When I almost killed the most famous lawyer in America
And why Alan Watts never forgot me
A friend of mine just sent me an email that said, “Hey there! I haven't seen a newsletter in awhile and thought I'd check on you. I hope yall are ok.” (Hi Holly! We are!)
Wasn’t that sweet of her? Plus, it made me realize that it’s been well over a month since I wrote On the Road with Snicklefritz (which made my wife cry and say it was maybe the only perfect thing she’d ever read but whatever).
Anyway, a month since ‘ere I did tread these Substack boards!
My whole problem is time.
For me time is like math: I understand its general principles, but am not great at making it actually work for me.
Okay, lemme really think for a moment about how to capture how I think about time.
The past is a song that’s done being sung, the future is a song that no one can ever sing, and the present is nothing but the breath between the two.
Whoa! Pretty Zenny of me!
Speaking of Zen and time, in the past I met Alan Watts once. (Young people: Alan Watts was a British-American philosopher and visionary whose bestselling book, The Way of Zen, introduced Eastern philosophy generally, and Zen Buddhism particularly, to the Western world. Before Watts, Americans didn’t know a Zen koan from a hen’s colon. Because of him millions of Americans started rethinking everything about who they are and how they were living. Watts basically birthed the New Age movement—which is basically Zen meets white privilege and buy one, get one free crystals.)
I met the man when I was ten years old. It was 1968. Upon my parents’ divorce in 1966, my mom enrolled at San Jose State University (SJSU), then part of a triad of colleges—the other two being UC Berkeley and San Francisco State University—that were, in many real and important ways, leading the country’s protests against the Vietnam War.
One of the results of my mom enrolling at SJSU was that our once normal suburban home became a gathering place for the likes of Alan Watts, Timothy Leary, and Richard Alpert (a.k.a. Baba Ram Daas, who wrote the 1971 monster bestseller, Be Here Now, which was my full-on bible for . . . well, however many years it’ll be between 1971 and the day I can’t be anywhere ever because I’ve croaked).
(Sidenote: The reason that the whole West Coast Leading Lights of the 60’s Counterculture crowd periodically gathered at our home in Cupertino, California was because, soon after her enrollment at SJSU, my mom became the girlfriend and then wife of Thomas Tutko, an SJSU psychology professor whose classes were so wildly popular they had to be held in the university’s showcase auditorium rather than a regular classroom or lecture hall. He founded the whole field of sports psychology. [His literally game-changing bestselling book Sports Psyching: Playing Your Best Game All of the Time was dedicated in part to li’l ol’ me.] Tutko was a crowd-commanding intellectual powerhouse; my mom, not exactly a dummy, was insanely hot; so yeah: boring party at our house!)
During one such salon-cum-soiree my mom stopped me as I was not inconspicuously enough ducking into our kitchen for something to eat. She was standing with a tall thin man with a goatee who was wearing a black suit, white shirt and a thin black tie: the then-standard Thoughtful Beatnik with a Respectable Job look. Delicately holding his martini glass with both his long-fingered hands, the man, I couldn’t help but notice, was handsome.
“Alan,” said my mom, “I’d like you to meet my son, John.”
My dad had taught me that whenever being introduced I should put out my hand, shake, and say, “It’s nice to meet you.” But my dad wasn’t there now, so I heeded to my shyness and just stood there like lump.
“John’s reading your book,” said my mom. “John, this is Alan Watts.”
“Oh!” I said. “It’s nice to meet you!”
Alan Watts locked his eyes right into mine. “You’re reading my book?”
“I am.”
“Which one?”
“The Way of Zen.”
Watts stared at me for a moment before saying, “You’re reading The Way of Zen?”
I wasn’t surprised or offended by his incredulity. All adults seemed to believe that all kids were burbling idiots, so this was just par for the course. “Yeah,” I said. “I’m almost done with it.”
When Alan Watts leaned down towards me a bit I felt like a mouse to his hawk. “Do you like it?” he said.
“I do, yes. A lot.”
“Do you understand it?”
“Yes,” I said. “I mean, most of it.” I did a little shoulder shrug. “It’s a pretty simple book.”
Alan Watts processed for a brief beat, and then straightened up to throw back his head and bust out a laugh so loud half the party stopped to look at us. Then, beaming down at me, he said, “That is the single greatest thing anyone has ever said to me.”
I looked up at my mom, who was looking back at me with as much love and pride as any mother has ever looked at her child.
Big Mom Love and cracking up Alan Watts. Not a bad moment for little John!
The only other of those sorts of persons whom I specifically recall being at our home was Timothy Leary. He was in our family room, sitting on this paisley red loveseat we had in front of our sliding patio door. The place was packed, but Mr. Leary was alone. Perched in a ramrod straight posture, he was being extremely intense: his eyes were like laser beams that he was using to see through everything and everyone.
I was passing by, stopped, looked at him, thought Nope, and kept going. That is my entire memory of the time that I could have met Timothy Leary but didn’t want to because I already had enough crazy in my life.
I don’t think Timothy Leary was actually crazy, by the way. I think he might very well have been balls deep into an acid trip in our family room that afternoon, but he seems to have been a good guy. I have no idea. I know my mom liked him. “He’s really funny,” she once told me. “He talks a lot.”
One more quick thing along these lines.
When, after some seven years of marriage, my mom divorced Tom Tutko, guess who her divorce lawyer was?
Go ahead. Guess.
You’ll never guess. Don’t even try.
It was William. Fucking. Kunstler.
Young people: William Kunstler was one of the most famous lawyers of the 20th century. The iconic civil rights-era lawyer, he defended, for starters, the Chicago Seven, which included Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Tom Hayden, and co-founder of the Black Panther Party, Bobby Seale. Among Kunstler’s other clients were Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcom X., Lenny Bruce, H. Rap Brown, Stokely Carmichael, Angela Davis, the Catonsville Nine, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., members of the American Indian Movement who were at Wounded Knee (which included Russell Means and Dennis Banks), Fred Shuttlesworth and the NAACP, the Freedom Riders—and on and on and on.
Kunstler was head of the ACLU from 1964-1972. He co-founded The Center for Constitutional Rights. He was instrumental in the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
I’ll stop now, but you get the idea.
And he had done all of that stuff before I met him. So I knew very well who he was. Everyone in America knew who he was, if for no other reason than that for months the trial of the Chicago Seven was covered on the nightly news. (If you’re interested in learning more about the zeitgeist-embodying cultural phenomenon that was the Chicago Seven trial of 1969-70, the 2020 movie written and directed by Aaron Sorkin, The Trial of the Chicago Seven, might be a good place to start. It’s on Netflix. It’s not great. But it does star Sacha Baron Cohen as Abbie Hoffman, so . . . you know, talk about a redeeming feature.)
If you are wondering what in the name of jacked-up jurisprudence was William Kunstler doing being my mom’s divorce lawyer, all I can say is welcome to the club. I have no idea how or why that happened. It makes no sense. It’s like seeing Moby Dick in someone’s swimming pool, or running across Superman working as a security guard at Target.
Nonetheless, in 1975 there was William Kunstler, sitting across the table from me and my mom in a booth at a Denny’s restaurant in San Jose, California. My primary memory of the experience is of trying not to fall into catatonic shock over the fact that I was at Denny’s with the most famous lawyer in America while he advised my mom on her divorce from the most famous psychologist in America. (Among other reasons, I base my justification for the latter claim on how often Tutko was a guest on Johnny Carson. Young people: Johnny Carson was the Jimmy Fallon of Jack Paar, whom nobody remembers anymore because of time.)
Toward the end of our meal my mom excused herself to go to the lady’s room.
And then there I was, sitting alone in a Denny’s booth with William Kunstler.
Tongue-tied doesn’t begin to describe me. I wouldn’t have said anything if my ass had suddenly caught fire.
The great man and I sat in silence for a long moment that turned into long minute which was just starting to feel like an agonizing eternity when the most unbelievable thing happened.
William Moses Kunstler, the indefatigable lion of American justice, the people’s champion, defender of the defenseless and liberator of the oppressed, said something to me that I wouldn’t forget if during a lobotomy they accidentally removed my whole brain.
William Kunstler said to me, “You gonna eat the rest of your whipped cream there?”
I looked down. Sure enough, I hadn’t touched the whipped cream that came with my piece of (as I recall) boysenberry pie.
“No, no, I’m not,” I said. “Please, help yourself.”
“Great,” said William Kunstler. And then he reached over with his fork and just . . . started eating my whipped cream.
“Have you ever had an egg cream?" he said.
Because of nerves I basically yelled, “NO I HAVEN’T. I’VE NEVER REALLY UNDERSTOOD WHAT THEY ARE.”
Mr. Kunstler unhurriedly scooped another dab off my plate. “What they are is heaven. There’s nothing like a real egg cream. But for some reason you can only get ‘em in New York.”
I felt my intimidation giving way to my curiosity, because I had once heard my father, who was from New York, waxing rhapsodic to my mom about “real egg creams.”
“Why is it that you can only get a great egg cream in New York?” I asked Martin Luther King’s lawyer.
Kunstler shrugged. “I don’t know. But it’s true. Also true: you gotta try one. If you ever come to New York, John, I want you to look me up, and I’ll take you out for a real egg cream. Okay?”
I have no idea what possessed me at that moment to try to be, of all things, funny. But I went for it.
I said, “What—I’m gonna argue? With you?”
And that’s the time I made William Kunstler laugh so hard he almost choked to death on some whipped cream. He was in the throes of som serious laugh-coughing when my mom returned from the bathroom.
Standing beside our table, she looked first at William Kunstler, and then at me. She was smiling.
“Sweetheart,” she said to me, “I don’t know what you just said to him, but I sure do wish I had heard it.”
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Damn, John! I thought you’d died up there. It’s been ages and then you hit us with this gem. Who knew? You really did rub elbows, toes or some other anatomical part with some doozies. And yes, I’m old enough to have recognized every name and group you’ve written about. I even have a famous person encounter who crossed your path as well; Adam Clayton Powell. How ‘bout that? Not bad for a little old mountain girl. You being from that part of Cali though, I can understand how your parents might have encountered some of the most illustrious of the time and as sharp as you are, you must have had an above average gene pool for your zygote to draw from. Your folks must have been quite a pair-until they weren’t. I’m going to have to go back and reread your book now in light of all this new information.
At any rate, this has been a fun read. You didn’t mention it but I’m assuming you’re still at Home Depot? Naturally, I’ve been keeping up with Aville and the recovery effort in the entire area. My heart is still broken just knowing what people are having to face each day. My oldest was there the other day, is in Charleston now with sibs but will be back there in a few days for a Dad visit. He’ll give me a full report, I’m sure. Take care and don’t be a stranger.
My most famous person story is having dinner with Tim Sample and his family because my mother was collaborating to make cards with him.
To me, I was happy to have a meal in a regular house with electricity and everything and kept real quiet hoping no one noticed I didn’t belong.
I was born in 1974. When and where in 1974 are lost to mystery and history. I must content myself with “somewhere in the woods in the winter” but that is another story for another time.
I love this story. I wish I had money to subscribe. I don’t even have the money to go to Denny’s these days. Thank you for sharing.