“Crazy as a Fucking Loon”

Abstract

Depressed over his failure at La MaMa, Cal needed to get out of New York and in late January 1974 retreated to Florida, where he remained for several months. Nervous about making the journey alone, he asked Jeff Weiss to accompany him. While on board the Silver Meteor train heading south, he continued to grumble, “A piece of shit shit shit that Paul Foster had thought up no doubt to see how many people he could humiliate. Had I taken the whole thing seriously, I probably would have jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge very happily. It was all a gruesome joke from beginning to end. We all knew it and learned what ever paltry lessons that we could from such an asinine experience.”¹