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One of the paradoxes dearest to science fiction writers depicts the earth-born hero returning to his planet after a flight of several years' duration at a speed approaching that of light. Due to a quirk in the Einsteinian cosmos, his own personal time has moved far more slowly than that on earth, and so he returns to a planet where everything has changed almost unrecognizably, where everyone he knew before he left is either dead or dying. Yet this fantasy can become close to a reality in one's own lifetime, as anyone who has returned to his country after a prolonged absence well knows.

When Ilene and I stumbled back into Greenwich Village after seven years in Europe, we might just as well have been space travellers shot out of a "time warp." We had no choice but to submit to a period of reverse cultural shock in readjusting to American manners, customs, and tempo. During this time our previous experience as Americans turned out to be of dubious benefit, for so much had changed in our absence. We were forewarned of these changes by our assiduous reading of the underground press, but we were still not prepared for the full impact.

The America we had left in 1961 had been stately by comparison, formalistic, still nestled in its 'Fifties mythology. To the extent that a culture was evident, it had been the orthodox culture, whose adherents spoke in hushed voices and gathered in small enclaves for self-protection. Contacts between these enclaves and the dominant American life-style were rare and unsought on either side. Anyone who dressed the least bit strangely would be stared at, perhaps even heckled in certain neighborhoods. I can recall being stared at myself for wearing one of the first Russian-style fur hats in New York during the deep recesses of the 'Fifties, and I remember Ilene getting cat-calls even in Greenwich Village as late as 1961 for the large earrings she was fond of wearing.

But the America we were returning to in 1968 was so different that we could only rub our eyes with joy and amazement. What we were seeing was of course only New York, but the changes even here were so compelling that we had to extend them in our minds to the nation as a whole. To our astonishment almost every other person we saw looked weirder than ourselves. This was not only true of the East and West Villages but extended to some extent uptown as well. When we had gone to Europe, the East Village was a small defensive community of nonconformists. When we came back, it seemed unaccountably to have taken over.

After a fitful night's sleep in a fleabag hotel, we stumbled into the offices of the East Village Other in the hope of orienting ourselves to what had been happening during our time with Rip Van Winkle. To my surprise, our sense of dislocation went totally unnoticed, and I was immediately asked to start writing for the paper on the strength of the work I had been doing in London and Berlin. And to my further surprise I found this quite easy to doalthough I was walking into what appeared to me almost a foreign land, my every step of the way seemed assured, as though I had been rehearsing this role over a long period. And in a sense I had been. I started writing my articles, brought them into the paper, and saw them in print a few days later, just as I had been doing in London. It was as though I had walked from one world into a totally different one without missing a step. After only two months I was firmly established as a fixture at the East Village Other.

Because this newspaper emanated from New York, still widely hailed as the nation's cultural capital, and because it had preceded all other underground papers in the country¹with the exception of one or two conventionally laid out papers which were called underground in retrospectit was widely regarded by many as the chief spokesman for "the movement." Universities and libraries had started to subscribe (as had other newspapers and even foreign embassies) on the theory that we were the cutting edge of the youth culture and had to be understood.

We were only in the EVO offices a few moments when Allan Katzman told us that he was being regularly courted by uptown reporters and commentators and had even been asked to speak at various press lunches on the significance of what we believed we were doing. Allan regarded this as something of a joke besides being a waste of time, for no matter what he would tell them, they were simply not in a position to interpret it correctly and integrate it with their preconceptions. This was how wide and real the gap between the two cultures was in late l968. As this gap was spread out over all of the twelve cultural and political areas (described briefly in the footnote below and in greater detail elsewhere in the book),² it is not really surprising that it often seemed to be an unbridgeable chasm.

As soon as I started writing for EVO, I too found myself being wooed by certain uptown media types, who seemed to believe that I possessed a key to opening deep cultural secrets, if only I would share it with them. And this attempt at rapprochement among media people, at courtship even, was going on during the height of the tensions surrounding the counterculture, when demonstrations, arrests, and physical violence were a fact of everyday life. I believe that what Allan and I saw working was one of the mechanisms by which a society protects itself from dissolution. Fortunately for all of us it was to prove quite effective

The East Village Other aka EVO at the time I formally joined it had already been in existence for over two years and had reached what was in many ways the peak of its power. It had been founded by John Wilcock, Walter Bowart, Sherry Needham, and Allan Katzman as a single sheet broadside which slowly and painfully began to put out larger and more frequent editions. It had originally been published from offices on Avenue A but gladly accepted the offer of free office space from rock impresario Bill Graham, and in 1967 EVO moved into its Second Avenue offices over the Fillmore East. During its early existence it came out twice a month at best, but shortly before my return to America it went weekly and for a while at least seemed to have no problems coping with this schedule.

The fights and duels between the various founders were already legendary when I arrived in New York. John Wilcock and Walter Bowart had allegedly broken up over a dispute concerning whether or not the work of Andy Warhol should be featured in the paper. This was at a time when Warhol was truly an underground and controversial figure. Wilcock was in favor of promoting him, but Bowart was unable to accept Warhol because of his homosexuality. This story alone made me wonder how much real freedom the underground press was capable of, but the upshot of this feud was that both Wilcock and Bowart decamped, leaving Katzman mainly in charge of the paper. Bowart took off for the Southwest, and I was to see him only once, a few weeks after I returned to New York, when he arrived at the EVO offices accompanied by a lawyer.

He was impressive, tall and bearded, and reminded me in many ways of Jim Haynes in London. Soon he and his lawyer disappeared into the front office to talk with Allan, Sherry, and some of the other "official" directors of the paper. There soon emanated from behind the door shouting of such intensity and duration that I and several other writers left the building and went elsewhere to work. When we returned, we learned that there had been a battle over the custody of the EVO stock (I will deal later with the ironies of an underground paper issuing stock), and the impasse had been resolved with Bowart being bought out and fleeing back to Arizona.

Although John Wilcock was no longer around the paper he was a considerable figure in his own right. He had originally quit the Village Voice when they criticized an article in which he had mentioned potsmoking, another indication of how much times were to change. Not only did he play an important role in starting EVO but he was also one of those figures who were to catalyze many other papers and underground activities, achieving little for himself in the long run other than personal satisfaction. He had also been involved in the early stages of the Los Angeles Free Press, Detroit's Fifth Estate, and had even visited London during the summer when plans were being laid for International Times aka IT. He had a job writing for the well-known series of books on how to live in various countries for five dollars a day, which aided him greatly in moving around the world, and he is rumored to have played a role in starting papers in India, Japan and Thailand as well.

I soon became aware that the atmosphere of the EVO offices was far more turbulent than that of London's underground paper. Despite our various problems with the police, there had always been a certain English gentleness and unhurried quality at IT. Whatever other international benefits the underground might be conferring, it had clearly not yet succeeded in eradicating national differences.

Perhaps the single most important element of the tension at EVO was a tall, heavyset young man named Joel Fabricant, who increasingly took on the role and duties of "publisher." At any time of day Joel was usually quite loudly occupied in various administrative tasks. Although Allan was responsible for editorial matters, Joel had come onto the scene after the split between Bowart and Wilock to coordinateif that was the wordour business affairs. Although Joel was very much into pot, rock music, vegetarian foods and all the other underground causes, I always felt there was something decidedly unreconstructed and 'Fifties-like about him. To me he looked like the typical fast-buck businessman glazed over with a counter-cultural wash, which frequently wore thin.

Although the EVO offices were spacious enough, Joel made them feel quite cramped, for he was always everywhere at once, shouting and laughing loudly, punching the men with mock boxing blows or striking karate poses, pinching the women with gleeful abandon, barking orders to everyone about advertising, circulation, printing runs, graphics, layout, and even editorial policy. While we all had to make some sort of peace with Joel's presence, I know that many of the writers found him objectionable in varying degrees and did their best to avoid him whenever possible. And I suspect that Joel was one of the reasons that eventually led Allan to resign as editor.

The best that could be said about Joel was that his bustling was harmless and even ineffectual in the long run, for he rarely read a copy of the paper. He was mainly concerned with having a new issue to ship to the distributors each week, and he showed an interest in its contents only if there had been some negative feedback from the distributors or the newsstands where it was sold. I have already mentioned that this happened with one article I wrote (an illustrated review of a book on erotic art), which was so outspokenly sexual for its time (possibly because I entitled it Fucking Through the Ages and included some of the wildest drawings) that several thousand copies of EVO were returned from California, and suits against the paper were launched in two small New Jersey towns. Joel tried chewing me out over this, saw that I wouldn't take it, and finally concluded that this sort of problem was good for our circulation in the long run.

The absolute peak in EVO's power and influence came during the spring and summer of 1969, and if a few halfway competent decisions been taken around that time, the paper might conceivably still be around today. But EVO's success was just beginning to be counter-productive, for until that time the paper had enjoyed a virtual monopoly on raunchy material and sex ads in a newsprint format. Over the winter, however, a new paper had been launched in the form of Screw Magazine, and its appearance signalled that we had indeed, ironically enough, been successful in our battle against censorship. Yet our victory was to prove most useful to another sort of paper. While the underground press had included sex as only one part of its broad formula, Screw moved in to specialize in this area.

At first our stand was to support Screw, and we accepted their ads in EVO. Soon they grew so powerful that they launched a second paper called GAY for the other side of the sex scene now emerging. As our "publisher," Joel was beside himself both with the threat this posed and the opportunity it offered. Within only a month or two, he responded to this challenge by publishing out of the EVO office not only our own separate sex paper called KISS and our own gay Sheet called GAY POWER, but even a foray into astrology called the AQUARIAN AGENT. And Peter Leggieri, another of our editors, soon started a comic strip tabloid called Gothic Blimp Works. For a while all of these papers were being prepared on the same premises at once.

These developments drove some of our writers up the wall. Not only were they being asked to turn out a popular paper with a political thrust under trying circumstances and with very little pay, but now they were being pressured into writing for the new papers as well. Many of these writers had chosen to write for EVO out of idealism in the belief that they were paving the way for a new society. And here was Joel Fabricant, as many thought, just trying to make money, with little thought for the future of EVO or the paper's policies.

Several pep rallies were called that winter and spring, and Joel would explain the bright future ostensibly awaiting all of us if we would just keep writing, for he believed he was building an empire that would change the whole future of journalism. To an extent he was correct in this belief, but it turned out not to be his empire or any one's for that matter. But for the time being it looked as if Joel was unstoppable. No one could contradict him or even argue with him for that matter. And yet it was at one of his own pep sessions that his fate was sealed. He met his defeat at the hands of a single artist. And the decisive blow was dealt not by a sledge hammer but by a simple symbolic act.

The entire staffsome thirty of uswere gathered in the front office beneath its custom-made stained glass windows showing Katzman and Bowart as glowing saintly presences. Everyone waited expectantly as Joel, seated next to the door, began his latest sales pitch for the combined papers. He went on and on until we all grow numb. One person got up and left, muttering some excuse, and we all envied him. Joel was still holding forth a few minutes later when the door opened again. The cartoonist R. Crumb reached into the room just far enough to smash a gigantic Ratner's cream pie into Joel's face. Crumb quickly retreated. There was a moment's pause, a dread silence before anyone, even Joel, reacted.

Then Joel shouted one word at the top of his lungs:

"FUCK!"

The rest was a stream of obscenities punctuated with Crumb's name. Joel had risen like a bolt of lightening and raced back into the layout room, where he imagined the cartoonist had fled. Fortunately for Crumb and the future of American comics, he had chosen to run down the stairs instead and on up Second Avenue. After a bemused interlude, Joel came back, still quite literally in a lather from the pie, and tried to resume the mood of the meeting. But it was no use. No one could take anything seriously after that. And it was from that moment that we ourselves stopped taking Joel seriously.

I had been present a few weeks earlier at a small gathering in Joel's office, where I think we all may have had a foretaste of his demise. Allan Katzman, his twin brother Don, and several other writers and editors were crammed together around Joel's desk while he spoke on the phone to a relative, who happened to be a broker on the New York Stock Exchange. This being America, the original founders of the paper had issued themselves stock in the East Village Other Corporation, and now Joel had gotten it into his head that EVO's promise and renown had become so great that considerable capital could be raised by "going public" reissuing the stock and selling it on Wall Street.

He had managed to corral the imagination of several other EVO workers in this vision, and they all sat there awaiting the final outcome of his phone call on this matter. I was an exception, as I just happened to be in the office at the time. I expect I was the only one present who was skeptical of this plan, but I kept my opinion to myself. Slowly but surely we watched Joel's jaw drop, as he absorbed the information from the other end of the phone. After he got off, he quietly explained that we appeared to have some slight communication problem with Wall Street concerning our "image." Why, many of the brokers down there actually thought we were opposed to capitalist society, he announced in a flat voice devoid of humor. I do not think it had really occurred to him to ever doubt until that moment that everything could be sold as a commodity on the marketincluding revolution.

Joel stayed on for several months after his face was first defiled by Crumb's custard, but his fate was sealed. Allan Katzman talked with ever increasing vigor of resigning as editor, and Sherry Needham, one of the original founders, withdrew because she felt the original goals of the paper were no longer being served. Allan's own plight as editor was typical of what was beginning to happen at a number of underground papers across the country. Actually, the very values on which the underground was based were inimical in many ways to the requirements of bringing out a newspaper. After all, the counter-culture was devoted to spontaneity, joyous living, a free and easy lifestyle, while bringing out any regular publication, even an underground one, requires a certain amount of industriousness, attention to detail, and a respect for deadlines.

While the founding editors of many papers were able to go along with these responsibilities for a while by rationalizing that they were helping others to find greater freedom, they soon became aware of the corner they had red-penciled themselves into. For Allan and others proofreading became a drag to be avoided, and it was this rather than any basic illiteracy that caused some of our most blatant errors: typos, inverted paragraphs, missing ends of articles, even misdated issues. Artists and art directors frequently took over in this power vacuum, which of course gave underground papers their distinctive appearance. Some editors simply fled, leaving no forwarding address, others sank deeper into drugs or other pleasures of the scene. A few, like Allan, tried to deal with the problem as realistically as possible and arrange for a successor. It was almost inevitable that the new generation of underground editors, when it took over, would have personalities and interests quite different from those of the founders.

The morale at EVO was not visibly uplifted by another enormous feud that broke out that summer between Joel and co-editor Peter Leggieri. Peter had dropped out of law school into EVO because he felt the goals of a truly just society would be better served by underground journalism than by the law. Although technically an editor, he was not at all a "words person" and spent most of his time in the back room with the artists and layout people. This meant he rarely came into any extended contact with most of the writers. Many of EVO's artists prided themselves on not really needing the writers at all and boasted that they could bring out an entire issue at a moment's notice, composed almost entirely of illustrations. They were of course right in their way and came close to proving their thesis on several occasions, though no one knew how long such a product would keep selling as a newspaper

This idea received its severest test when Peter activated his pet project of bringing out a paper composed entirely of cartoons. At first he and Joel worked together on this, but then Peter took a look at EVO's books and claimed that Joel had been cheating everyone right and left from the time he joined the paper, using phony circulation figures, entering false figures for writers' fees, and committing a variety of further misdeeds. This battle came close to scuttling EVO on the spot, but at last some kind of compromise was reached. Peter was allowed to withdraw with his comic strip project still intact, while the rest of us would go on bringing out EVO and the other papers. At this time the claim was also heard that EVO was being distributed by a certain benevolent Italian workingmen's organization, who were taking their own cut out of the revolution. Most of the writers rationalized this news, telling themselves that all the city's other weeklys (and many monthlies too) were also being distributed by the same people, which of course they were.

During this uncertain period, no one knew who the next editor would be, and a number of us began flirting with former editor John Wilcock, still single-handedly bringing out his own Other Scenes on an irregular basis from whatever city in the world he happened to be in at the time. I suspect John would have been the choice of many for our next editor, and I myself went to visit him that summer to find out his thoughts on the subject. John and I had a fair amount in common in any case, since we were among the few on the scene who had any deep experience of its international implications. It was while visiting John that I first met Abbie Hoffman and had a chance to form some kind of personal impression of him.

On that particular day, he was in extremely poor health, as he was still recovering from a case of severe hepatitis he believed had been purposely injected into his system by a policeman with a hypodermic syringe while he was in jail. I would later see him in far better fettle at our rally for the Judson Three flag case, but he was nonetheless in good humor even that day, and his quips had a pleasing undertone of self-deprecation, as though he knew perfectly well that he had been marked by society as a potential martyr but didn't take himself too seriously in the role.

At that time he was still waiting for the infamous Chicago trial to begin, though I don't think any of us were very hopeful about its outcome. I had brought one of our light machines with me, and the three of us sat around watching it and spent a fairly light-hearted few hours together. Most of the talk revolved around tactics for setting up a smoke-in in Central Park and improvising legal ways for small quantities of pot to find their way to a number of prominent citizens in preparation for it, as of course none of us would have dreamt of violating any law. As to the main purpose of my visit, John declared himself quite willing to return to EVO under the right circumstances, which could only have helped the paper at this point. But this was not to be.

It was several months before the identity of our next editor was settled. I did everything I could to push for Wilcock, and I studiously stayed out of the running myself. I felt I still had far too little understanding of the American scenein fact, I found many of its elements positively frightening. This was the autumn of 1969, the period of the Nixon government's first big drive against the counter-culture, symbolized by the pending case in Chicago and countless other legal entanglements. Militancy became ever more the order of the day, and rumors of concentration camps being prepared for all of us were everywhere. I do not know to this day how much of this was realistic, how much paranoia. We had, in the words of the cliché, created a monster, and it was about to destroy us. A lot of my friends, black and white alike, started giving black panther salutes. Strangers on the street would flash each other the two-fingered V for victory, and the peace symbol was everywhere. Yet only a year or so later almost all of this had vanished as thoroughly as last season's fashions ever could.

Our search for an editor and the problems with Joel did not help the morale of our writers. Most were young, high-spirited, and talented in varying degreethey had flourished under Allan, who knew how to got the best out of them with a few words of encouragement or constructive criticism. Office bull sessions were creative romps, marked as much by self-criticism as by hatred of the system. It was a heady atmosphere, in which Tim Leary, Jerry Rubin, Allan Ginsburg or any of the other movement heavies could walk into the office at any moment. But during this interregnum, our sense of group identity began to wear down and some of the best writers became verbose and self-congratulatory in their pieces. There was no one they could turn to for guidance, and their egos took over. A propagandist who begins to believe his own propaganda can no longer function properly. This basic principle was coming to be overlooked at EVO.

Finally the suspense over the succession was broken. After many rumors flying in every possible direction, we learned that Joel had agreed to leave more or less gracefully, taking with him Kiss and the Aquarian Agent. EVO would continue to be published from the same offices, and although Allan would be retiring as editor, he would keep on working on behalf of the paper both as writer and administrator. The real news was that the next editor would be one Jaakov Kohn. When we first heard this, I think we all assumed it meant Jaakov would be serving in a caretaker capacity, with Allan making all the real decisions. It was the only reasonable way we could interpret the news, for while Jaakov had always been busy with various administrative duties around the paper, I don't think any of us took him seriously in his new role as editor. What we did not realize was that Jaakov took his title as editor very seriously indeed, though it didn't take us very long to catch on to this.

And here, in my opinion, with this decision to install Jaakov Kohn as the new editor, we have the key to EVO's final downfall. It wasn't just the Zeitgeist or any such lofty metaphysical principle that did the paper in, it was a classical administrative error: the wrong man in the wrong job at the wrong time. After all, the underground press would survive for some years in many other cities, and there is no shortage of aboveground publications that have outlived their periods of maximum relevance.

There was a paranoid assumption at that time that omniscient and omnipotent CIA or FBI men were constantly hatching sophisticated plots to do us in. From my own experience I doubted that either agency was ever alert or effective enough to destroy us, even if they had been trying to. But if they had purposely set out to finish off the East Village Otherand I'm pretty sure they didn't, or at least not in this particular waythey couldn't have found a more perfect tool than Jaakov Kohn.

I personally had always gotten on quite well with Jaakov. A bearded continental Jew with a limp and a slightly harsh accent, I had known him fleetingly years before when he and his wife, like Ilene and myself, had been hawking craftsy jewelry in the Village. We would banter together at great length in German, which he spoke with some fluency, and we had a German mock-militaristic number we would perform to the amusement of the rest of the office, shouting orders and curses at each other. I had always thought of Jaakov as an easy-going associate. a gemütlicher beerhall companion, but never as an editor.

But Jaakov turned out to have very strict preconceived notions of what an editor's personality and duties should be, almost from the moment he took over. Where Allan had been content to let things happen around him, offering criticism and suggestions in a helpful manner, Jaakov visualized himself as first among his peers, an inspirer of writers and artists to ever higher achievements. He believed this gave him the right to demand extensive rewrites from his authors, and he would waste his time and ours in prolonged conferences over the meaning of an article or the supposed ideology behind it. As most of us were working for very little money, and a few for none at all, it was not long before some of the writers concluded that if they wanted this kind of nonsense from an editor, they could get it just as well uptown, where at least they would be paid decently for their pains.

Although Allan continued with the paper for most of another year, he appeared ever less frequently in our office, and soon almost all the decisions were being left to Jaakov. From the beginning there was a small cabal critical of him, composed chiefly of Dean Latimer, Claudia Dreifus, Ray Schultz, and myself. We would win a point or two by phoning up Allan and complaining, but this did not solve the long-range problem. In the meantime, Jaakov had begun to recruit some new writers who could put words together after a fashion but had little experience with the realm of ideas. Worst of all, he also began to terrorize the artists on the paper, taking over its layout and setting all our articles in giant blocks of eight-point type, which no one could wade through. His teenage son had been doing odd jobs for the paper for some time, and now more and more responsibility for the paper's appearance began to be assigned to Stephen Kohn.

Few people on the paper were capable of grasping how serious Jaakov's error on our layout was, and the growing unreadability of the paperirrespective of its contentscannot have helped our already flagging circulation. At our height, in the spring of 1969, we had an audited readership of 70,000. Eighteen months after Jaakov took over, I doubt if we had one-tenth that number. There were also larger errors of strategy and policy. Almost all of Jaakov's energies were going into the political side of the movement at this time, and he was constantly on the phone to Chicago or other parts of the country where trials instigated by the convicted Watergate conspirator John Mitchell, sadly enough at that time our nation's Attorney General, were under way.

This meant that much of our energy was going into reacting to the government's moves against us rather than into devising new tactics and plans. Jaakov became a monomaniac on the Chicago trial and boasted that we had more coverage on it than any other paper in the country, overlooking the fact that the style and typography of our coverage made it close to unreadable even for the most devoted of underground enthusiasts.

I was soon to have a small confrontation with Jaakov over an annoying editorial habit he had developed. He had taken to signing his editorialsnot merely printing his name beneath them but actually reproducing his own handwritten signature. It was the sort of thing an ego-struck teenager might imagine himself doing if he took over a paper. I pointed out to Jaakov that almost no publicationeither under or above groundhas signed editorials of any sort, the editor's name on the masthead usually being considered sufficient identification. I also told him I felt personalizing his editorials in this way violated one of the basic principles of the counter-culture, as I had the impression we wanted to de-emphasize our individual egos rather than call attention to them.

Jaakov completely rejected this view. In fact, he became quite furious with me and soon doubled the size of his signature, spreading it out over three columns. I felt this was quite unfortunate, and although I continued to write for EVO, and Jaakov continued to print my work, a sense of strain now crept in. Several other writers were also growing restive with Jaakov's leadership, for his manner of criticizing their work wasted a lot of time and took much of the joy out of writing for the Underground. English was not Jaakov's own first language, and it did not go unnoted that his own writing could be rather wooden and cliché-ridden.

It was during this period that I had the chance to meet Tim Leary two or three times. He would duck into the office in between his various trials and hang out with Allan and Jaakov. My impression of him was of a rather garrulous Irishman given to over-verbalizing ideas and overdramatizing his own experiences (even granting they had been remarkable ones). There was something washed out about him at that time, as though he had gone through more than even he could begin to comprehend, as though he had been used as a tool by society without his ever fully understanding how or why.

For many at that time he was something like a Christ figure, but to me he looked more like a nameless victim on a sacrificial altar. At first he had agreed willingly to the sacrifice and only afterwards had awakened to the realization that there might be pain involved. EVO followed Tim's trials with growing sadness, and we launched appeal after appeal to obtain something resembling justice for him. I should add that it should be obvious that I was not seeing him at the best possible time of his life.

The final blow for EVO fell in the spring of 1970. A bomb had exploded at the Electric Circus, a rock music palace around the corner from EVO, and one of our writers had suggested in an article that the reason for the bombing had been the high admission price to the dance hall. He went on to speculate that it might be a good idea if someone planted a bomb in the Fillmore East as well, since their prices were just as high. Bill Graham, who was giving us free rent in the Fillmore's upstairs loftspace, naturally enough came storming into the offices and demanded an explanation. He told Kohn and Katzman that if this was the way they felt about the Fillmore, they could just get the hell out.

A writer friend who witnessed this encounter tells me that Graham wasn't really all that angry and could easily have been calmed down if either Jaakov or Allan had made an attempt. Instead, they both lost their temper at him in return. Perhaps there had just been too many emergencies, too many arrests, beatings, busts, deaths, and bombs, and no one had any cool left. And thus the East Village Other, which had scored so many "firsts" in its history, was to remain unique even in its declineit also became the first underground paper (and to my knowledge the only one) ever to advocate bombing its own offices.

The upshot was that EVO had to move and now had to pay rent for its offices. There was another long interregnum, while Katzman and Kohn looked for a new place. I suggested they look in Soho for cheap office space and told them this looked like the emerging new neighborhood. They played with this idea briefly but finally settled on an eleventh floor loft on East Twelfth Street. There was a manned elevator during office hours but none at all after six. Since much of our work was done at night, this entailed frequent ten-flight climbs up and down, making life quite onerous.

EVO had also been used to people just walking in off the street at all hours to give us news or advertising copyour new location made this far less feasible. But the final irony was that the Village Voice had also moved its offices around the same time. They were now located right around the corner from us at University Place and Eleventh Street, while we were half a block to the west on Twelfth Street. In other words, our "east" Village paper was now located further to the west than the so-called "west" Village paper. This little symbolic irony seemed to me one further proof that EVO had lost its grip on reality.

Another underground paper that died the death even sooner was RAT. Once EVO proved an unconventional paper could survive in New York, others began to spring up. RAT was alleged by some to be more genuinely "radical" in its policy than EVO, which in practice meant more news of demonstrations and less psychedelia. It pioneered in trying to reach the youngest generation of rebels in the high schools, but it never really competed with EVO, despite the attempts of some radical purists to set up false dichotomies. When RAT got carted away by the police, EVO brought out their next issue for them out of our offices, using a joint logo. Feminists took over RAT in 1970 and expelled all men from the staff. The paper was unable to sustain itself in this new incarnation and soon faded away.

Many of EVO's writers convinced themselves they were quite happy to be out of the East Villagesome were working on books or beginning to write for Penthouse, Esquire, or even the New York Times, and so their first attention was no longer focused on EVO. There was nonetheless a great girding of loins and a valiant attempt was made to keep the paper going. We all tried our best to work with Jaakov, but he was continually talking to someone else on the phone. In fact, he seemed to prefer being on the phone to talking to whoever was trying to get his attention in the office. The writers began to joke that there no point to coming into the office any morethe best way to get through to Jaakov was to call him up.

In the past many of our best stories had resulted from office inter-reaction between writers and editor, so this also became a factor in EVO's slow descent. The longer Jaakov remained as editor, the more the pressures seemed to tell on him. By some irony he had his home in one of the slummier parts of distant Rockland County, and he was always leaping onto late-night buses or alternately sleeping over at the office and awaking in a bedraggled shape. And rumor had it that these pressures had led him to overindulge in a certain white powder, which may have explained some of his incredible swings of mood.

The dénouement was expectably depressing. Allan Katzman and most of the early writers began to drop out. Sales were declining, the paper went back on a fortnightly basis, and soon even this became quite insecure. After a while EVO was being written and put together entirely by Jaakov, his son Steve, and a few last-ditch supporters. They had lost their Twelfth Street loft, and I paid my final visit to the last stronghold of the paper in the borrowed offices of a legal defence bureau on the fringe of the Village. Newsstand distribution broke down altogether. I bought the last copy of EVO from a bearded peddler at the Port Authority Bus Terminal in January of 1972.

As I have pointed out, the establishment press had long ago moved in to cover the stories and themes originated or first publicized by the underground press. And so it might be said that EVO had served its purposeit had died on schedule according to an anarchist's timetable. Yet similar papers would continue to flourish and play a significant role in many other of the nation's cities. Because the underground press died out in New York, those who formulate some of the cultural attitudes for that city would attribute a finality and an inevitability to its demise which I do not believe is necessarily warranted. Many issues launched by EVO are still in need of far more sharpening than they are likely to receive in the establishment press, and many other issues now lurking in the wings may have to wait a long time before making it onto the stage.

Ironically, the Village Voice would soon move into the vacuum left by EVO and lay claim to being New York's unconventional paper par excellence, despite its passage through the hands of several well-financed owners. But the Voice did not play this role during the peak of the 'Sixties, when it mattered. Although many press outlets now regularly feature articles on drugs, deviant sex, and offbeat causes and events, they avoided them like the plague back then, when the only paper that really covered the field was the East Village Other.

NOTES:

¹ A considerable debate would later arise as to which was the "first" underground paper. I opt for EVO, because it was the first to use a story content AND a graphics layout treatment which became identifiably underground. Neither of the two Los Angeles Papers founded somewhat earlier (the Free Press and Open City) did so, nor did the Berkeley Barb, which beat EVO by two months. And the editors of the quintessentially "psychedelic" paper, the San Francisco Oracle, freely admitted EVO'S influence on them. Those interested in this sort of detail may wish to look at Robert J. Glessing's The Underground Press in America, Indiana University Press, 1970.

² In a later chapter, I spelled out in some detail the precise differences which separated the counter-cultural and orthodox-cultural outlook, as defined in twelve specific cultural and political areas. Using this approach I constructed a test or game for measuring how counter-cultural or "orthodox-cultural" various people were at various times (or even might be today). It was this thorough-going contrast in ideas over so wide a field that created the tension between the two cultures and held the potential for a real social breakdown. The twelve areas of disagreement I identified (others may occur to the reader) were acceptance and use of drugs of varying degrees of soft- or hardness, attitudes to rock music, openness of sexual attitudes (heterosexual), attitudes towards gay sexuality, interest in mysticism, I Ching, etc, the Viet Nam war and/or militarism in general, commitment to feminism, interest in ending or limiting capitalism, desire to restructure government or society as a whole, the status of minority rights, desirability of new breakthroughs in art, education & technology, and ecology/environmental issues.