by Paul Krassner

When my daughter Holly was eleven years old, she decided to come stay with me in San Francisco for a whole year. This was a courageous move for her--a new city, a new school, new friends. Holly's best new friend was Pia Hinckle, whose father, Warren, was then editor of City magazine, published by Francis Ford Coppola. It was the film director's brief foray into print journalism.

The girls used the City color photo-copying machine to reproduce dollar bills. Holly and Pia enjoyed playing tricks. Once, they rolled a marijuana joint for me, only they filled it with herbal tea. Actually, I had a healthy stash of pot in my desk drawer, but mice kept getting inside and eating right through the baggie in order to get their cannabis fix. I would find mouse turds in the box each day. We had no mouse trap, but Holly had an idea.

"Doesn't the mouse get the munchies after eating the marijuana?"

So we left on the floor of our kitchen a large paper bag containing a piece of cheese and a lollipop. Sure enough, in the evening we would hear the mouse rustling inside the paper bag, and I would capture it by closing the top before it could get out. Then we would bring the bag with the stoned mouse out to an empty lot across the street and let it go free, only to be caught sooner or later by a stray cat, who in turn would get zonked out from having eaten the stoned mouse.

Although we had literally invented a better mouse trap--a non-violent one, at that--the world was not exactly beating a path to our door, as promised by the folklore of the capitalist system.

I had been performing stand-up comedy, and naturally that little experience turned into a bit on stage. I would weave an imaginary story about how I had found myself becoming especially stoned on this stash, but I could not figure out what made it so powerful. Then I decided to send a sample to Pharm-Chem, a sort of People's Food and Drug Administration, and they informed me that a preliminary test showed there was an unknown additive in my marijuana.

They could ascertain only that it was organic. But further testing indicated that it was mouse turds. So I began to entice the mice by leaving marijuana out and capturing them with the old lollipop-in-the-bag ploy. I would collect their turds until I had enough to roll a dynamite joint. I had discovered a new and cheap way of getting high: smoking mouse turds.

I decided to present a comedic equivalent to Tony Orlando and Dawn. What stand-up comic had ever featured back-up singers before? I held an informal rehearsal with Holly and Pia for the debut of Paul Krassner and Dusk. They choreographed their own dance steps to perform behind me, singing the appropriate doo-ah doo-ahs, while I proceeded to tell the tale of my discovery of a new way to get high at no expense except for a lollipop and rolling papers, culminating with a spectacular musical chant by Dusk--"Mouse turds! Mouse turds! Mouse turds!"--as they rhythmically flailed their arms in the air.

At a local "No Talent Contest" sponsored by Rolling Stone, I decided to play my musical saw for the first time publicly. As I was putting rosin on my bow, I confessed to the audience, "This is slightly humiliating for someone who was a child prodigy violinist--me, the youngest concert artist ever to perform at Carnegie Hall, when I was only six years old--but..."

And then, having diligently smoked mouse turds, I surrended to an impulse. Instead of playing "Indian Love Call," as I had been practicing, I simply sawed my bow in half. The audience was stunned for an instant, then laughed and applauded my bizarre performance. Holly berated me for wasting money like that, and I promised never to do it again.

We spent that Christmas with Ken Kesey at the family farm in Oregon. They all lived in a huge, sectioned-out barn, with a metal fireplace that hung from the living-room ceiling. Ken's brother Chuck ran a creamery, and he brought over a large supply of home-made ice cream blended with two kinds of liquor. I ate so much (the coldness and sweetness covered up the taste of alcohol) that, without even knowing it, for the first time in my life I got drunk--on ice cream--throwing up and passing out.

Later I explained, "I never take any legal drugs."

© 2003 - Paul Krassner

Paul Krassner's latest book--Magic Mushrooms and Other Highs: From Toad Slime to Ecstasy (stories by and about Terence McKenna, John Lennon, Ken Kesey, Stephen Gaskin, John Lilly, Robert Anton Wilson, Ivan Stang, Ram Dass, William S. Burroughs, John Shirley, R. U. Sirius, Lisa Law and others)--is available via Paul's Web Site