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THAT'S GOOD THINKING THERE, COOL BREEZE, COOL BREEZE is a kid with three or four days'
beard sitting next to me on the stamped metal bottom of the open back part of a
pickup truck. Bouncing along. Dipping and rising and rolling on these rotten springs
like a boat. Out the back of the truck the city of San Francisco is bouncing down the
hill, all those endless staggers of bay windows, slums with a view, bouncing and
streaming down the hill. One after another, electric signs with neon martini glasses lit
up on them, the San Francisco symbol of "bar"—thousands of neon-magenta martini
glasses bouncing and streaming down the hill, and beneath them hundreds, thousands
of people wheeling around to look at this freaking crazed truck we're in, their white
faces erupting from their lapels like marshmallows—streaming and bouncing down
the hill—and God knows they've got plenty to look at.
That's why it strikes me as funny when Cool Breeze says very seriously over the
whole roar of the thing, "I don't know—when Kesey gets out I don't know if I can
come around the Warehouse."
"Why not?"
"Well, like the cops are going to be coming around like all feisty, and I'm on
probation, so I don't know."
Well, that's good thinking there, Cool Breeze. Don't rouse the bastids. Lie low—
like right now. Right now Cool Breeze is so terrified of the law he is sitting up in
plain view of thousands of already startled citizens wearing some kind of Seven
Dwarfs Black Forest gnome's hat covered in feathers and fluorescent colors. Kneeling
in the truck, facing us, also in plain view, is a half-Ottawa Indian girl named Lois
Jennings, with her head thrown back and a radiant look on her face. Also a blazing
silver disk in the middle of her forehead alternately exploding with light when the sun
hits it or sending off rainbows from the defraction lines in it. And, oh yeah, there's a
long-barreled Colt .45 revolver in her hand, only nobody on the street can tell it's a
cap pistol as she pegs away, kheeew, kheeew, at the erupting marshmallow faces like
Debra Paget in ... in ...
—Kesey's coming out of jail!
Two more things they are looking at out there are a sign on the rear bumper
reading "Custer Died for Your Sins" and, at the wheel, Lois's enamorado Stewart
Brand, a thin blond guy with a blazing disk on his forehead too, and a whole necktie
made of Indian beads. No shirt, however, just an Indian bead necktie on bare skin and
a white butcher's coat with medals from the King of Sweden on it.
Here comes a beautiful one, attaché case and all, the day-is-done resentful look and
the ... shoes—how they shine!—and what the hell are these beatnik ninnies—and Lois
plugs him in the old marshmallow and he goes streaming and bouncing down the
hill...
And the truck heaves and billows, blazing silver red and Day-Glo, and I doubt
seriously, Cool Breeze, that there is a single cop in all of San Francisco today who
does not know that this crazed vehicle is a guerrilla patrol from the dread LSD.
The cops now know the whole scene, even the costumes, the jesuschrist strung-out
hair, Indian beads, Indian headbands, donkey beads, temple bells, amulets, mandalas,
god's-eyes, fluorescent vests, unicorn horns, Errol Flynn dueling shirts—but they still
don't know about the shoes. The heads have a thing about shoes. The worst are shiny
black shoes with shoelaces in them. The hierarchy ascends from there, although
practically all lowcut shoes are unhip, from there on up to the boots the heads like,
light, fanciful boots, English boots of the mod variety, if that is all they can get, but
better something like hand-tooled Mexican boots with Caliente Dude Triple A toes on
them. So see the FBI—black—shiny—laced up—FBI shoes—when the FBI finally
grabbed Kesey—
There is another girl in the back of the truck, a dark little girl with thick black hair,
called Black Maria. She looks Mexican, but she says to me in straight soft
Californian:
"When is your birthday?"
"March 2."
"Pisces," she says. And then: "I would never take you for a Pisces."
"Why?"
"You seem too... solid for a Pisces."
But I know she means stolid. I am beginning to feel stolid. Back in New York City,
Black Maria, I tell you, I am even known as something of a dude. But somehow a
blue silk blazer and a big tie with clowns on it and ... a ... pair of shiny lowcut black
shoes don't set them all to doing the Varsity Rag in the head world in San Francisco.
Lois picks off the marshmallows one by one; Cool Breeze ascends into the innards of
his gnome's hat; Black Maria, a Scorpio herself, rummages through the Zodiac;
Stewart Brand winds it through the streets; paillettes explode—and this is nothing
special, just the usual, the usual in the head world of San Francisco, just a little
routine messing up the minds of the citizenry en route, nothing more than psyche food
for beautiful people, while giving some guy from New York a lift to the Warehouse to
wait for the Chief, Ken Kesey, who is getting out of jail.
ABOUT ALL I KNEW ABOUT KESEY AT THAT POINT WAS THAT HE was a
highly regarded 31-year-old novelist and in a lot of trouble over drugs. He wrote One
Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962), which was made into a play in 1963, and
Sometimes a Great Notion (1964). He was always included with Philip Roth and
Joseph Heller and Bruce Jay Friedman and a couple of others as one of the young
novelists who might go all the way. Then he was arrested twice for possession of
marijuana, in April of 1965 and January of 1966, and fled to Mexico rather than risk a
stiff sentence. It looked like as much as five years, as a second offender. One day I
happened to get hold of some letters Kesey wrote from Mexico to his friend Larry
McMurtry, who wrote Horseman, Pass By, from which the movie Hud was made.
They were wild and ironic, written like a cross between William Burroughs and
George Ade, telling of hideouts, disguises, paranoia, fleeing from cops, smoking
joints and seeking satori in the Rat lands of Mexico. There was one passage written
George Ade—fashion in the third person as a parody of what the straight world back
there in the U.S.A. must think of him now:
"In short, this young, handsome, successful, happily-married-three-lovely-children
father was a fear-crazed dope fiend in flight to avoid prosecution on three felonies and
god knows how many misdemeanors and seeking at the same time to sculpt a new
satori from an old surf—in even shorter, mad as a hatter.
"Once an athlete so valued he had been given the job of calling signals from the
line and risen into contention for the nationwide amateur wrestling crown, now he
didn't know if he could do a dozen pushups. Once possessor of a phenomenal bank
account and money waving from every hand, now it was all his poor wife could do to
scrape together eight dollars to send as getaway money to Mexico. But a few years
previous he had been listed in Who's Who and asked to speak at such auspicious
gatherings as the Wellesley Club in Dah-la and now they wouldn't even allow him to
speak at a VDC [Vietnam Day Committee] gathering. What was it that had brought a
man so high of promise to so low a state in so short a time? Well, the answer can be
found in just one short word, my friends, in just one all-well-used syllable:
"Dope!
"And while it may be claimed by some of the addled advocates of these chemicals
that our hero is known to have indulged in drugs before his literary success, we must
point out that there was evidence of his literary prowess well before the advent of the
so-called psychedelic into his life but no evidence at all of any of the lunatic thinking
that we find thereafter ! "
To which he added:
"(oh yea, the wind hums
time ago—time ago—
the rafter drums and the walls see
... and there's a door to that bird
in the sa-a-a-apling sky
time ago by—
Oh yeah the surf giggles
time ago time ago
of under things killed when
bad was banished and all the
doors to the birds vanished
time ago then.)"
I got the idea of going to Mexico and trying to find him and do a story on Young
Novelist Real-Life Fugitive. I started asking around about where he might be in
Mexico. Everybody on the hip circuit in New York knew for certain. It seemed to be
the thing to know this summer. He is in Puerto Vallarta. He is in Ajijic. He is in
Oaxaca. He is in San Miguel de Allende. He is in Paraguay. He just took a steamboat
from Mexico to Canada. And everyone knew for certain.
I was still asking around when Kesey sneaked back into the U.S. in October and
the FBI caught up with him on the Bayshore freeway south of San Francisco. An
agent chased him down an embankment and caught him and Kesey was in jail. So I
flew to San Francisco. I went straight to the San Mateo County jail in Redwood City
and the scene in the waiting room there was more like the stage door at the Music Box
Theatre. It was full of cheerful anticipation. There was a young psychologist there,
Jim Fadiman—Clifton Fadiman's nephew, it turned out—and Jim and his wife
Dorothy were happily stuffing three I Ching coins into the spine of some interminable
dense volume of Oriental mysticism and they asked me to get word to Kesey that the
coins were in there. There was also a little roundfaced brunette named Marilyn who
told me she used to be a teenie grouper hanging out with a rock 'n' roll group called
The Wild Flowers but now she was mainly with Bobby Petersen. Bobby Petersen was
not a musician. He was a saint, as nearly as I could make out. He was in jail down in
Santa Cruz trying to fight a marijuana charge on the grounds that marijuana was a
religious sacrament for him. I didn't figure out exactly why she was up here in the San
Mateo jail waiting room instead except that it was like a stage door, as I said, with
Kesey as the star who was still inside.
There was a slight hassle with the jailers over whether I was to get in to see him or
not. The cops had nothing particularly to gain by letting me in. A reporter from New
York—that just meant more publicity for this glorified beatnik. That was the line on
Kesey. He was a glorified beatnik up on two dope charges, and why make a hero out
of him. I must say that California has smooth cops. They all seem to be young, tall,
crewcut, blond, with bleached blue eyes, like they just stepped out of a cigarette ad.
Their jailhouses don't look like jailhouses, at least not the
parts the public sees. They are all blond wood, fluorescent lights and filingcabinet-tan
metal, like the Civil Service exam room in a new Post Office building.
The cops all speak soft Californian and are neat and correct as an ice cube. By the
book; so they finally let me in to see Kesey during visiting hours. I had ten minutes. I
waved goodbye to Marilyn and the Fadimans and the jolly scene downstairs and they
took me up to the third floor in an elevator.
The elevator opened right onto a small visiting room. It was weird. Here was a
lineup of four or five cubicles, like the isolation booths on the old TV quiz shows,
each one with a thick plate-glass window and behind each window a prisoner in a
prison blue workshirt. They were lined up like haddocks on ice. Outside each window
ran a counter with a telephone on it. That's what you speak over in here. A couple of
visitors are already hunched over the things. Then I pick out Kesey.
He is standing up with his arms folded over his chest and his eyes focused in the
distance, i.e., the wall. He has thick wrists and big forearms, and the way he has them
folded makes them look gigantic. He looks taller than he really is, maybe because of
his neck. He has a big neck with a pair of sternocleido-mastoid muscles that rise up
out of the prison workshirt like a couple of dock ropes. His jaw and chin are massive.
He looks a little like Paul Newman, except that he is more muscular, has thicker skin,
and he has tight blond curls boiling up around his head. His hair is almost gone on
top, but somehow that goes all right with his big neck and general wrestler's build.
Then he smiles slightly. It's curious, he doesn't have a line in his face. After all the
chasing and hassling—he looks like the third week at the Sauna Spa; serene, as I say.
Then I pick up my telephone and he picks up his—and this is truly Modern Times.
We are all of twenty-four inches apart, but there is a piece of plate glass as thick as a
telephone directory between us. We might as well be in different continents, talking
over Videophone. The telephones are very crackly and lo-fi, especially considering
that they have a world of two feet to span. Naturally it was assumed that the police
monitored every conversation. I wanted to ask him all about his fugitive days in Mexico.
That was still the name of my story, Young Novelist Fugitive Eight Months in
Mexico. But he could hardly go into that on this weird hookup, and besides, I had
only ten minutes. I take out a notebook and start asking him—anything. There had
been a piece in the paper about his saying it was time for the psychedelic movement
to go "beyond acid," so I asked him about that. Then I started scribbling like mad, in
shorthand, in the notebook. I could see his lips moving two feet away. His voice
crackled over the telephone like it was coming from Brisbane. The whole thing was
crazy. It seemed like calisthenics we were going through.
"It's my idea," he said, "that it's time to graduate from what has been going on, to
something else. The psychedelic wave was happening six or eight months ago when I
went to Mexico. It's been growing since then, but it hasn't been moving. I saw the
same stuff when I got back as when I left. It was just bigger, that was all—" He talks
in a soft voice with a country accent, almost a pure country accent, only crackling and
rasping and cheese-grated over the two-foot hookup, talking about—
"—there's been no creativity," he is saying, "and I think my value has been to help
create the next step. I don't think there will be any movement off the drug scene until
there is something else to move to—"
—all in a plain country accent about something—well, to be frank, I didn't know
what in the hell it was all about. Sometimes he spoke cryptically, in aphorisms. I told
him I had heard he didn't intend to do any more writing. Why? I said.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph," he said.
He talked about something called the Acid Test and forms of expression in which
there would be no separation between himself and the audience. It would be all one
experience, with all the senses opened wide, words, music, lights, sounds, touch—
lightning.
"You mean on the order of what Andy Warhol is doing?" I said.
... pause. "No offense," says Kesey, "but New York is about two years behind."
He said it very patiently, with a kind of country politeness, as if... I don't want to be
rude to you fellows from the City, but there's been things going on out here that you
would never guess in your wildest million years, old buddy ...
THE TEN MINUTES WERE UP AND I WAS OUT OF THERE. I HAD
gotten nothing, except my first brush with a strange phenomenon, that strange upcountry
charisma, the Kesey presence. I had nothing to do but kill time and hope
Kesey would get out on bail somehow and I could talk to him and get the details on
Novelist Fugitive in Mexico. This seemed like a very long shot at this time, because
Kesey had two marijuana charges against him and had already jumped the country
once.
So I rented a car and started making the rounds in San Francisco. Somehow my
strongest memories of San Francisco are of me in a terrific rented sedan roaring up
hills or down hills, sliding on and off the cable-car tracks. Slipping and sliding down
to North Beach, the fabled North Beach, the old fatherland bohemia of the West
Coast, always full of Big Daddy So-and-so and Costee Plusee and long-haired little
Wasp and Jewish buds balling spade cats—and now North Beach was dying. North
Beach was nothing but tit shows. In the famous Beat Generation HQ, the City Lights
bookstore, Shig Murao, the Nipponese panjandrum of the place, sat glowering with
his beard hanging down like those strands of furze and fern in an architect's drawing,
drooping over the volumes of Kahlil Gibran by the cash register while Professional
Budget Finance Dentists here for the convention browsed in search of the beatniks
between tit shows. Everything was The Topless on North Beach, strippers with their
breasts enlarged with injections of silicone emulsion.
The action—meaning the hip cliques that set the original tone—the action was all
over in Haight-Ashbury. Pretty soon all the bellwethers of a successful bohemia
would be there, too, the cars going through, bumper to bumper, with everbody rubbernecking,
the tour buses going through "and here ... Home of the Hippies... there's one
there," and the queers and spade hookers and bookstores and boutiques. Everything
was Haight-Ashbury and the acid heads.
But it was not just North Beach that was dying. The whole old-style hip life—jazz,
coffee houses, civil rights, invite a spade for dinner, Vietnam—it was all suddenly
dying, I found out, even among the students at Berkeley, across the bay from San
Francisco, which had been the heart of the "student-rebellion" and so forth. It had
even gotten to the point that Negroes were no longer in the hip scene, not even as
totem figures. It was unbelievable. Spades, the very soul figures of Hip, of jazz, of the
hip vocabulary itself, man and like and dig and baby and scarf and split and later and
so fine, of civil rights and graduating from Reed College and living on North Beach,
down Mason, and balling spade cats—all that good elaborate petting and patting and
pouring soul all over the spades—all over, finished, incredibly.
So I was starting to get the trend of all this heaving and convulsing in the
bohemian world of San Francisco. Meantime, miraculously, Kesey's three young
lawyers, Pat Hallinan, Brian Rohan, and Paul Robertson, were about to get Kesey out
on bail. They assured the judges, in San Mateo and San Francisco, that Mr. Kesey had
a very public-spirited project in mind. He had returned from exile for the express
purpose of calling a huge meeting of heads and hippies at Winterland Arena in San
Francisco in order to tell The Youth to stop taking LSD because it was dangerous and
might french fry their brains, etc. It was going to be an "acid graduation" ceremony.
They should go "beyond acid." That was what Kesey had been talking to me about, I
guess. At the same time, six of Kesey's close friends in the Palo Alto area had put their
homes up as security for a total of $35,000 bail with the San Mateo County court. I
suppose the courts figured they had Kesey either way. If he jumped bail now, it would
be such a dirty trick on his friends, costing them their homes, that Kesey would be
discredited as a drug apostle or anything else. If he didn't, he would be obliged to give
his talk to The Youth—and so much the better. In any case, Kesey was coming out.
This script was not very popular in Haight-Ashbury, however. I soon found out that
the head life in San Francisco was already such a big thing that Kesey's return and his
acid graduation plan were causing the heads' first big political crisis. All eyes were on
Kesey and his group, known as the Merry Pranksters. Thousands of kids were moving
into San Francisco for a life based on LSD and the psychedelic thing. Thing was the
major abstract word in Haight-Ashbury. It could mean anything, isms, life styles,
habits, leanings, causes, sexual organs; thing and freak; freak referred to styles and
obsessions, as in "Stewart Brand is an Indian freak" or "the zodiac—that's her freak,"
or just to heads in costume. It wasn't a negative word. Anyway, just a couple of weeks
before, the heads had held their first big "be-in" in Golden Gate Park, at the foot of
the hill leading up into Haight-Ashbury, in mock observance of the day LSD became
illegal in California. This was a gathering of all the tribes, all the communal groups.
All the freaks came and did their thing. A head named Michael Bowen started it, and
thousands of them piled in, in high costume, ringing bells, chanting, dancing
ecstatically, blowing their minds one way and another and making their favorite
satiric gestures to the cops, handing them flowers, burying the bastids in tender fruity
petals of love. Oh christ, Tom, the thing was fantastic, a freaking mind-blower,
thousands of high-loving heads out there messing up the minds of the cops and
everybody else in a fiesta of love and euphoria. Even Kesey, who was still on the run
then, had brazened on in and mingled with the crowd for a while, and they were all
one, even Kesey—and now all of a sudden here he is, in the hands of the FBI and
other supercops, the biggest name in The Life, Kesey, announcing that it is time to
"graduate from acid." And what the hell is this, a copout or what? The Stop Kesey
movement was beginning even within the hip world.
We pull up to the Warehouse in the crazed truck and—well, for a start, I begin to
see that people like Lois and Stewart and Black Maria are the restrained, reflective
wing of the Merry Pranksters. The Warehouse is on Harriet Street, between Howard
and Folsom. Like most of San Francisco, Harriet Street is a lot of wooden buildings
with bay windows all painted white. But Harriet Street is in San Francisco's Skid Row
area, and despite all the paint, it looks like about forty winos crawled off in the
shadows and died and turned black and bloated and exploded, sending forth a stream
of spirochetes that got into every board, every strip, every crack, every splinter, every
flecking flake of paint. The Warehouse actually turns out to be the ground-floor
garage of an abandoned hotel. Its last commercial use was as a pie factory. We pull up
to the garage and there is a panel truck parked just outside, painted in blue, yellow,
orange, red Day-Glo, with the word BAM in huge letters on the hood. From out the
black hole of the garage comes the sound of a record by Bob Dylan with his raunchy
harmonica and Ernest Tubb voice raunching and rheuming in the old jack-legged
chants—
Inside is a huge chaotic space with what looks at first in the gloom like ten or
fifteen American flags walking around. This turns out to be a bunch of men and
women, most of them in their twenties, in white coveralls of the sort airport workers
wear, only with sections of American flags sewn all over, mostly the stars against
fields of blue but some with red stripes running down the legs. Around the side is a lot
of theater scaffolding with blankets strewn across like curtains and whole rows of
uprooted theater seats piled up against the walls and big cubes of metal debris and
ropes and girders.
One of the blanket curtains edges back and a little figure vaults down from a
platform about nine feet up. It glows. It is a guy about five feet tall with some sort of
World War I aviator's helmet on ... glowing with curves and swirls of green and
orange. His boots, too; he seems to be bouncing over on a pair of fluorescent globes.
He stops. He has a small, fine, ascetic face with a big mustache and huge eyes. The
eyes narrow and he breaks into a grin.
"I just had an eight-year-old boy up there," he says.
Then he goes into a sniffling giggle and bounds, glowing, over into a corner, in
among the debris.
Everybody laughs. It is some kind of family joke, I guess. At least I am the only
one who scans the scaffolding for the remains.
"That's the Hermit." Three days later I see he has built a cave in the corner.
A bigger glow in the center of the garage. I make out a school bus.. . glowing
orange, green, magenta, lavender, chlorine blue, every fluorescent pastel imaginable
in thousands of designs, both large and small, like a cross between Fernand Léger and
Dr. Strange, roaring together and vibrating off each other as if somebody had given
Hieronymous Bosch fifty buckets of Day-Glo paint and a 1939 International
Harvester school bus and told him to go to it. On the floor by the bus is a 15-foot
banner reading ACID TEST GRADUATION, and two or three of the Flag People are
working on it. Bob Dylan's voice is raunching and rheuming and people are moving
around, and babies are crying. I don't see them but they are somewhere in here,
crying. Off to one side is a guy about 40 with a lot of muscles, as you can see because
he has no shirt on—just a pair of khakis and some red leather boots on and his hell of
a build—and he seems to be in a kinetic trance, flipping a small sledge hammer up in
the air over and over, always managing to catch the handle on the way down with his
arms and legs kicking out the whole time and his shoulders rolling and his head
bobbing, all in a jerky beat as if somewhere Joe Cuba is playing "Bang Bang"
although in fact even Bob Dylan is no longer on and out of the speaker, wherever it is,
comes some sort of tape with a spectral voice saying:
"... The Nowhere Mine ... we've got bubble-gum wrappers ..." some sort of weird
electronic music behind it, with Oriental intervals, like Juan Carrillo's music: "...
We're going to jerk it out from under the world ... working in the Nowhere Mine ...
this day, every day ..."
One of the Flag People comes up.
"Hey, Mountain Girl! That's wild!"
Mountain Girl is a tall girl, big and beautiful with dark brown hair falling down to
her shoulders except that the lower two-thirds of her falling hair looks like a paint
brush dipped in cadmium yellow from where she dyed it blond in Mexico. She pivots
and shows the circle of stars on the back of her coveralls.
"We got 'em at a uniform store," she says. "Aren't they great! There's this old guy
in there, says, 'Now, you ain't gonna cut them flags up for costumes, are you?' And so
I told him, 'Naw, we're gonna git some horns and have a parade.' But you see this?
This is really why we got 'em."
She points to a button on the coveralls. Everybody leans in to look. A motto is
engraved on the bottom in art nouveau curves: "Can't Bust 'Em."
Can't Bust 'Em!... and about time. After all the times the Pranksters have gotten
busted, by the San Mateo County cops, the San Francisco cops, the Mexicale Federale
cops, FBI cops, cops cops cops cops...
And still the babies cry. Mountain Girl turns to Lois Jennings.
"What do Indians do to stop a baby from crying?"
"They hold its nose."
"Yeah?"
"They learn."
"I'll try it... it sounds logical . . ." And Mountain Girl goes over and picks up her
baby, a four-month-old girl named Sunshine, out of one of those tube-and-net portable
cribs from behind the bus and sits down in one of the theater seats. But instead of the
Indian treatment she unbuttons the Can't Bust 'Em coveralls and starts feeding her.
"... The Nowhere Mine ... Nothing felt and screamed and cried . . ." brang
tweeeeeeng ". . . and I went back to the Nowhere Mine ..."
The sledge-hammer juggler rockets away—
"Who is that?"
"That's Cassady."
This strikes me as a marvelous fact. I remember Cassady. Cassady, Neal Cassady,
was the hero, "Dean Moriarty," of Jack Kerouac's On the Road, the Denver Kid, a kid
who was always racing back and forth across the U.S. by car, chasing, or outrunning,
"life," and here is the same guy, now 40, in the garage, flipping a sledge hammer,
rocketing about to his own Joe Cuba and—talking. Cassady never stops talking. But
that is a bad way to put it. Cassady is a monologuist, only he doesn't seem to care
whether anyone is listening or not. He just goes off on the monologue, by himself if
necessary, although anyone is welcome aboard. He will answer all questions, although
not exactly in that order, because we can't stop here, next rest area 40 miles, you
understand, spinning off memories, metaphors, literary, Oriental, hip allusions, all
punctuated by the unlikely expression, "you understand—"
Chapter
II
The Bladder Totem
FOR TWO OR THREE DAYS IT WENT LIKE THAT FOR ME IN THE garage
with the Merry Pranksters waiting for Kesey. The Pranksters took me pretty much for
granted. One of the Flag People, a blonde who looked like Doris Day but was known
as Doris Delay, told me I ought to put some more ... well, color... into my appearance.
That hurt, Doris Delay, but I know you meant it as a kindly suggestion. She really did.
So I kept my necktie on to show that I had pride. But nobody gave a damn about that.
I just hung around and Cassady flipped his sledge hammer, spectral tapes played,
babies cried, mihs got flipped out, bus glowed, Flag People walk, freaks loop in outta
sunlight on old Harriet Street, and I only left to sleep for a few hours or go to the
bathroom.
The bathroom; yes. There was no plumbing in the Warehouse, not even any cold
water. You could go out into a little vacant lot next door, behind a board fence, and
take a stance amid the great fluffy fumes of human piss that were already lufting up
from the mud, or you could climb a ladder through a trap door that led up to the old
hotel where there were dead flophouse halls lined with rooms of a kind of spongy
scabid old wood that broke apart under your glance and started crawling, vermin,
molting underlife. It was too rank even for the Pranksters. Most of them went up to
the Shell station on the corner. So I went up to the Shell station on the corner, at Sixth
and Howard. I asked where the bathroom is and the guy gives me The Look—the
rotten look of O.K., you're not even buying gas but you want to use the bathroom—
and finally he points inside the office to the tin can. The key to the bathroom is
chained to a big empty Shell oil can. I pick it up and walk out of the office part, out
onto the concrete apron, where the Credit Card elite are tanking up and stretching
their legs and tweezing their undershorts out of the aging waxy folds of their scrota,
and I am out there carrying a Shell oil can in both hands like a bladder totem, around
the corner, to the toilet, and—all right, so what. But suddenly it hits me that for the
Pranksters this is permanent. This is the way they live. Men, women, boys, girls, most
from middle-class upbringings, men and women and boys and girls and children and
babies, this is the way they have been living for months, for years, some of them,
across America and back, on the bus, down to the Rat lands of Mexico and back,
sailing like gypsies along the Servicenter fringes, copping urinations, fencing with
rotten looks—it even turns out they have films and tapes of their duels with servicestation
managers in the American heartland trying to keep their concrete bathrooms
and empty Dispensa-Towels safe from the Day-Glo crazies...
Back inside the Warehouse. Everything keeps up. Slowly I am getting more and
more of a strange feeling about the whole thing. It is not just the costumes, the tapes,
the bus and all that, however. I have been through some crewcut college fraternity
weekends that have been weirder-looking and -sounding, insane on the beano. The ...
feeling begins when the Flag People start coming up to me and saying things like—
well, when Cassady is flipping the sledge hammer, with his head down in the mull of
the universe, just mulling the hell out of it, and blam, the sledge hammer, he misses it,
and it slams onto the concrete floor of the garage and one of the Flag People says,
"You know, the Chief says when Cassady misses it, it's never an accident—"
For a start, the term the "Chief." The Pranksters have two terms for referring to
Kesey. If it is some mundane matter they're talking about, it's just Kesey, as in "Kesey
got a tooth knocked out." But if they are talking about Kesey as the leader or teacher
of the whole group, he becomes the Chief. At first this struck me as phony. But then it
turned to... mysto, as the general mysto steam began rising in my head. This steam, I
can actually hear it inside my head, a great ssssssssss, like what you hear if you take
too much quinine. I don't know if this happens to anybody else or not. But if there is
something startling enough, fearful, awesome, strange, or just weird enough,
something I sense I can't cope with, it is as if I go on Red Alert and the fogging steam
starts . . .
"—when Cassady misses, it's never an accident. He's saying something. There's
something going on in the room, something's getting up tight, there's bad vibrations
and he wants to break it up.
They mean it. Everything in everybody's life is... significant. And everybody is
alert, watching for the meanings. And the vibrations. There is no end of vibrations.
Sometime after that I was up in Haight-Ashbury with some kid, not a Prankster, a kid
from another communal group, and the kid was trying to open an old secrétaire, the
kind that opens out into a desktop you can write on, and he pinches his finger in a
hinge. Only instead of saying Aw shit or whatever, the whole thing becomes a parable
of life, and he says:
"That's typical. You see that? Even the poor cat who designed this thing was
playing the game they wanted him to play. You see how this thing is designed, to open
out? It's always out, into, it's got to be out, into your life, the old bullshit thrust—you
know?—they don't even think about it—you know?—this is just the way they design
things and you're here and they're there and they're going to keep coming at you. You
see that kitchen table?" There is an old enamel-top kitchen table you can see through a
doorway in there. "Now that's actually better design, it actually is, than all this ornate
shit, I mean, I truly dig that kitchen table, because the whole thing is right there—you
know?—it's there to receive, that's what it's all about, it's passive, I mean what the hell
is a table anyway? Freud said a table is a symbol of a woman, with her shanks open,
balling it, in dreams—you know?—and what is this a symbol of? " He points to the
secrétaire. "It's a symbol of fuck-you, Fuck you, right?" And so on, until I want to put
my hand on his shoulder and say why don't you just kick it in the kneecaps and let it
go at that.
But anyway this talk just flows. Everyone is picking up on the most minute
incidents as if they are metaphors for life itself. Everybody's life becomes more
fabulous, every minute, than the most fabulous book. It's phony, goddamn it. .. but
mysto ... and after a while it starts to infect you, like an itch, the roseola.
There is also a lot about games. The straight world outside, it seems, is made up of
millions of people involved, trapped, in games they aren't even aware of. A guy they
call Hassler comes in out of the sunlight screen on Harriet Street and, zoom, he
doesn't even wait for the metaphors. I never got into an abstract discussion with a total
stranger so fast in my life. We began talking right away about the games. Hassler is a
young guy, good-looking with a wide face and long hair with bangs just exactly like
Prince Valiant in the comic strip and a turtleneck jersey on with metal stars on it, of
the sort generals wear on their shoulders, and he says, "Games so permeate our
culture that..." rumble rumble ego games judge everything screwed up brainwashing
tell ourselves "... keep on oppositioning"—here Hassler stiffens his hands and brings
his fingertips together like a karate collision—
But my mind is wandering. I am having a hard time listening because I am
fascinated by a little plastic case with a toothbrush and toothpaste in it that Hassler
has tucked under one thumb. It is shuddering around in front of my eyes as Hassler's
hands opposition ... What a curious bunch of bohos. This guy with the generals' stars
on his jersey is giving a kind of vesper service lecture on the sins of man and—a
toothbrush!—but of course!—he brushes after every meal!—he really does. He
brushes after every meal despite the fact that they are living here in this garage, like
gypsies, and there is no hot water, no toilet, no beds, except for a couple of mattresses
in which the dirt, the dust, the damps, and the scuds are all one, melded, with the
stuffing, and they stretch out on the scaffoldings, in the bus, in the back of a pickup
truck, nostrils mildewing—
"—but you know what? People are beginning to see through the warf of the games.
Not just the heads and everybody, but all sorts of people. You take in California.
There's always been this pyramid—"
Here Hassler outlines a pyramid in the air with his hands and I watch, fascinated,
as the plastic toothbrush case shiny shiny slides up one incline of the pyramid—
"—they're transcending the bullshit," says Hassler, only his voice is earnest and
clear and sweet like a high-school valedictorian's, as if he just said may next year's
seniors remember our motto—"transcending the bullshit—"
—a nice line of light there along the plastic, a straight rigid gleam from the past,
from wherever Hassler came from. Now I'm doing it again, ah, that amiable itch, I just
extracted a metaphor, a piece of transcendent bullshit, from this freaking toothbrush
case—
"—transcending the bullshit—"
A TALL GUY COMES INTO THE WAREHOUSE WEARING SOME
kind of blue and orange outfit like a mime harlequin's and with an orange Day-Glo
mask painted on his face, so that he looks extraordinarily like The Spirit, if you
remember that comic strip. This, I am told, is Ken Babbs, who used to be a helicopter
pilot in Vietnam. I get to talking to him and I ask him what it was like in Vietnam and
he says to me, very seriously:
"You really want to know what it was like?"
"Yeah."
"Come over here. I'll show you."
So he leads me back into the garage and he points to a cardboard box lying on the
floor, just lying there amid all the general debris and madness.
"It's all in there."
"It's all in there?"
"Right, right, right."
I reach in there and lift out a typewritten manuscript, four or five hundred pages. I
leaf through. It's a novel, about Vietnam. I look at Babbs. He gives me a smile of good
fellowship with his Day-Glo mask glowing and crinkling up.
"It's all in there?" I say. "Then I guess it takes a while to get it."
"Yeah, yeah, right! right! right!" says Babbs, breaking into a laugh, as if I just said
the funniest thing in the world. "Yeah! Yeah! Hah hah hah hah hah hah hah Right!
Right!" with the mask glowing and bouncing around on his face. I lower the novel
back into the box, and for days I would notice Babbs's novel about Vietnam lying out
there on the floor, out in the middle of everything, as if waiting for a twister to whip it
up and scatter it over San Francisco County, and Babbs would be somewhere around
saying to some other bemused soul: "Yeah, yeah, right! right! right!"
The Merry Pranksters were all rapidly assembling, waiting for Kesey. George
Walker arrives. Walker has on no costume. He is just like some very clean-cut blond
college kid wearing a T-shirt and corduroy pants, smiling and outgoing, just a good
West Coast golden boy except for a few random notes like the Lotus racing car he has
outside, painted with orange Day-Glo so that it lights up at dusk, skidding around the
corners of the California suburbs in four-wheel drifts. And Paul Foster. Foster, I am
told, is some kind of mad genius, a genius at computers, with all sorts of firms with
names like Techniflex, Digitron, Solartex, Automaton, trying to hunt him down to lay
money on him to do this or that for them . . . Whether he is a genius or not, I couldn't
say. He certainly looks mad enough. He is hunched over in a corner, in a theater seat,
an emaciated figure but with a vast accumulation of clothes. It looks like he has on
about eight pairs of clown's pants, one on top of the other, each one filthier than the
next one, all black, sooty, torn, mungey and fungous. His head is practically shaven
and he is so thin that all the flesh seems to be gone off his head and when he contracts
his jaw muscles it is as if some very clever anatomical diagram has been set in motion
with little facial muscles, striations, sheathes, ligaments, tissues, nodules, integuments
that nobody ever suspected before bunching up, popping out, springing into definition
in a complex chain reaction. And he contracts his jaw muscles all the time,
concentrating, with his head down and his eyes burning, concentrating on a drawing
he is doing on a pad of paper, an extremely small but crucial drawing by the looks of
his concentration . . .
Black Maria sits on a folding chair and smiles ineffably but says nothing. One of
the Flag People, a thin guy, tells me about Mexicans strung out on huaraches. Doris
Delay tells me—
"They're off on their own freak," Hassler continues, "and it may not look like
much, but they're starting to transcend the bullshit. There's this old trinity, Power,
Position, Authority, and why should they worship these old gods and these old forms
of authority—"
"Fuck God ... ehhhhh ... Fuck God ..."
This is a voice behind a blanket curtain to one side. Somebody is back there
rapping off what Hassler just said.
"Fuck God. Up with the Devil."
It is a very sleepy, dreamy voice, however. The curtain pulls back and standing
there is a wiry little guy who looks like a pirate. Behind him, back in there behind the
curtain, all sorts of wires, instruments, panels, speakers are all piled up, a glistening
heap of electronic equipment, and the tape is back there going ... "In the Nowhere
Mine ..." The guy looks like a pirate, as I said, with long black hair combed back
Tarzan-style, and a mustache, and a gold ring through his left earlobe. He stares out,
sleepily. In fact, he is a Hell's Angel. His name is Freewheeling Frank. He has on the
Hell's Angels' "colors," meaning a jacket with insignia, a jacket with the sleeves cut
off and the skull with the helmet on it and the wings and a lot of other arcane
symbols.
"Fuck God," says Freewheeling Frank. "Fuck all forms of... of. . ." and the words
trail off in a kind of dreamy way, although his lips are still moving and he kind of puts
his head down and trudges off into the gloom, toward the bus, with his hands flicking
out, first this side, then the other, like Cassady, and he is off on his trip, like Cassady,
and, all right, a Hell's Angel—and the Hassler brushes his teeth after every meal, in
the middle of a Shell station tin-can economy—
Just then Kesey arrives.
chapter
III
The Electric Suit
THROUGH THE SHEET OF SUNLIGHT AT THE DOORWAY AND down the
incline into the crazy gloom comes a panel truck and in the front seat is Kesey. The
Chief; out on bail. I half expect the whole random carnival to well up into a
fluorescent yahoo of incalculably insane proportions. In fact, everybody is quiet. It is
all cool.
Kesey gets out of the truck with his eyes down. He's wearing a sport shirt, an old
pair of pants, and some Western boots. He seems to see me for an instant, but there is
no hello, not a glimmer of recognition. This annoys me, but then I see that he doesn't
say hello to anybody. Nobody says anything. They don't all rush up or anything. It's as
if... Kesey is back and what is there to say about it.
Then Mountain Girl booms out: "How was jail, Kesey!"
Kesey just shrugs. "Where's my shirt?" he says.
Mountain Girl fishes around in the debris over beside a bunch of theater seats and
gets the shirt, a brown buckskin shirt with an open neck and red leather lacings. Kesey
takes off the shirt he has on. He has huge latissimi dorsi muscles making his upper
back fan out like manta-ray wings. Then he puts on the buckskin shirt and turns
around.
Instead of saying anything, however, he cocks his head to one side and walks
across the garage to the mass of wires, speakers, and microphones over there and
makes some minute adjustment. "... The Nowhere Mine ..." As if now everything is
under control and the fine tuning begins.
From out of the recesses of the garage—I didn't even know they were there—here
comes a woman and three children. Kesey's wife Faye, their daughter Shannon, who
is six, and two boys, Zane, five, and Jed, three. Faye has long, sorrel-brown hair and
is one of the prettiest, most beatific-looking women I ever saw. She looks radiant,
saintly. Kesey goes over to her and picks up each of the kids, and then Mountain Girl
brings over her baby, Sunshine, and he picks up Sunshine a moment. All right—
Then Kesey loosens up and smiles, as if he just thought of something. It is as if he
just heard Mountain Girl's question about how was jail. "The only thing I was worried
about was this tooth," he says. He pops a dental plate out of the roof of his mouth and
pushes a false front tooth out of his mouth with his tongue. "I had the awfulest
feeling," he says. "I was going to be in court or talking to reporters or something, and
this thing was going to fall down like this and I was going to start gumming my
words." He gums the words "start gumming my words," to illustrate.
Three weeks later he was to replace it with a tooth with an orange star and green
stripes on it, an enameled dens incisus lateral bearing a Prankster flag. One day at a
gas station the manager, a white guy, gets interested in the tooth and calls over his
helper, a colored guy, and says, "Hey, Charlie, come over here and show this fellow
your tooth." So Charlie grins and bares his upper teeth, revealing a gold tooth with a
heart cut out in the gold so that a white enamel heart shows through. Kesey grins back
and then bares his tooth—the colored guy stares a moment and doesn't say anything.
He doesn't even smile. He just turns away. A little while later, down the road, Kesey
says very seriously, very sorrowfully, "That was wrong of me. I shouldn't have done
that." "Done what?" "I outniggered him," says Kesey.
Outniggered him! Kesey has kept these countryisms, like "the awfulest feeling," all
through college, graduate school, days of literary celebration...
"How did it happen?" says Freewheeling Frank, meaning the tooth.
"He got in a fight with a Hell's Angel," says Mountain Girl.
"What!—" Freewheeling Frank is truly startled.
"Yeah!" says Mountain Girl. "The bastard hit him with a chain!"
"What!" says Frank. "Where? What was his name!"
Kesey gives Mountain Girl a look.
"Naw," she says.
"What was his name!" Frank says. "What did he look like!"
"Mountain Girl is shucking you," Kesey says. "I was in a wreck."
Mountain Girl looks repentant. Angels' duels are no joke with Frank. Kesey breaks
up ... the vibrations. He sits down in one of the old theater seats. He is just talking in a
soft, conversational tone, with his head down, just like he is having conversation with
Mountain Girl or somebody.
"It's funny," he says. "There are guys in jail who have been in jail so much, that's
their whole thing. They're jail freaks. They've picked up the whole jail language—"
—everybody starts gathering around, sitting in the old theater seats or on the floor.
The mysto steam begins rising—
"—only it isn't their language, it's the guards', the cops', the D.A.'s, the judge's. It's
all numbers. One of them says, 'What happened to so-and-so?' And the other one says,
'Oh, he's over in 34,' which is a cellblock. 'They got him on a 211'—they have
numbers for different things, just like you hear on a police radio—'they got him on a
211, but he can cop to a 213 and get three to five, one and a half with good behavior.'
"The cops like that. It makes them feel better if you play their game. They'll chase
some guy and run him down and pull guns on him and they're ready to blow his head
off if he moves a muscle, but then as soon as they have him in jail, one of them will
come around and ask him how his wife is and he's supposed to say she's O.K., thanks,
and ask him about his kids, like now that we've played the cops-and-robbers part of
the game, you can go ahead and like me. And a lot of them in there go along with that,
because that's all they know.
"When you're running, you're playing their game, too. I was up in Haight-Ashbury
and I heard something hit the sidewalk behind me and it was a kid had fallen out the
window. A lot of people rushed up and a woman was there crying and trying to pick
him up, and I knew what I should do is go up and tell her not to move him but I didn't.
I was afraid I was going to be recognized. And then up the street I saw a cop writing
out parking tickets and I was going to go up and tell him to call an ambulance. But I
didn't. I just kept going. And that night I was listening to the news on television and
they told about a child who fell out of a window and died in the hospital."
And that's what the cops-and-robbers game does to you. Only it is me thinking it.
Figuring out parables, I look around at the faces and they are all watching Kesey and,
I have not the slightest doubt, thinking: and that's what the cops-and-robbers game
does to you. Despite the skepticism I brought here, I am suddenly experiencing their
feeling. I am sure of it. I feel like I am in on something the outside world, the world I
came from, could not possibly comprehend, and it is a metaphor, the whole scene, ancient
and vast, vaster than ...
TWO GUYS COME IN OUT OF THE DAYLIGHT ON HARRIET
Street, heads by the looks of them, and walk up to Kesey. One of them is young with a
sweatshirt on and Indian beads with an amulet hanging from the beads—a routine
acid-head look, in other words. The other one, the older one, is curiously neat, however.
He has long black hair, but neat, and a slightly twirly mustache, like a cavalier,
but neat, and a wildly flowered shirt, but neat and well-tailored and expensive, and a
black leather jacket, only not a motorcycle jacket but tailored more like a coat, and a
pair of English boots that must have set him back $25 or $30. At first he looks like
something out of Late North Beach, the boho with the thousand-dollar wardrobe. But
he has a completely sincere look. He has a thin face with sharp features and a couple
of eyes burning with truth oil. He says his name is Gary Goldhill and he wants to
interview Kesey for the Haight-Ashbury newspaper The Oracle, and when could he
do that—but right away it is obvious that he has something to get off his chest that
can't wait.
"The thing is, Ken"—he has an English accent, but it is a middle-class accent, a
pleasant sort of Midlands accent—"the thing is, Ken, a lot of people are very
concerned about what you've said, or what the newspapers say you've said, about
graduating from acid. A lot of people look up to you, Ken, you're one of the heroes of
the psychedelic movement"—he has a kind of Midlands England way of breaking up
long words into syllables, psy-che-delic move-ment—"and they want to know what
you mean. A very beautiful thing is happening in Haight-Ashbury, Ken. A lot of
people are opening the doors in their minds for the first time, but people like you have
to help them. There are only two directions we can go, Ken. We can isolate ourselves
in a monastery or we can organize a religion, along the lines of the League for
Spiritual Discovery"—the League for Spi-ri-tu-al Dis-cov-ery—"and have acid and
grass legalized as sacraments, so everyone won't have to spend every day in fear
waiting for the knock on the door."
"It can be worse to take it as a sacrament," Kesey says.
"You've been away for almost a year, Ken," Goldhill says. "You may not know
what's been happening in Haight-Ashbury. It's growing, Ken, and thousands of people
have found something very beautiful, and they're very open and loving, but the fear
and the paranoia, Ken, the waiting for the knock on the door—it's causing some
terrible things, Ken. It's re-spon-si-ble for a lot of bad trips. People are having bad
trips, Ken, because they take acid and suddenly they feel that any moment there may
be a knock on the door. We've got to band together. You've got to help us, Ken, and
not work against us."
Kesey looks up, away from Goldhill, out across the gloom of the garage. Then he
speaks in a soft, far-off voice, with his eyes in the distance:
"If you don't realize that I've been helping you with every fiber in my body ... if
you don't realize that everything I've done, everything I've gone through ..."
—it is rising and rising—
"I know, Ken, but the repression—"
"We're in a period now like St. Paul and the early Christians," Kesey says. "St. Paul
said, if they shit on you in one city, move on to another city, and if they shit on you in
that city, move on to another city—"
"I know, Ken, but you're telling people to stop taking acid, and they're not going to
stop. They've opened up doors in their minds they never knew existed, and a very
beautiful thing, and then they read in the papers that somebody they've looked up to is
suddenly telling them to stop."
"There's a lot of things I can't tell the newspapers," says Kesey. His eyes are still
focused long-range, away from Goldhill. "One night in Mexico, in Manzanillo, I took
some acid and I threw the I Ching. And the I Ching—the great thing about the I Ching
is, it never sends you Valentines, it slaps you in the face when you need it—and it said
we had reached the end of something, we weren't going anywhere any longer, it was
time for a new direction—and I went outside and there was an electrical storm, and
there was lightning everywhere and I pointed to the sky and lightning flashed and all
of a sudden I had a second skin, of lightning, electricity, like a suit of electricity, and I
knew it was in us to be superheroes and that we could become superheroes or nothing."
He lowers his eyes. "I couldn't tell this to the newspapers. How could I? I
wouldn't be put back in jail, I'd be put in Pescadero."
—rising—rising—
"But most people aren't ready for that, Ken," Goldhill says. "They're just beginning
to open the doors in their minds—"
"But once you've been through that door, you can't just keep going through it over
and over again—"
"—and somebody's got to help them through that door—"
"Don't say stop plunging into the forest," Kesey says. "Don't say stop being a
pioneer and come back here and help these people through the door. If Leary wants to
do that, that's good, it's a good thing and somebody should do it. But somebody has to
be the pioneer and leave the marks for others to follow." Kesey looks up again, way
out into the gloom. "You've got to have some faith in what you're trying to do. It's
easy to have faith as long as it goes along with what you already know. But you've got
to have faith in us all the way. Somebody like Gleason—Gleason was with us this
far." Kesey spread his thumb and forefinger about two inches apart. "He was with us
as long as our fantasy coincided with his. But as soon as we went on further, he didn't
understand it, so he was going against us. He had ... no faith."
No faith!—bay fog turns steam, hissing in the old cranium—
Faith! Further! And it is an exceedingly strange feeling to be sitting here in the
Day-Glo, on poor abscessed Harriet Street, and realize suddenly that in this
improbably ex-pie factory Warehouse garage I am in the midst of Tsong-Isha-pa and
the sangha communion, Mani and the wan persecuted at The Gate, Zoroaster,
Maidhyoimaongha and the five faithful before Vish-tapu, Mohammed and Abu Bekr
and the disciples amid the pharisaical Koreish of Mecca, Gautama and the brethren in
the wilderness leaving the blood-and-kin families of their pasts for the one true family
of the sangha inner circle—in short, true mystic brotherhood—only in poor old
Formica polyethylene 1960s America without a grain of desert sand or a shred of
palm leaf or a morsel of manna wilderness breadfruit overhead, picking up vibrations
from Ampex tapes and a juggled Williams Lok-Hed sledge hammer, hooking down
mathematical lab drugs, LSD-25, IT-290, DMT, instead of soma water, heading out in
American flag airport coveralls and an International Harvester bus—yet for real!—
amid the marshmallow shiny black shoe masses—
chapter
IV
What Do You Think
of My Buddha?
THE CURRENT FANTASY ... BY NOW, LATE EVENING, MOST of the
Pranksters have cleared out of the Warehouse, off to take a shower at the apartment of
Gut, an ex—Hell's Angel who has a psychedelic shop called Joint Ventures, off to
here, off to there . .. Just Kesey and a couple of others left in the Warehouse. Kesey
stands in the gloom of the Control Central, over to the side amid the tapes, and cans of
movie film marked with adhesive strips, and notebooks and microphones and wires
and coils, speakers, amplifiers. The Prankster Archives—and a tape drones on in a
weird voice, full of Ouija-whammy:
"... the blissful counterstroke ... a considerable new message ..."
A considerable new message ... The current fantasy ... Fantasy is a word Kesey has
taken to using more and more, for all sorts of plans, ventures, world views, ambitions.
It is a good word. It is ironic and it isn't. It refers to everything from getting hold of a
pickup truck—"that's our fantasy for this weekend"—-to
some scary stuff out on the raggedy raggedy edge ... like the current
fantasy, which is somehow to be told at the Acid Test Graduation. But how to tell it?
Kesey rummages through the film cans and assorted . .. Archives ... It has never been
possible, has it, truly, just to come out and announce the current fantasy, not even in
days gone by, when it seemed so simple. Now, you take Goldhill, who was just in here
with the truth in his eyes. He will come closer than most. Kesey could see it. Goldhill
was open... and into the pudding. He had his own fantasy, the League for Spi-ri-tu-al
Dis-cov-ery, and yet he is the rare kind who might even be willing to move with their
fantasy, his and the Pranksters'. It takes a rare kind. Because always comes the moment
when it's time to take the Prankster circus further on toward Edge City. And
always at that point some good souls are startled: Hey, wait! Like Ralph Gleason with
his column in the Chronicle and his own clump of hipness. Gleason is one of those
people ... Kesey can remember them all, people who thought he was great so long as
his fantasy coincided with theirs. But every time he pushed on further—and he always
pushed on further—they became confused and resentful . . . The tape winds on:
"... the blissful counterstroke ... through workhorse and intercourse ... the blood
that was available to him in intercourse ... made us believe he was in the apple sauce
for twenty years . . ."
Only lucky dogs and Merry Pranksters can understand this supersonic warble! ...
most likely .. .
". .. the blissful counterstroke . .."
... the current fantasy ... Even back on Perry Lane, where everyone was young and
intellectual and analytical, and the sky, supposedly, was the limit—there was no way
he could just come right out and say: Come in a little closer, friends ... They had their
own fantasy for him: he was a "diamond in the rough." Wellllll, that was all right,
being a diamond in the rough. He had gone to Stanford University in 1958 on a
creative-writing fellowship, and they had taken him in on Perry Lane because he was
such a swell diamond in the rough. Perry Lane was Stanford's bohemian quarter. As
bohemias go, Perry Lane was Arcadia, Arcadia just off the Stanford golf course. It
was a cluster of two-room cottages with weathery wood shingles in an oak forest,
only not just amid trees and greenery, but amid vines, honeysuckle tendrils, all buds
and shoots and swooping tendrils and twitterings like the best of Arthur Rackham and
Honey Bear. Not only that, it had true cultural cachet. Thorstein Veblen had lived
there. So had two Nobel Prize winners everybody knew about though the names
escaped them. The cottages rented for just $60 a month. Getting into Perry Lane was
like getting into a club. Everybody who lived there had known somebody else who
lived there, or they would never have gotten in, and naturally they got to know each
other very closely too, and there was always something of an atmosphere of
communal living. Nobody's door was ever shut on Perry Lane, except when they were
pissed off.
It was sweet. Perry Lane was a typical 1950s bohemia. Everybody sat around
shaking their heads over America's tailfin, housing-development civilization, and
Christ, in Europe, so what if the plumbing didn't work, they had mastered the art of
living. Occasionally somebody would suggest an orgy or a three-day wine binge, but
the model was always that old Zorba the Greek romanticism of sandals and simplicity
and back to first principles. Periodically they would take pilgrimages 40 miles north
to North Beach to see how it was actually done.
The main figures on Perry Lane were two novelists, Robin White, who had just
written the Harper Prize novel, Elephant Hill, and Gwen Davis, a kind of West Coast
Dawn Powell. In any case, all the established Perry Laners could see Kesey coming a
mile away.
He had Jack London Martin Eden Searching Hick, the hick with intellectual
yearnings, written all over him. He was from Oregon—who the hell was ever from
Oregon?—and he had an Oregon country drawl and too many muscles and callouses
on his hands and his brow furrowed when he was thinking hard, and it was perfect.
White took Kesey under his wing and got him and his wife Faye a cottage on Perry
Lane. The Perry Lane set liked the idea at once. He could always be counted on to do
perfect things. Like the time they were all having dinner—there was a lot of communal
dining—and some visitor was going on about the ineffable delicacy of James
Baldwin's work, and Kesey keeps eating but also trying to edge a word in saying,
well, bub, I dunno, I cain't exactly go along with you there, and the fellow puts down
his knife and fork very carefully and turns to the others and says,
"I'll be delighted to listen to whatever Mr. Kesey has to say—as soon as he learns
to eat from a plate without holding down his meat with his thumb."
Perfect! He had been voted "most likely to succeed" at his high school in
Springfield, Oregon, and had graduated from the University of Oregon, where he was
all involved in sports and fraternities, the Ail-American Boy bit. He had been a star
wrestler in the 174-pound class and a star actor in college plays. He had even gone to
Los Angeles after he finished college, and knocked around Hollywood for a while
with the idea of becoming a movie star. But the urge to write, to create, had burst up
through all this thick lumpy All-American crap somehow, like an unaccountable
purslane blossom, and he had started writing, even completing a novel about college
athletics, End of Autumn. It had never been published, and probably never would be,
but he had the longing to do this thing. And his background—it was great, too.
Somehow the Perry Lane set got the idea that his family were Okies, coming out of
the Dust Bowl during the Depression, and then up to Oregon, wild, sodden Oregon,
where they had fought the land and shot bears and the rivers were swift and the
salmon leaped silver in the spring big two-hearted rivers.
His wife Faye—she was from the same kind of background, only she came from
Idaho, and they had been high-school sweethearts in Springfield, Oregon, and had run
off and gotten married when they were both freshmen in college. They once made a
bet as to which of them had been born in the most Low Rent, bottomdog shack, his
old place in La Junta, or hers in Idaho. He was dead sure there was no beating La
Junta for Rundown until they got to Idaho, and she sure as hell did win that one. Faye
was even more soft-spoken than Kesey. She hardly spoke at all. She was pretty and
extremely sweet, practically a madonna of the hill country. And their cottage on Perry
Lane—well, everybody else's cottage was run-down in a careful bohemian way,
simplicity, Japanese paper lamp globes and monk's cloth and blond straw rugs and
Swedish stainless steel knives and forks and cornflowers sticking out of a handthrown
pot. But theirs was just plain Low Rent. There was always something like a
broken washing machine rusting on the back porch and pigweed, bladderpods, scoke
and scurf peas growing ragged out back. Somehow it was. . . perfect... to have him
and Faye on hand to learn as the Perry Lane sophisticates talked about life and the
arts.
BEAUTIFUL! . . . THE CURRENT FANTASY . . . BUT HOW TO TELL them?—
about such arcane little matters as Captain Marvel and The Flash ... and The Life—
and the very Superkids—
"... a considerable new message . . . the blissful counter-stroke ..."
—when they had such a nice clear picture of him as the horny-nailed son of the
Western sod, fresh from Springfield, Oregon. It was true that his father, Fred Kesey,
had started him and his younger brother, Joe, known as Chuck, shooting and fishing
and swimming as early as they could in any way manage it, also boxing, running,
wrestling, plunging down the rapids of the Willamette and the McKenzie Rivers, on
inner-tube rafts, with a lot of rocks and water and sartin' death foamin' down below.
But it was not so they could tame animals, forests, rivers, wild upturned convulsed
Oregon. It was more to condition them to do more of what his father had already done
a pretty good job
of—claim whatever he can rightly get by being man enough to take it, and not on
the frontier, either .. . Kesey Sr. had been part of the 1940s migration from the
Southwest—not of "Okies" but of Protestant entrepreneurs who looked to the West
Coast as a land of business opportunity. He started out in the Willamette Valley with
next to nothing and founded a marketing cooperative for dairy farmers, the Eugene
Farmers Cooperative, and built it into the biggest dairy operation in the area, retailing
under the name of Darigold. He was one of the big postwar success stories in the
Valley—and ended up not in an old homestead with wood sidings and lightning rods
but in a modern home in the suburbs, lowslung and pastel, on a street called Debra
Lane. The incredible postwar American electro-pastel surge into the suburbs!—it was
sweeping the Valley, with superhighways, dream-boat cars, shopping centers, soaring
thirty-foot Federal Sign & Signal Company electric supersculptures—Eight New
Plexiglas Display Features!—a surge of freedom and mobility, of cars and the money
to pay for them and the time to enjoy them and a home where you can laze in a rich
pool of pale wall-to-wall or roar through the technological wonderworld in motor
launches and, in the case of men like his father, private planes—
The things he would somehow suddenly remember about the old home town—
over here, for example, is the old white clapboard house they used to live in, and
behind it, back a ways, is the radio tower of station KORE with a red light blinking on
top—and at night he used to get down on his knees to say his prayers and there would
be the sky and the light blinking—and he always kind of thought he was praying to
that red light. And the old highway used to take a bend right about here, and it seemed
like there was always somebody driving through about three or four in the morning,
half asleep, and they would see the lights over there in town where it was getting built
up and they'd think the road headed straight for the lights and they'd run off the bend
and Kesey and his dad would go out to see if they could help the guy draggle himself
out of the muck—chasing street lights!—praying to the red beacon light of KORE!—
and a little run-in at Gregg's Drive-in, as it used to be called, it is now Speck's, at
Franklin Boulevard at the bridge over the river. That was the big high-school drive-in,
with the huge streamlined sculpted pastel display sign with streaming streamlined
super-slick A-22 italic script, floodlights, clamp-on trays, car-hop girls in floppy blue
slacks, hamburgers in some kind of tissuey wax paper steaming with onions pressed
down and fried on the grill and mustard and catsup to squirt all over it from out plastic
squirt cylinders. Saturday nights when everybody is out cruising—some guy was in
his car in the lot at Gregg's going the wrong way, so nobody could move. The more
everybody blew the horns, the more determined the guy got. Like this was the test. He
rolls up the windows and locks the doors so they can't get at him and keeps boring in.
This guy vs. Kesey. So Kesey goes inside and gets a potato they make the french fries
with and comes out and jams it over the guy's exhaust pipe, which causes the motor to
conk out and you ain't going any which way now, bub. The guy brings charges against
Kesey for ruining his engine and Kesey ends up in juvenile court before a judge and
tries to tell him how it is at Gregg's Drive-In on a Saturday night: The Life—that
feeling—The Life—the late 1940s early 1950s American Teenage Drive-in Life was
precisely what it was all about—but how could you tell anyone about it?
But of course!—the feeling—out here at night, free, with the motor running and the
adrenaline flowing, cruising in the neon glories of the new American night—it was
very Heaven to be the first wave of the most extraordinary kids in the history of the
world—only 15, 16, 17 years old, dressed in the haute couture of pink Oxford shirts,
sharp pants, snaky half-inch belts, fast shoes—with all this Straight-6 and V-8 power
underneath and all this neon glamour overhead, which somehow tied in with the
technological superheroics of the jet, TV, atomic subs, ultrasonics—Postwar
American suburbs—glorious world! and the hell with the intellectual bad-mouthers of
America's tailfin civilization... They couldn't know what it was like or else they had it
cultivated out of them—the feeling—to be very Superkids ! the world's first
generation of the little devils—feeling immune, beyond calamity. One's parents
remembered the sloughing common order, War & Depression—but Superkids knew
only the emotional surge of the great payoff, when nothing was common any longer—
The Life! A glorious place, a glorious age, I tell you! A very Neon Renaissance—And
the myths that actually touched you at that time—not Hercules, Orpheus, Ulysses, and
Aeneas—but Superman, Captain Marvel, Batman, The Human Torch, The SubMariner,
Captain America, Plastic Man, The Flash—but of course! On Perry Lane,
what did they think it was—quaint?—when he talked about the comic-book Superheroes
as the honest American myths? It was a fantasy world already, this electropastel
world of Mom&Dad&Buddy&Sis in the suburbs. There they go, in the family
car, a white Pontiac Bonneville sedan—the family car!—a huge crazy god-awfulpowerful
fantasy creature to begin with, 327 horsepower, shaped like twenty-seven
nights of lubricious luxury brougham seduction—you're already there, in
Fantasyland, so why not move off your smug-harbor quilty-bed dead center and cut
loose—go ahead and say it—Shazam!—juice it up to what it's already aching to be:
327,000 horsepower, a whole superhighway long and soaring, screaming on toward ...
Edge City, and ultimate fantasies, current and future ... Billy Batson said Shazam! and
turned into Captain Marvel. Jay Garrick inhaled an experimental gas in the research
lab ...
 ... AND BEGAN TRAVELING AND THINKING AT THE SPEED OF
light as... The Flash .. . the current fantasy. Yes. The Kesey diamond-in-the-rough
fantasy did not last very long. The most interesting person on Perry Lane as far as he
was concerned was not any of the novelists or other literary intellectuals, but a young
graduate student in psychology named Vic Lovell. Lovell was like a young Viennese
analyst, or at least a California graduate-school version of one. He was slender with
wild dark hair and very cool intellectually and wound-up at the same time. He introduced
Kesey to Freudian psychology. Kesey had never run into a system of thought
like this before. Lovell could point out in the most persuasive way how mundane
character traits and minor hassles around Perry Lane fit into the richest, most complex
metaphor of life ever devised, namely, Freud's... . And a little experimental gas . . .
Yes. Lovell told him about some experiments the Veterans Hospital in Menlo Park
was running with "psychomimetic" drugs, drugs that brought on temporary states
resembling psychoses. They were paying volunteers $75 a day. Kesey volunteered. It
was all nicely calcimined and clinical. They would put him on a bed in a white room
and give him a series of capsules without saying what they were. One would be
nothing, a placebo. One would be Ditran, which always brought on a terrible
experience. Kesey could always tell that one coming on, because the hairs on the
blanket he was under would suddenly look like a field of hideously diseased thorns
and he would put his finger down his throat and retch. But one of them—the first
thing he knew about it was a squirrel dropped an acorn from a tree outside, only it was
tremendously loud and sounded like it was not outside but right in the room with him
and not actually a sound, either, but a great suffusing presence, visual, almost tactile, a
great impacting of... blue... all around him and suddenly he was in a realm of
consciousness he had never dreamed of before and it was not a dream or a delirium
but part of his awareness. He looks at the ceiling. It begins moving. Panic—and yet
there is no panic. The ceiling is moving—not in a crazed swirl but along its own
planes its own planes of light and shadow and surface not nearly so nice and smooth
as plasterer Super Plaster Man intended with infallible carpenter level bubble sliding
in dim honey Karo syrup tube not so foolproof as you thought, bub, little lumps and
ridges up there, bub, and lines, lines like spines on crests of waves of white desert
movie sand each one with MGM shadow longshot of the ominous A-rab coming up
over the next crest for only the sinister Saracen can see the road and you didn't know
how many subplots you left up there, Plaster Man, trying to smooth it all out, all of it,
with your bubble in a honey tube carpenter's level, to make us all down here look up
and see nothing but ceiling, because we all know ceiling, because it has a name,
ceiling, therefore it is nothing but a ceiling—no room for A-rabs up there in Level
Land, eh, Plaster Man. Suddenly he is like a ping-pong ball in a flood of sensory
stimuli, heart beating, blood coursing, breath suspiring, teeth grating, hand moving
over the percale sheet over those thousands of minute warfy woofings like a brush
fire, sun glow and the highlight on a stainless-steel rod, quite a little movie you have
going on in that highlight there, Hondo, Technicolors, pick each one out like fishing
for neon gumballs with a steam shovel in the Funtime Arcade, a ping-pong ball in a
flood of sensory stimuli, all quite ordinary, but... revealing themselves for the first
time and happening... Now... as if for the first time he has entered a moment in his life
and known exactly what is happening to his senses now, at this moment, and with
each new discovery it is as if he has entered into all of it himself, is one with it, the
movie white desert of the ceiling becomes something rich, personal, his, beautiful
beyond description, like an orgasm behind the eyeballs, and his A-rabs—A-rabs
behind the eyelids, eyelid movies, room for them and a lot more in the five billion
thoughts per second stroboscope synapses—his A-rab heroes, fine Daily Double
horsehair mustaches wrapped about the Orbicularis Oris of their mouths—
Face! The doctor comes back in and, marvelous, poor tight cone ass, doc, Kesey
can now see into him. For the first time he notices that the doctor's lower left lip is
trembling, but he more than sees the tremor, he understands it, he can—almost seen!
—see each muscle fiber decussate, pulling the poor jelly of his lip to the left and the
fibers one by one leading back into infrared caverns of the body, through transistorradio
innards of nerve tangles, each one on Red Alert, the poor ninny's inner hooks
desperately trying to make the little writhing bastards keep still in there, I am Doctor,
this is a human specimen before me—the poor ninny has his own desert movie going
on inside, only each horsehair A-rab is a threat—if only his lip, his face, would stay
level, level like the honey bubble of the Official Plaster Man assured him it would—
Miraculous! He could truly see into people for the first time—
And yes, that little capsule sliding blissly down the gullet was LSD.
VERY SOON IT WAS ALREADY TIME TO PUSH ON BEYOND
another fantasy, the fantasy of the Menlo Park clinicians. The clinicians' fantasy was
that the volunteers were laboratory animals that had to be dealt with objectively,
quantitatively. It was well known that people who volunteered for drug experiments
tended to be unstable anyway. So the doctors would come in in white smocks, with
the clipboards, taking blood pressures and heart rates and urine specimens and having
them try to solve simple problems in logic and mathematics, such as adding up
columns of figures, and having them judge time and distances, although they did have
them talk into tape recorders, too. But the doctors were so out of it. They never took
LSD themselves and they had absolutely no comprehension, and it couldn't be put
into words anyway.
Sometimes you wanted to paint it huge—Lovell is under LSD in the clinic and he
starts drawing a huge Buddha on the wall. It somehow encompasses the whole—
White Smock comes in and doesn't even look at it, he just starts asking the old
questions on the clipboard, so Lovell suddenly butts in:
"What do you think of my Buddha?"
White Smock looks at it a moment and says, "It looks very feminine. Now let's see
how rapidly you can add up this column of figures here ..."
Very feminine. Deliver us from the clichés that have locked up even these so-called
experimenters' brains like the accordion fences in the fur-store window—and Kesey
was having the same problem with his boys. One of them was a young guy with a liedown
crewcut and the straightest face, the straightest, blandest, most lineless awfulest
Plaster Man honey bubble levelest face ever made, and he would come in and open
his eyes wide once as if to make sure this muscular hulk on the bed were still rational
and then get this smug tone in his voice which poured out into the room like absorbent
cotton choked in chalk dust from beaten erasers Springfield High School.
"Now when I say 'Go,' you tell me when you think a minute is up by saying, 'Now.'
Have you got that?"
Yeah, he had that. Kesey was soaring on LSD and his sense of time was wasted,
and thousands of thoughts per second were rapping around between synapses,
fractions of a second, so what the hell is a minute—but then one thought stuck in
there, held ... ma-li-cious, de-li-cious. He remembered that his pulse had been running
75 beats a minute every time they took it, so when Dr. Fog says 'Go,' Kesey slyly
slides his slithering finger onto his pulse and counts up to 75 and says:
"Now!"
Dr. Smog looks at his stop watch. “Amazing!" he says, and walks out of the room.
You said it, bub, but like a lot of other people, you don't even know.
LSD; HOW CAN — NOW THAT THOSE BIG FAT LETTERS ARE babbling
out on coated stock from every newsstand ... But this was late 1959, early 1960, a full
two years before Mom&Dad&Buddy&Sis heard of the dread letters and clucked
because Drs. Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert were french-frying the brains of
Harvard boys with it. It was even before Dr. Humphry Osmond had invented the term
"psychodelic," which was later amended to "psychedelic" to get rid of the nuthouse
connotation of "psycho" ... LSD! It was quite a little secret to have stumbled onto, a
hulking supersecret, in fact—the triumph of the guinea pigs! In a short time he and
Lovell had tried the whole range of the drugs, LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, peyote, IT-
290 the superamphetamine, Ditran the bummer, morning-glory seeds. They were onto
a discovery that the Menlo Park clinicians themselves never—mighty fine irony here:
the White Smocks were supposedly using them. Instead the White Smocks had
handed them the very key itself. And you don't even know, bub . .. with these drugs
your perception is altered enough that you find yourself looking out of completely
strange eyeholes. All of us have a great deal of our minds locked shut. We're shut off
from our own world. Aand these drugs seem to be the key to open these locked doors.
How many?—maybe two dozen people in the world were on to this incredible secret!
One was Aldous Huxley, who had taken mescaline and written about it in The Doors
of Perception. He compared the brain to a "reducing valve." In ordinary perception,
the senses send an overwhelming flood of information to the brain, which the brain
then filters down to a trickle it can manage for the purpose of survival in a highly
competitive world. Man has become so rational, so utilitarian, that the trickle becomes
most pale and thin. It is efficient, for mere survival, but it screens out the most
wondrous part of man's potential experience without his even knowing it. We're shut
off from our own world. Primitive man once experienced the rich and sparkling flood
of the senses fully. Children experience it for a few months—until "normal" training,
conditioning, close the doors on this other world, usually for good. Somehow, Huxley
had said, the drugs opened these ancient doors. And through them modern man may at
last go, and rediscover his divine birthright—
But these are words, man! And you couldn't put it into words. The White Smocks
liked to put it into words, like hallucination and dissociative phenomena. They could
understand the visual skyrockets. Give them a good case of an ashtray turning into a
Venus flytrap or eyelid movies of crystal cathedrals, and they could groove on that,
Kluver, op cit., p. 43n. That was swell. But don't you see?—the visual stuff was just
the décor with LSD. In fact, you might go through the whole experience without any
true hallucination. The whole thing was... the experience... this certain indescribable
feeling. .. Indescribable, because words can only jog the memory, and if there is no
memory of... The experience of the barrier between the subjective and the objective,
the personal and the impersonal, the / and the not-I disappearing ... that feeling!... Or
can you remember when you were a child watching someone put a pencil to a sheet of
paper for the first time, to draw a picture ... and the line begins to grow—into a nose!
and it is not just a pattern of graphite line on a sheet of paper but the very miracle of
creation itself and your own dreams flowed into that magical... growing... line, and it
was not a picture but a miracle... an experience... and now that you're soaring on LSD
that feeling is coming on again—only now the creation is of the entire universe—
MEANWHILE, OVER ON PERRY LANE, THIS WASN'T PRECISELY the
old Searching Hick they all knew and loved. Suddenly Kesey—well, he was softspoken,
all right, but he came on with a lot of vital energy. Gradually the whole Perry
Lane thing was gravitating around Kesey. Volunteer Kesey gave himself over to science
over at the Menlo Park Vets hospital—and somehow drugs were getting up and
walking out of there and over to Perry Lane, LSD, mescaline, IT-290, mostly. Being
hip on Perry Lane now had an element nobody had ever dreamed about before, wildflying,
mind-blowing drugs. Some of the old Perry Lane luminaries' cool was tested
and they were found wanting. Robin White and Gwen Davis were against the new
drug thing. That was all right, because Kesey had had about enough of them, and the
power was with Kesey. Perry Lane took on a kind of double personality, which is to
say, Kesey's. Half the time it would be just like some kind of college fraternity row,
with everybody out on a nice autumn Saturday afternoon on the grass in the dapple
shadows of the trees and honeysuckle tendrils playing touch football or basketball. An
hour later, however, Kesey and his circle would be hooking down something that in
the entire world only they and a few avant-garde neuropharmacological researchers
even knew about, drugs of the future, of the neuropharmacologists' centrifuge utopia,
the coming age of. . .
Well shee-ut. An' I don't reckon we give much of a damn any more about the art of
living in France, either, boys, every frog ought to have a little paunch, like Henry
Miller said, and go to bed every night in pajamas with collars and piping on them—
just take a letter for me and mail it down to old Morris at Morris Orchids, Laredo,
Texas, boys, tell him about enough peyote cactus to mulch all the mouldering widows'
graves in poor placid Palo Alto. Yes. They found out they could send off to a place
called Morris Orchids in Laredo and get peyote, and one of the new games of Perry
Lane—goodbye Robin, goodbye Gwen—got to be seeing who was going down to the
Railway Express at the railroad station and pick up the shipment, since possession of
peyote, although not of LSD, was already illegal in California. There would be these
huge goddamned boxes of the stuff, 1,000 buds and roots $70; buds only—slightly
higher. If they caught you, you were caught, because there was no excuse possible.
There was no other earthly reason to have these goddamned fetid plants except to get
high as a coon. And they would all set about cutting them into strips and putting them
out to dry, it took days, and then grinding them up into powder and packing them in
gelatin capsules or boiling it down to a gum and putting it in the capsules or just
making a horrible goddamned broth that was so foul, so unbelievably vile, you had to
chill it numb to try to kill the taste and fast for a day so you wouldn't have anything on
your stomach, just to keep eight ounces of it down. But then—soar. Perry Lane, Perry
Lane.