimped out, rationalizing that -- because Cecil and I had a baby -- this was no time to be out of work. To this day I feel guilty about my lack of courage at that time. And I'm the kind of guy who doesn't feel guilty about much.

During this time I'd spend some evenings with Shelly at her apartment.

One night I was on my way to see Shelly. I was walking down a dark street toward Fullerton Avenue. In the distance I saw a group of about eight young men gathered under a street light. One of them broke off from the pack and headed down the street I was on. As he approached me I could see he was just a kid, thirteen or fourteen maybe. He looked at me and said "Hey, Heepie, fock you!"

"No," I replied. "Fock you" I said, imitating his hispanic accent. Probably wasn't a wise thing to do.

He ran back to his group of compadres and, as I approached the corner they all crossed out of the light of the street lamp and into the dark where I was. They surrounded me, making gutteral noises and snarling like feral animals. They were all young, like the kid who originally approached me. Except for the guy in charge, who was 17 or 18. He was twirling a golf club. "Hey mon," he said "You don' fock wit' one a my boys. We're Latin Kings, mon." His grip tighten on the iron as his boys began snapping radio antennas off of parked automobiles.

My options were dwindling and I knew this wasn't going to end peacefully. I also was aware that a whipping with radio antennas could slice a person to ribbons. A guy could easily lose and ear, or an eye.

About four blocks in the distance was the brightly lit intersection of Fullerton, Lincoln and Halsted. I reached into my jacket pocket and gripped my keys, one between each finger in my clenched fist. I knew I could deliver a significant and painful blow to the ringleader. I also knew that, if I did that, the others would tear me to pieces. I was always a fairly good sprinter, so I figured my only recourse -- If I wanted to survive -- was to run like hell toward the light.

My opportunity came when the golf club kid threw a punch to my jaw. The guy sure wasn't a prizefighter. I hardly felt it. But it gave me the opportunity to break from the pack. I was off and running down the middle of Fullerton Avenue like my life depended on it. They were right behind me. I could feel the steel ball tips of the radio antennas hitting my back, and the swoosh of the golf club through my hair as he swung to make contact. A couple of cars were headed in my direction, but they swerved to avoid the gang of hooligans chasing the long-haired, fringe-jacketed, bell-bottomed guy, and were on about their business.

I made it about three of the four blocks when the golf club made contact with the right side of my skull, just above my ear. I fell in slow motion. It felt like I was falling into soft, goose-down pillows. But I wasn't down for the count. I was only unconscious for a couple of seconds and I crawled to the curb expecting hell to rain down on me. There was a horrified woman standing on the sidewalk. I crawled to her feet and asked "Are they gone?" She couldn't say anything. I don't think she could wrap her mind around what she'd just witnessed. I rolled over and looked back into the dark. They were running away, breaking up in all directions, scampering like fire ants into the urban night.

After a minute or so I got to my feet. The bug-eyed lady asked "Are you okay?"

"I've been better" I said as I lurched on down to Lincoln Ave.

I've often thought that I was quite lucky than night. In those days street gangs were fairly lightly armed. These days they'd simply pop a cap into my sorry ass and I'd be dead meat.

I made my way to Head Imports, a headshop on Lincoln Avenue run by my friend George Sells. About a half hour after I'd dropped face down in the street I was projectile vomiting behind the Head Imports store. Cecilia left our baby, Megan, with our neighbors and picked me up and took me to the nearest emergency room.

I was x-rayed with some difficulty -- I had trouble standing. One of the nurses commented on the round wounds on my back. "Radio antennas" I said. They discovered a hairline fracture in my skull at the point of impact. The diagnosis was "Minor concussion".

A Chicago cop wrote out a report, but he was clearly pleased that the hippies and the Latin Kings weren't getting along.

A couple of months after my encounter with the Latin Kings, they'd made the mistake of burglarizing the home of a Mafia henchman on the near north side. Outfit thugs made an example of a couple of the Kings (Much worse than anything the Kings had done to me) and the entire street gang -- wisely -- moved north, out of the neighborhood.