For sale: my past, $348.20

When I was a freshman at UCLA way back in the '60s, I convinced the editors of the campus humor magazine, Satyr, that I could write funny, and they put me on staff. The following year all the staff, except me, was gone. I was named editor. What happened next, some might say, would overshadow the rest of my writing career.

I had an office; typewriters, telephones, light boxes and a budget. But no one to help me. Then, one day, a fellow sophomore knocked at the door. He had a cartoon to submit. It was of one Volkswagen Beetle on top of another, with two guys looking on. One of them said to the other, "Perhaps if we turned the hose on them."

It was sophomoric. It was crude. I made him the art director. The next guy to walk in said he was a writer. I made him assistant editor.

Little by little, we took on the responsibility of satirizing college life; making fun of courses and teachers, testing and grades, drugs and politics. It was a time of protest, assassinations, free sex and hallucinations -- a great time to edit a humor magazine.

In three years, we published nine issues. We had articles about seeing a campus psychiatrist, visiting Forest Lawn cemetery, having a "hate-out" (rather than a "love-in") and defending cheating. We published a Draft Dodger's Handbook. We did illustrated satires of the Greek tragedy "The Oresteia," Joseph Heller's "Catch-22" and Barbie and Ken dolls. We did a CliffsNotes for a sexy "Little Red Riding Hood." We published Tony Auth's illustrations and Jon Kellerman's cartoons. Auth would go on to win a Pulitzer Prize at the Philadelphia Inquirer, and Kellerman would stretch out his first name to Jonathan and become a bestselling author of psychological mysteries.

We even managed to get into trouble over a phone number (my art director added what he thought was a made-up number to an illustration of a Blue Book; the number turned out to be an actual coed's). For one particularly dicey issue, the printer refused to print the magazine. With another issue, we expected possible repercussions over some sexual and political content but got none. However, the University of New Mexico's humor magazine, the Juggler, reprinted the pages in question and wound up creating a huge media controversy that made us envious.

We printed 2,000 copies of each issue and sold them for 50 cents each. So, imagine my surprise when I recently discovered that Amazon.com had a listing under my name that said: "SATYR . Paperback. Used. $366."