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INTRODUCTION, by Richard Lupoff

“FOUR WORDS”

FOUR WORDS:

Read. Enjoy. Trust me.

There, I always wanted to do that. Thank you for giving me the chance.

Michael Kurland’s The Unicorn Girl is a novel about a magical world, half-mythical, half-historic, half-imaginary. Three halves, you ask, isn’t that impossible? Of course it is. That’s why it’s magical. It is a lost world, too, a lost world called The Sixties.

What were the Sixties, and when were they? First of all, they didn’t start at 12:00:01 AM on January 1, 1960, nor did they end at 12:00:00 midnight on December 31, 1969. There’s a good deal of debate as to exactly when the Sixties—that astonishing era that we call, as a matter of convenience, the Sixties—really began.

Some people argue that the era began with the election of John F. Kennedy to be President of the United States. That was November, 1960. Others argue that the Sixties really began with Kennedy’s inauguration in January, 1961, or with his assassination in November, 1963.

Maybe the Sixties originated in England with the rise of the Beatles, Twiggy, and the Carnaby Street fashion fad, and American politics had nothing to do with it. Or them. Maybe the phenomenon (or collection of phenomena) that we call the Sixties was imported to the US.

But I know exactly when the Sixties ended. They ended on that glorious day in August, 1974, when Richard E. Nixon resigned the Presidency of the United States. That one, I will assert with absolute conviction. I was sitting in my friend Jerry Peters’ living room when Nixon came on TV and read his statement. Jerry and I toasted the event and then I went for a walk around the neighborhood and you could tell that an era had ended.

For better or for worse, the world was made new.

The Sixties were, to borrow a phrase from Chuckie Dickens, the niftiest of times and the nastiest of times. In some ways they were a flashback to the 1920’s, “The Era of Wonderful Nonsense.”

In the Twenties, sheiks wore raccoon coats and straw skimmers and slicked-down hair; shebas wore short dresses and feather boas, rolled-down stockings and cloche hats. They all drank bathtub gin or bootleg hooch whether they liked it or not. This was called “striking a blow for freedom,” and when I was in the army thirty years later some of our old-timers still used that expression every time they enjoyed a libation.

In the Sixties, men paraded around in long hair, moustaches and beards, love beads and bell-bottom trousers. Girls (!) wore granny glasses and granny dresses and long straight shiny hair and no makeup at all, or else they opted for miniskirts and oversized sun-glasses anchored to the tops of their heads and dark eye-shadow and pale lipstick.

For some of us the most important questions in the world were when the Beatles were going to release their next album, or whether the Jefferson Airplane’s music was as trippy as the Grateful Dead’s. (It wasn’t.)

And the drugs—can they nab me for a series of felonies I committed thirty years ago solely on the basis of this essay? If so, get a comfy cell warmed up ’cause here comes Arch-Criminal Number One! I remember an icy winter’s evening when my wife and I were meeting our friend Steve Stiles to celebrate his birthday. We’d bought him a baggie of something wonderful but illegal and wrapped it in bright paper and tied it with a ribbon.

We’d arranged to meet in the East Village, and when Pat and I arrived there was Steve, just across St. Mark’s Place, and there was a uniformed police officer in the middle of the street directing traffic. We certainly wouldn’t jaywalk, so I hollered Steve’s name, drew back my arm, and flung the gift-wrapped package skyward. It arched high over the policeman’s head through a light fall of lovely, feathery snowflakes, curved gracefully downward, and landed safely in Steve’s eagerly outstretched hands.

The light changed, Steve strolled across the street, passing inches from the cop, and everybody had a good laugh, never worrying about how close we’d come to three pairs of handcuffs and a ride in the paddy wagon, Instead, it was off to the Fillmore East to hear the Mothers of Invention and Sly and the Family Stone.

Like our parents and grandparents in the 1920s, we too felt that we were “striking a blow for freedom.”

Those days were long ago, and the playful lifestyle of the era seems as remote and as alien to today’s world as the civilization of the druids who built Stonehenge or that of the Aztecs who constructed those mysterious pyramids in Yucatán.

But if all that playfulness was the light-hearted side of the Sixties, there was a serious side as well. There was the Civil Rights movement with its heroes like Martin Luther King, and Rosa Parks, its villains like Bull Conner and George Wallace, and its martyrs like Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman. There were good guys like Senator Eugene McCarthy, and bad ones like John Mitchell and Richard Daley. There was the tragedy of Kent State and the horrifying police riot in Chicago, and behind so much of this, the Vietnam War, and behind that, the Cold War.

Remember the Black Panther Party and the Youth International Party? Remember, “Girls say Yes to boys who say No?” Remember movies like Easy Rider and Zabriskie Point? If you don’t, ask somebody who was there.

We treasured the books that this new consciousness and this new spirit of questioning spawned. Ken Kesey and Hunter Thompson and Tom Robbins hit the bigtime bestseller lists, and in the smaller world of science fiction there were topical novels by Michael Moorcock, Chester Anderson, Michael Kurland, Thomas Waters, Grania Davis, Norman Spinrad, and Robert Silverberg. I even wrote one myself, called Sacred Locomotive Flies. The late Don Bensen bought it for one publisher and loved the book so much that he went to bat for it in-house. He fought so hard to get it decent treatment that he got himself fired and had to buy it all over again for another publisher, once he’d got another job.

I think of all the people I knew and loved and admired in the Sixties, and what became of them. The era acted like a crucible. Some of my friends and heroes were destroyed; they literally lost their lives in the flames that were those years. Others were warped, distorted, dreadfully damaged, although they managed to survive and to some degree recover. But the majority of the people I knew in that era were tempered by the heat. Like iron, they emerged as better and stronger men and women than they had been before those strange and wonderful and terrible days.

And then, quite suddenly, the Sixties were over. Along came the Disco Seventies and the Go Go Eighties and the Dot.Com Nineties, and now we are living in a new millennium unlike anything that any of us could have anticipated.

Will there ever he another era like the Sixties? Oh yes, I think it’s inevitable. When the proper concatenation of economic conditions, social and political circumstances, and technological advances occurs—as old H. P. Lovecraft would say, “When the stars are right”—well, we had the Roaring Twenties and the Swinging Sixties and eventually we’ll have something else, something new and yet old, some fresh Era of Wonderful nonsense all over again.

When?

Ah, there’s the rub.

But, listen, I’ve been getting too serious and profound for my own good or for your amusement. Michael Kurland calls The Unicorn Girl an entertainment and also a fantasy, and he’s right on both counts. We all need an entertaining fantasy now and then, and Michael has created a wonderful one for us.

Just the other day I reread The Unicorn Girl for the first time in more than thirty years. Seamlessly I found myself slipping from the grim present into a past that never quite existed, but nearly did, and surely should have. I found myself an invisible d’Artagnon heading off on an adventure with the three mod musketeers Anderson, Kurland, and Waters, and their lovely companions Sylvia and Dorothy. My only complaint with the adventure was that it ended too soon, but that’s always a sign of a book that one loves.

Michael tells me that the memo to subscribers to Crawdaddy magazine is authentic, and it makes me wonder if I’ll ever collect the money that Crawdaddy has owed me since 1969. Nah, I don’t think so. The attribution to William Lindsey Gresham is also authentic; Gresham was one of the great, tragic literary talents of the Twentieth Century and I commend his works to you. Other poetry in The Unicorn Girl is Michael’s own creation, and damned skillfully executed at that.

In this book you will encounter one of the world’s great natural story-tellers. I’ve worked with Michael on several projects in recent decades, and can tell you that his is one of the most startlingly creative minds I have ever encountered. We would be working along on a story or on a piece of nonfiction, and I would have thought or written myself into a seemingly inescapable literary cul-de-sac. Time after time, Michael would take over the helm and turn the narrative in a direction that I not merely hadn’t thought of taking, but hadn’t imagined existed.

And suddenly, we were off and rolling again.

That’s what happens to the adventurers in The Unicorn Girl.

Now here’s another delight you can look forward to. I mentioned that I was saddened when I’d finished reading The Unicorn Girl. But on this occasion, The End is not really the end at all. No! Barely had I finished reading The Unicorn Girl when my friend Maurice Newburn surprised me by handing me a copy of Perchance, by Michael Kurland.

What was this?

I thought I knew all Michael’s books, or at least knew of them, and had read most of them. But here was one I’d never even heard of. I skipped home merrily clutching the book and discovered that, twenty years after the publication of The Unicorn Girl, Michael had produced a—well, yes, I’ll take a chance and call it a sequel.

Perchance is another wondrous adventure in the realm of multiple realities. Once again people go blipping from one earth-variant to another. The characters aren’t the same as in The Unicorn Girl—or are they? Delbit and Exxa bear a suspicious similarity to Michael and Sylvia, and their leaps and scrapes are as breathtaking as those of their prototypes. The mood is, perhaps, a trifle darker, the tone just a little more serious, but to this reader at least Perchance reads like Unicorn Girl II.

Perchance is out of print at the moment, but if you wish hard enough—visit enough paperback dealers—cruise enough websites—you just might turn up a copy. Or, well, maybe Michael will see fit to bring Perchance back into print. One can certainly wish.

But for now you hold in your hands the one, the only, the original Unicorn Girl. It’s time to slip an old Harper’s Bizarre or Strawberry Alarm Clock LP onto the turntable, pour yourself a glass of cheap wine, take off your shoes and put up your feet. Then set fire to a little Maui wowee (if you’re so inclined—don’t tell anybody I encouraged you to break the law) and settle in for a trip to a wonderful half-real, half-imaginary era with Michael Kurland and The Unicorn Girl.