"Spider Robinson - Very Bad Deaths" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Spider)

walked away as if nothing had happened. Or if necessary crawled.
Hell, in his way, the guy was as weird as I was.
"Okay," I said. "What's our goddam room number?"
It was a pleasure, watching Lefors's jaw drop.

How can I begin to convey to you just how long ago this was?
The Beatles were still together. They would always be together. They'd just performed "All You Need is
Love" and "Hey Jude," live for the whole world, that July. Forget AltamontтАФWoodstock hadn't
happened yet. Brian Epstein was dead, but Brian Jones was still alive. So was Che Guevara.
There was not a single footprint on the moon, and most adults believed there never would be. All
educated people knew that the Cold War would, in our lifetimes, culminate in an apocalyptic nuclear
exchange that would sterilize the planet. Some of us railed against it, some fought to prevent it, some
accepted it, but none of us doubted it. Nobody, I mean nobody, anywhere, would have thought it
conceivable that the Soviet Union might ever simply . . . stop. It wasn't possible enough to be the
premise of a science fiction story.
Bobby and Rev. Dr. King were both still alive. Charlie Company had not saved My Lai. LBJ was
president, and it was unimaginable that he would not run again. Nobody knew that Chicago cops were
vicious thugs and Mayor Daley was a monster except black people who lived in Chicago. Paul Krassner
had not yet coined the term "Yippies" for the people who would go there to protest the war.
You could smoke a cigarette just about anywhere except church or schoolroom. Nobody realized they
minded it yet, and the dread dangers of sidestream smoke had not yet been faked. You could smoke on
an airplane. NoтАФhere's how long ago it was: you could buy a plane ticket under any name you liked,
with cash, and board without showing ID or passing a metal detector. The term "terrorist" was not yet
commonly heard outside Israel.
That's how long ago it was for the world. Here's how long ago it was for me:
I was entering my sophomore year at St. William Joseph, a Catholic college run by the Marianite order
in Olympia, a medium-sized town in northern New York State. Only my third year as a free human
being. My parents still believed I was a Catholic. And a virgin.
I could still count my lovers on the fingers of one hand . . . and give the peace sign at the same time. I
had been drinking alcohol for a little less than a year, smoking pot for six months. I'd never taken any


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other drug, and didn't expect to.
I wasn't sure whether I wanted to be a lawyer, an English teacher, or an anarchist. One of those.
Long time ago.
Maybe this will convey something. I basically had only two heros, at that time. Ed Sodakis, and Paul
Krassner.
You've probably heard of Krassner. Youngest violinist ever to play Carnegie Hall, at age 6 . . . Lenny
Bruce's roommate, uncredited editor of his autobiography . . . took acid with Groucho Marx. Publisher
since 1958 of The Realist, an underground satirical journal dedicated to outraging as many people as
possible, ideally to apoplexy.
He had in fact just that summer pulled off what was probably his greatest prank. A writer named
Manchester had written a controversial book about the Kennedy clan, and their lawyers had managed to
force the deletion of a few chapters before publication. The Realist ran a piece purporting to be some of
the suppressed material. A dazed Jackie Kennedy is wandering around the plane, in search of a
bathroom where she can wipe her husband's blood from her, when she opens the wrong door . . . and
finds LBJ having carnal knowledge of the corpse, in an apparent attempt to make an entry wound look