The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

The

Electric

Kool-Aid

Acid Test

This edition contains the complete text

of the original hardcover edition.

NOT ONE WORD HAS BEEN OMITTED.

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

A Bantam Book / published by arrangement with Farrar, Straus & Giroux

PUBLISHING HISTORY

Farrar, Straus & Giroux hardcover edition published in August 1968 Literary Guild edition

published in August 1968

Bantam mass market edition / October 1969 Bantam trade paperback edition / October 1999

Parts of several chapters of this book appeared, in very different form, in the

WORLD

JOURNAL TRIBUNES

Sunday magazine,

NEW YORK

in January and February 1967,

http://avaxho.me/blogs/ChrisRedfield

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 68-13008.

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retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

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ISBN 0-553-38064-8

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20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13

Contents

I Black Shiny FBI Shoes / 1

II The Bladder Totem / 16

III The Electric Suit / 24

IV What Do You Think of My Buddha? / 32

V The Rusky-Dusky Neon Dust / 55

VI The Bus / 67

VII Unauthorized Acid / 87

VIII Tootling the Multitudes / 99

IX The Crypt Trip / 104

X Dream Wars / 108

XI The Unspoken Thing / 124

XII The Bust / 149

XIII The Hell's Angels / 167

XIV A Miracle in Seven Days / 182 XV Cloud /

198

XVI The Frozen Jug Band / 214

XVII Departures / 227

XVIII Cosmo's Tasmanian Deviltry / 229

XIX The Trips Festival / 249

XX The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test / 266

XXI The Fugitive / 286

XXII ¡Diablo! / 305

XXIII The Red Tide / 310

XXIV The Mexican Bust / 325

XXV Secret Agent Number One / 331

XXVI The Cops and Robbers Game / 346

XXVII The Graduation / 371 Epilogue / 413

The Electric

Kool-Aid Acid Test

Chapter

Black Shiny

FBI Shoes

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 filing-cabinet-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 min-

utes. 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 mus-

cles 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 up-

country 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 bo-

hemia 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 pan-

jandrum 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

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 service-station 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, be-

cause 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

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 week-

end"—-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 hand-thrown 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 Sub-Mariner, 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 Super-heroes as the

honest American myths? It was a fantasy world al-

ready, this electro-pastel 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-awful-powerful

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 fan-

tasies, 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 transistor-radio 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 lie-down

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 expe-

rience 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 pa-

per 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

soft-spoken, 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, wild-flying, 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 god-

damned 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.

Miles

under all that good vegetation from Morris

Orchids and having visions

Faces

so many faces rolling up behind the eyelids,

faces he has never seen

before, complete with spectral cheekbones,

pregnant eyes, stringy wattles, and all of a sudden:

Chief Broom. For some reason peyote does this... Ke-

sey starts getting eyelid movies of faces, whole

galleries of weird faces, churning up behind the

eyelids, faces from out of nowhere. He knows nothing

about Indians and has never met an Indian, but

suddenly here is a full-blown Indian—Chief Broom—

the solution, the whole mothering key, to the novel...

HE HADN'T EVEN MEANT TO WRITE THIS

BOOK. HE HAD BEEN working on another one,

called Zoo about North Beach. Lovell had suggested

why didn't he get a job as night attendant on the

psychiatrie ward at Menlo Park. He could make some

money, and since there wasn't much doing on the ward

at night, he could work on Zoo. But Kesey got absorbed

in the life on the psychiatric ward. The whole system—

if they set out to invent the perfect Anti-cure for what

ailed the men on this ward, they couldn't have done it

better. Keep them cowed and docile. Play on the

weakness that drove them nuts in the first place.

Stupefy the bastards with tranquilizers and if they still

get out of line haul them up to the "shock shop" and

punish them. Beautiful—

Sometimes he would go to work high on acid. He

could see into their faces. Sometimes he wrote, and

sometimes he drew pictures of the patients, and as the

lines of the ball-point greasy creased into the paper the

lines of their faces, he could—the interiors of these

men came into the lines, the ball-point crevasses, it was

the most incredible feeling, the anguish and the pain

came right out front and flowed in the crevasses in

their faces, and in the ball-point crevasses, the same—

one!—crevasses now, black starling nostrils, black

starling eyes, blind black starling geek cry on every

face: "Me! Me! Me! Me! I am—Me!"—he could see

clear into them. And—how could you tell anybody

about this? they'll say you're a nut yourself—but

afterwards, not high on anything, he could still see into

people.

The novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest,

was about a roustabout named Randle McMurphy. He is

a big healthy animal, but he decides to fake insanity in

order to get out of a short jail stretch he is serving on a

work farm and into what he figures will be the soft life

of a state mental hospital. He comes onto the ward with

his tight reddish-blond curls tumbling out from under

his cap, cracking jokes and trying to get some action

going among these deadasses in the loony bin. They

can't resist the guy. They suddenly want to do things.

The tyrant who runs the place, Big Nurse, hates him for

weakening .. . Control, and the System. By and by,

many of the men resent him for forcing them to strug-

gle to act like men again. Finally, Big Nurse is driven

to play her trump card and finish off McMurphy by

having him lobotomized. But this crucifixion inspires

an Indian patient, a schizoid called Chief Broom, to

rise up and break out of the hospital and go sane:

namely, run like hell for open country.

Chief Broom. The very one. From the point of

view of craft, Chief Broom was his great inspiration. If

he had told the story through McMurphy's eyes, he

would have had to end up with the big bruiser

delivering a lot of homilies about his down-home the-

ory of mental therapy. Instead, he told the story

through the Indian. This way he could present a

schizophrenic state the way the schizophrenic himself,

Chief Broom, feels it and at the same time report the

McMurphy Method more subtly.

Morris Orchids! He wrote several passages of the

book under peyote and LSD. He even had someone give

him a shock treatment, clandestinely, so he could write

a passage in which Chief Broom comes back from "the

shock shop." Eating Laredo buds—he would write like

mad under the drugs. After he came out of it, he could

see that a lot of it was junk. But certain passages—like

Chief Broom in his schizophrenic fogs—it was true

vision, a little of what you could see if you opened the

doors of perception, friends . . .

RIGHT AFTER HE FINISHED ONE FLEW

OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST, Kesey sublet his

cottage on Perry Lane and he and Faye went back up to

Oregon. This was in June, 1961. He spent the summer

working in his brother Chuck's creamery in Springfield

to accumulate some money. Then he and Faye moved

into a little house in Florence, Oregon, about 50 miles

west of Springfield, near the ocean, in logging country.

Kesey started gathering material for his second novel,

Sometimes a Great Notion, which was about a logging

family. He took to riding early in the morning and at

night in the "crummies." These were pickup trucks that

served as buses taking the loggers to and from the

camps. At night he would hang around the bars where

the loggers went. He was Low Rent enough himself to

talk to them. After about four months of that, they

headed back to Perry Lane, where he was going to do

the writing.

ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST WAS

PUBLISHED IN FEBRUARY, 1962, and it made his

literary reputation immediately:

"A smashing achievement"—Mark Schorer

"A great new American novelist"—Jack Kerouac

"Powerful poetic realism"—Life

"An amazing first novel"—Boston Traveler

"This is a first novel of special worth"—New

York Herald Tribune

"His storytelling is so effective, his style so

impetuous, his grasp of characters so certain, that the

reader is swept along... His is a large, robust talent,

and he has written a large, robust book"—Saturday

Review

AND ON THE LANE — ALL THIS

WAS A CONFIRMATION OF everything they

and Kesey had been doing. For one thing there was the

old Drug Paranoia—the fear that this wild uncharted

drug thing they were into would gradually... rot your

brain. Well, here was the answer. Chief Broom!

And McMurphy ... but of course. The current

fantasy ... he was a McMurphy figure who was trying to

get them to move off their own snug-harbor dead

center, out of the plump little game of being ersatz

daring and ersatz alive, the middle-class intellectual's

game, and move out to ... Edge City ... where it was

scary, but people were whole people. And if drugs were

what unlocked the doors and enabled you to do this

thing and realize all this that was in you, then so let it

be ...

Not even on Perry Lane did people really seem to

catch the thrust of the new book he was working on,

Sometimes a Great Notion. It was about the head of a

logging clan, Hank Stamper,

who defies a labor union and thereby the whole

community he lives in by continuing his logging

operation through a strike. It was an unusual book. It

was a novel in which the strikers are the villains and

the strikebreaker is the hero. The style was experi-

mental and sometimes difficult. And the main source of

"mythic" reference was not Sophocles or even Sir

James Frazer but... yes, Captain Marvel. The union

leaders, the strikers, and the townspeople were the

tarantulas, all joyfully taking their vow: "We shall

wreak vengeance and abuse on all whose equals we are

not... and 'will to equality' shall henceforth be the name

for virtue; and against all that has power we want to

raise our clamor!" Hank Stamper was, quite

intentionally, Captain Marvel. Once known as.. .

Ubermensch. The current fantasy ...

... on Perry Lane. Nighttime, the night he and

Faye and the kids came back to Perry Lane from

Oregon, and they pull up to the old cottage and there is

a funny figure in the front yard, smiling and rolling his

shoulders this way and that and jerking his hands out to

this side and the other side as if there's a different

drummer somewhere, different drummer, you

understand, corked out of his gourd, in fact... and, well,

Hi, Ken, yes, uh, well, you weren't around, exactly, you

understand, doubledy-clutch, doubledy-clutch, and they

told me you wouldn't mind, generosity knoweth no—

ahem—yes, I had a '47 Pontiac myself once, held the

road like a prehistoric bird, you understand ... and, yes,

Neal Cassady had turned up in the old cottage, like he

had just run out of the pages of On the Road, and ...

what's next, Chief? Ah .. . many Day-Glo freaking

curlicues—

All sorts of people began gathering around Perry

Lane. Quite an... underground sensation it was, in Hip

California. Kesey, Cassady, Larry McMurtry; two

young writers, Ed McClanahan and Bob Stone; Chloe

Scott the dancer, Roy Seburn the artist, Carl Lehmann-

Haupt, Vic Lovell... and Richard Alpert him-

lf... all

sorts of people were in and out of there all the time,

because they had heard about it, like the local beats—

that term was still used—a bunch of kids from a pad

called the Chateau, a wildhaired kid named Jerry

Garcia and the Cadaverous Cowboy, Page Browning.

Everybody was attracted by the strange high times they

had heard about... the Lane's fabled Venison Chili, a

Kesey dish made of venison stew laced with LSD,

which you could consume and then go sprawl on the

mattress in the fork of the great oak in the middle of

the Lane at night and play pinball with the light show

in the sky . .. Perry Lane.

And many puzzled souls looking in ... At first

they were captivated. The Lane was too good to be

true. It was Walden Pond, only without any Thoreau

misanthropes around. Instead, a community of

intelligent, very open, out-front people—out front was

a term everybody was using—out-front people who

cared deeply for one another, and shared... in

incredible ways, even, and were embarked on some

kind of... well, adventure in living. Christ, you could

see them trying to put their finger on it and ... then .. .

gradually figuring out there was something here they

weren't in on ... Like the girl that afternoon in

somebody's cottage when Alpert came by. This was a

year after he started working with Timothy Leary. She

had met Alpert a couple of years before and he had

been 100 percent the serious young clinical

psychologist—legions of rats and cats in cages with

their brainstems, corpora callosa and optic chiasmas

sliced, spliced, diced, iced in the name of the Scientific

Method. Now Alpert was sitting on the floor in Perry

Lane in the old boho Lotus hunker-down and exegeting

very seriously about a baby crawling blindly about the

room. Blindly? What do you mean, blindly? That baby

is a very sentient creature . .. That baby sees the world

with a completeness that you and I will never know

again. His doors of perception have not yet been

closed. He still experiences the moment he lives in.

The inevitable bullshit hasn't constipated his cerebral

cortex yet. He still sees the world as it really is, while

we sit here, left with only a dim historical version of it

manufactured for us by words and official bullshit, and

so forth and so on, and Alpert soars in Ouspenskyian

loop-the-loops for baby while, as far as this girl can

make out, baby just bobbles, dribbles, lists and rocks

across the floor ... But she was learning ... that the

world is sheerly divided into those who have had the

experience and those who have not—those who have

been through that door and—

It was a strange feeling for all these good souls

to suddenly realize that right here on woody thatchy

little Perry Lane, amid the honeysuckle and dragonflies

and boughs and leaves and a thousand little places

where the sun peeped through, while straight plodding

souls from out of the Stanford eucalyptus tunnel plod-

ded by straight down the fairways on the golf course

across the way—this amazing experiment in

consciousness was going on, out on a frontier neither

they nor anybody else ever heard of before.

PALO ALTO, CALIF., JULY 21, I963 —

AND THEN ONE DAY THE end of an era, as the

papers like to put it. A developer bought most of Perry

Lane and was going to tear down the cottages and put

up modern houses and the bulldozers were coming.

The papers turned up to write about the last night

on Perry Lane, noble old Perry Lane, and had the old

cliché at the ready, End of an Era, expecting to find

some deep-thinking latter-day Thorstein Veblen

intellectuals on hand with sonorous bitter statements

about this machine civilization devouring its own past.

Instead, there were some kind of nuts out here.

They were up in a tree lying on a mattress, all high as

coons, and they kept offering everybody, all the

reporters and photographers, some kind of venison

chili, but there was something about the whole setup—

and when it came time for the sentimental bitter

statement, well, instead, this big guy Kesey dragged a

piano out of his house and they all set about axing the

hell out of it and burning it up, calling it "the oldest

living thing on Perry Lane," only they were giggling

and yahooing about it, high as coons, in some weird

way, all of them, hard-grabbing off the stars, and it was

hard as hell to make the End of an Era story come out

right in the papers, with nothing but this kind of

freaking Olsen & Johnson material to work with,

but they managed to go back with the story they

came with, End of an Era, the cliché intact, if they

could only blot out the cries in their ears of Ve-ni-son

Chi-li—

—and none of them would have understood it,

anyway, even if someone had told them what was

happening. Kesey had already bought a new place in La

Honda, California. He had already proposed to a dozen

people on the Lane that they come with him, move the

whole scene, the whole raggedy-manic Era, off to ...

Versailles, his Low Rent Versailles, over the

mountain and through the woods, in La Honda, Calif.

Where—where—in the lime :::::: light :::::: and the

neon dust—

"... a considerable new message ... the blissful

counter-stroke ..."

chapter

The Rusky-Dusky

Neon Dust

A very Christmas card,

Kesey's new place near La Honda.

A log house, a mountain creek, a little wooden

bridge

Fifteen miles from Palo Alto beyond

Cahill Ridge where Route 84

Cuts through a redwood forest gorge—

A redwood forest for a yard!

A very Christmas card.

And—

Strategic privacy.

Not a neighbor for a mile.

La Honda lived it Western style.

One work-a-daddy hive,

A housing tract,

But it was back behind the redwoods.

The work-a-daddy faces could

Not be seen from scenic old Route 84,

Just a couple Wilde Weste roadside places, Baw's

General Store,

The Hilltom Motel, in the Wilde Weste Touriste

mode.

With brown wood signs sawed jagged at the ends,

But sawed neat, you know,

As if to suggest:

Wilde Weste Roughing It, motoring friends,

But Sanitized jake seats

Ammonia pucks in every urinal

We aim to keep your Wilde West Sani-pure—

Who won the West?

Antisepsis did, I guess.

La Honda's Wilde Weste lode

Seems to be owed to the gunslinging Younger

Brothers.

They holed up in town

And dad-blame but they found a neighborly way

To pay for their stay.

They built a whole wooden store, these notorious

mothers.

But them was the Younger Brothers,

Mere gunslingers.

Now this Kesey

And his Merry Humdingers down the road—

—in the ::::: lime ::::: light :::::

Early in 1964, just a small group on hand as yet.

In the afternoon—Faye, the eternal beatific pioneer

wife, in the house, at the stove, at the sewing machine,

at the washing machine, with the children, Shannon and

Zane, gathered around her skirts. Out in a wooden

shack near the creek Kesey has his desk and typewriter

where he has just finished the revisions on Sometimes a

Great Notion, now almost 300,000 words long. Kesey's

friend from Oregon, George Walker, is here, a blond

All-American-looking guy in his twenties, well-built,

son of a wealthy housing developer. Walker has what is

known as a sunny disposition and is always saying Too

much! in the most enthusiastic way. And Sandy

Lehmann-Haupt. Sandy is the younger brother of Carl

Lehmann-Haupt, whom Kesey had known on Perry

Lane. Sandy is a handsome kid, 22 years old, tall,

lean—high-strung. Sandy had met Kesey three months

before, November 14, 1963, through Carl, when Kesey

had come to New York for the opening of the stage

version of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Kirk

Douglas played McMurphy. Sandy had dropped out of

N.Y.U. and was working as a sound engineer. He was a

genius with tapes, soundtracks, audio systems and so

forth, but he was going through a bad time. It got to the

point where one day he tried to enter himself in a

psychiatric ward, only to be talked out of it by Carl,

who took him off to see the opening of One Flew Over

the Cuckoo's Nest. And there was Randle McMurphy ...

Kesey ... and Carl asked Kesey to take Sandy out west

with him, to La Honda, to get him out of the whole

New York morass. And if there was any place for

curing the New York thing, this was it, out back of

Kesey's in the lime :::::: light :::::: bower :::::: up the

path out back of the house, up the hill into the redwood

forest, Sandy suddenly came upon a fabulous bower,

like a great domed enclosure, like what people mean

when they talk about a "cathedral in the pines," only

the redwoods were even more majestic. The way the

sun came down through the redwood leaves—trunks and

leaves seemed to stretch up for hundreds of feet above

your head. It was always sunny and cool at the same

time, like a perfect fall day all year around. The sun

came down through miles of leaves and got broken up

like a pointillist painting, deep green and dapple

shadows but brilliant light in a soaring deep green

super-bower, a perpetual lime-green light, green-and-

gold afternoon, stillness, perpendicular peace, wood-

scented, with the cars going by on Route 84 just adding

pneumatic sound effects, sheee-ooooooooo, like a

gentle wind. All peace here; very reassuring!

A FEW TIMES SANDY AND KESEY AND

WALKER WOULD WALK UP into the forest with axes

and cut some wood for the house—but that wasn't

really the name of it at Kesey's. Sandy could see that

Kesey wasn't primarily an outdoorsman. He wasn't that

crazy about unspoilt Nature. It was more like he had a

vision of the forest as a fantastic stage setting ... in

which every day would be a happening, an art form ...

He had hi-fi speakers up on the roof of the house,

and suddenly out here in God's great green mountain

ozone erupts a manic spade blowing on a plastic

saxophone, namely, an Ornette Coleman record. It's a

slightly weird path here that the three loggers take:

nutty mobiles hanging from the low branches and a lot

of wild paintings nailed up on the tree trunks. Then a

huge tree with a hollow base, and inside it, glinting in

the greeny dark, here is a tin horse with the tin bent so

that the grotesque little animal is keeled over, kneeling,

in bad shape.

The terrain Kesey was most interested in, in fact,

was inside the house. The house was made of logs, but

it was more like a lodge than a cabin. The main room

had big French doors, for a picture-window effect, and

exposed beams and a big stone fireplace at one end.

Kesey had all sorts of recording apparatus around, tape

recorders, motion-picture cameras and projectors, and

Sandy helped add still more, some fairly sophisticated

relay systems and the like. Often the Perry Lane people

would drive over—although no one had moved to La

Honda so far. Ed Mc-Clanahan, Bob Stone, Vic Lovell,

Chloe Scott, Jane Burton, Roy Seburn. Occasionally

Kesey's brother Chuck and his cousin Dale would come

down from Oregon. They both resembled Kesey but

were smaller. Chuck was a bright quiet man. Casual

and down-home. Dale was powerfully built and more

completely down-home than either. Kesey was trying to

develop various forms of spontaneous expression. They

would do something like ... all lie on the floor and start

rapping back and forth and Kesey puts a tape-recorder

microphone up each sleeve and passes his hands

through the air and over their heads, like a sorcerer

making signs, and their voices cut in and out as the

microphones sail over. Sometimes the results were

pretty—

—well, freaking gibberish to normal human ears,

most likely. Or, to the receptive standard intellectual

who has heard about the 1913 Armory Show and Erik

Satie and Edgard Varèse and John Cage it might sound

... sort of avant-garde, you know. But in fact, like

everything else here, it grows out of... the experience,

with LSD. The whole other world that LSD opened your

mind to existed only in the moment itself—Now—and

any attempt to plan, compose, orchestrate, write a

script, only locked you out of the moment, back in the

world of conditioning and training where the brain was

a reducing valve .. .

So they would try still wilder improvisations ...

like the Human Tapes, huge rolls of butcher paper

stretched out on the floor. They would take wax

pencils, different colors, and scrawl out symbols for

each other to improvise on: Sandy the pink drum

strokes there, and he would make a sound like chee-

oonh-chunh, chee-oonh-chunh, and so forth, and Kesey

the guitar arrows there, broinga broinga brang brang,

and Jane Burton the bursts of scat vocals there, and

Bob Stone the Voice Over stories to the background of

the Human Jazz—all of it recorded on the tape

recorder—and then all soaring on—what?—acid,

peyote, morning-glory seeds, which were very hell to

choke down, billions of bilious seeds mulching out into

sodden dandelions in your belly, bloated—but

soaring!—or IT-290, or dexedrine, benzedrine,

methedrine—Speed!—or speed and grass—sometimes

you could take a combination of speed and grass and

prop that... LSD door open in the mind without going

through the whole uncontrollable tumult of the LSD ...

And Sandy takes LSD and the lime :::::: light :::::: and

the magical bower turns into... neon dust... pointillist

particles for sure, now. Golden particles, brilliant

forest-green particles, each one picking up the light,

and all shimmering and flowing like an electronic

mosaic, pure California neon dust. There is no way to

describe how beautiful this discovery is, to actually see

the atmosphere you have lived in for years for the first

time and to feel that it is inside of you, too, flowing up

from the heart, the torso, into the brain, an electric

fountain ... And ... IT-290!—he and George Walker are

up in the big tree in front of the house, straddling a

limb, and he experiences .. . intersubjectivity—he

knows precisely what Walker is thinking. It isn't

necessary to say what the design is, just the part each

will do.

"You paint the cobwebs," Sandy says, "and I'll

paint the leaves behind them."

"Too much!" says George, because, of course, he

knows—all of us sliding in and out of these

combinations of mutual consciousness,

intersubjectivity, going out to the backhouse, near the

creek, with tape recorders and starting to rap—a form

of free association conversation, like a jazz

conversation, or even a monologue, with everyone, or

whoever, catching hold of words, symbols, ideas,

sounds, and winging them back and forth and beyond ...

the walls of conventional logic ... One of us finds a

bunch of wooden chessmen. They are carved figures,

some kind of ancient men, every piece an old carved

man, only somebody left them outside and they got wet

and now they're warped, which sprung them open into

their real selves. This one's genitals are hanging out

despite he has robes on and carries a spear—

—Have you seen my daughter? Claims I

embarrass her. Claims the whole world knows I have

cunt on the brain. At my age—

—Yes, sir, we have the report. Your daughter's a

horny little bitch, but I am the King and I have no

choice but to cut your balls off—

—King, I'll throw you for them—

—Your balls?

-—Right! With those gold hubcaps you lug about

there—

—Right! In fact, incredible. Each one of us has a

chess figure in his hand and becomes that character and

they are rapping off the personalities they see in these

figures, and they start thinking the same things at once.

I, too, saw these funny little curves under this figure's

hand here, no larger than the head of a tiny tack, as...

golden hubcaps... I was about to say it—

It is the strangest feeling of my life—

intersubjectivity, as if our consciousnesses have opened

up and flowed together and now one has only to look at

a flicker of the other's mouth or eye or at the chessman

he holds in his hand, wobbling—

—You wouldn't believe a girl with electric eel

tits, would you, King?

—The ones that ionized King Arthur's sword

under swamp water?

—The very ones. Dugs with a thousand tiny

suction caps, a horny, duggy little girl, I'm afraid, 120

household volts of jail bait if I ever saw one—

—and how, in the wildest operations of chance,

could a term like 120 household volts of jail bait arise

in all our minds at once—

But the swamps, too—it is no longer all Garden

of Eden and glorious discovery for the old Perry Lane

crowd. In fact, there's a little grumbling here in the

magic dell. Kesey is starting to organize our trips. He

hands out the drugs personally, one for you, and I one

for you ... and just when you're starting to lie back and

groove on your thing, he comes in—Hup!—Hup!—

Everybody up! and organizes a tramp through the

woods ...

After it's all over, some of them ask Kesey for

some acid and IT-290 to take back to Palo Alto. No-o-

o-o-o-o, says Kesey, and he cocks his head as if he

wants to say this thing just right, because it's a delicate

matter.—I think you should come here and take it...

Later, on the way back, someone says: We used

to be equals. Now it's Kesey's trip. We go to his place.

We take his acid. We do what he wants.

But what does he want? Gradually, vaguely, it

dawns that Kesey's fantasy has moved on again, beyond

even theirs, old Perry Lane. In any case, nobody has

the stomach for Kesey's master plan, that they should

all move out onto his place, in tents and so forth,

transplanting the Perry Lane thing to La Honda. They

began to eye Kesey's place as a kind of hill-country

Versailles, with Kesey as the Sun King, looking bigger

all the time, with that great jaw in profile against the

redwoods and the mountaintops. It never develops into

an open breach, however, or even disenchantment. They

just get uneasy. They get the feeling that Kesey was

heading out on further, toward a fantasy they didn't

know if they wanted to explore.

OTHER PEOPLE WERE BEGINNING TO SHOW

UP AT KESEY'S, AND that was part of the trouble.

Some of the Perry Lane crowd didn't know exactly what

to make of Cassady. Here he is before us in Kesey's

Versailles, coming on, coming on, with his shirt off and

his arms jerking and his abdominal obliques jutting out

at the sides like a weight lifter's . . . We are hip, we

value the holy primitive. Only Kesey is intimating that

one should learn from Cassady, he is talking to you.

Which he was. Cassady wanted intellectual communion.

But the intellectuals just wanted him to be the holy

primitive, the Denver kid, the natural in our midst.

Sometimes Cassady would sense they weren't accepting

him intellectually and go off into the corner, still on

his manic monologue, muttering, "All right, I'll take my

own trip, I'll go off on my own trip, this is my own

trip, you understand ..."

Or Page Browning. The Cadaverous Cowboy had

found his way over the mountain, too. Back on Perry

Lane he had been just a Low Rent character popping in

from time to time on his route. Only now Kesey is

intimating that one can learn from Page Browning.

Kesey finds something loyal, brave and creative, cre-

ative, under that cadaverous face and the Adam's apple

and the black motorcycle jacket like a leftover from

when he must've ridden with the Hell's Angels—and his

thick Shellube pit voice. The primordial Shellube pits

... could that be it, a little class fear, after all, among

the hip ... genteel... intellectuals? A little Ahor, as

Arthur Koestler called it, the Ancient Horror, from

boyhood—the genteel suburban kid rides his bicycle

over to the gas station and there in the grease pit area

where they lubricate the cars the hard rocks are

hunkered down telling jokes about pussy, with an

occasional clinical reference to bowel movements and

crepitation. And oh christ don't you remember their

forearms with the basilic veins wrapped around them

like surgical tubes, gorged with the unattainable lower-

class hard-rock power that any moment is going to look

up and spot us... genteel little pudding kids. But Kesey

loved this Low Rent stuff. He was ready to swing with

it. In time he would even be swinging with the beasts

from the veritable Ahor fathoms of the Shellube pits,

the Hell's Angels themselves . . .

In fact, only a few of the new retinue that

showed up at La Honda were Low Rent in terms of

background, but the place became much more down-

home than Perry Lane.

One of Kesey's old friends, Kenneth Babbs,

showed up, just back from Vietnam, where he had been

a captain in the Marines, flying helicopters. Babbs had

graduated magna cum laude from Miami University,

majoring in English. He had also been a great athlete.

He entered the creative-writing program at Stanford,

where Kesey met him. Babbs was tall, powerful, a very

Rabelaisian creature. Back from the wars, he came on

like a great hearty grizzly bear roaring a cosmic laugh.

Sometimes he would wear a flight suit for days at a

time, no matter where he was, come fly with me. And

Babbs was capable of some wild flights. He gave the

Kesey colony much of its new style ... Yes. He intro-

duced the idea of the pranks, great public put-ons they

could perform ...

And Mike Hagen arrived. Hagen was a fellow

Kesey had known in Oregon, good-looking, soft-

spoken, well-mannered, from a good family, fairly rich,

the kind of kid daddies smile over as he takes their

teenage daughter out on her first date, Yup, I've raised

her pretty damn well, if I do say so. No riffraff for my

girl, just nice Christian boys who say Yes, sir, Yes,

ma'am and comb their hair down with water on the

comb. About ten minutes after Hagen pulled into

Kesey's, he had his Screw Shack built out back of the

cabin, a lean-to banged together with old boards and

decorated inside with carpet remnants, a mattress with

an India-print coverlet, candles, sparkling little bijoux,

a hi-fi speaker—for the delight and comfort of Hagen's

Girls. Oh christ Hagen's Girls and the trouble they

caused—Stark Naked, Anonymous—but they come

later. Hagen was a benign but inspired con man in a

sweet way. He had a special gift for haggling,

bartering, hassling, and Hagen would turn up with his

car crammed with gleaming tape-recorder equipment,

movie equipment, microphones, speakers, amplifiers,

even video-tape equipment, and the audio-visual level

started rising around here—

Then one day, for example, one of Kesey's old

Perry Lane friends, Gurney Norman, a writer, drove up

for the weekend from Fort Ord, the Army camp, and

brought along one of his Army friends, a 24-year-old

first lieutenant in the infantry named Ron Bevirt.

Bevirt put everybody off at first, because he looked

totally Army. He was fat and sloppy-looking and had a

particularly gross-looking Army crewcut and was

totally unsophisticated. Bevirt, however, liked them

and he kept coming on weekends and bringing a lot of

food, which he enjoyed sharing with everybody, and he

smiled and laughed a lot and people couldn't help but

get to like him. By and by he was out of the Army and

he came around all the time. He even started getting

leaner and harder and his hair grew out until it was like

Prince Valiant's, in the comic strip, and he was a pretty

handsome guy and very much into the ... pudding. By

and by he became known as The Hassler and his real

name vanished almost...

AND BY AND BY, OF COURSE, THE

CITIZENS OF LA HONDA AND others would start

wondering ... what are the ninnies doing? How to tell

it? But there was no way to tell them about the expe-

rience. You couldn't put it into words. The citizens

always had the same fantasy, known as the pathology

fantasy. These ninnies are pathological. Sometimes it

was psychological—what do these kids come from,

broken homes or what? Sometimes it was social—are

these kids alienated? is our society getting rotten at the

core? or what? The citizens couldn't know about the

LSD experience, because that door had never opened

for them. To be on the threshold of—Christ! how to tell

them about the life here? The Youth had always had

only three options: go to school, get a job or live at

home. And—how boring each was!—compared to the

experience of. . . the infinite . . . and a life in which

the subject is not scholastic or bureaucratic but... Me

and Us, the attuned ones amid the non-musical shiny-

black-shoe multitudes, /—with my eyes on that almost

invisible hole up there in the r-r-r-redwood sky ...

ONE NIGHT BOB STONE WAS

SITTING AT HOME IN MENLO Park—he was

still in the creative-writing program at Stanford—and

the phone rang and it was Babbs calling from Kesey's

in La Honda. Come on over, he said, we're going to get

something going. Well, no, Stone said, he didn't feel

much up to it, he was kind of tired and it would take an

hour to drive over the mountain and an hour to drive

back, and maybe some other time—

"Come on, Bob," says Babbs. "It won't take you

an hour. You can get here in thirty minutes."

Babbs is in very high spirits and in the

background Stone can hear music and voices and they

are, indeed, getting something going.

"I know how long it takes," says Stone. "And it

takes forty-five minutes or an hour, more like an hour

at night."

'Listen!" says Babbs, who is laughing and

practically shouting into the phone. "The intrepid

traveler can make it in thirty minutes! The intrepid

traveler can make it with the speed of light!"

In the background Babbs can hear a couple of

voices rapping °ff that: "The intrepid traveler! The

intrepid traveler!"

"The intrepid traveler," Babbs is shouting. "The

intrepid traveler just gets up and walks out and he's

here!"

And so on, until Stone's resistance wears down

and he gets in his car and heads over. He arrives; after

an hour, yes.

As soon as he gets out of his car out front of the

house he starts hearing the Big Rap, from inside the

house, from up in the woods, it's like drums are beating

and horns are blowing and Pranksters are ululating and

rapping: "The Intrepid Traveler!"

"The Intrepid Traveler!"

He goes through the French doors in the front,

mad ochre and lurid lights, gongs, pipes, drums, guitars

being banged like percussion bangers—

"The Intrepid Traveler!"

"The Intrepid Traveler—the traveler in a flash!"

"The Intrepid Traveler—"

"—straights out the curves!"

"The Intrepid Traveler—"

"—curves out the straights!"

"The Intrepid Traveler—"

"—a beam of light!"

"The Intrepid Traveler—"

"—a lightning beam ! "

"The Intrepid Traveler—"

"—shortens the circuit!"

"The Intrepid Traveler—"

"—short-waves the band!"

"The Intrepid Traveler—"

"—and his band of Merry Pranksters!"

"The Intrepid Traveler!—"

—and his band of Merry Pranksters take a

journey to the East.

chapter

The Bus

I COULDN'T TELL YOU FOR SURE WHICH OF THE

MERRY

Pranksters got the idea for the bus, but it had

the Babbs touch. It was a superprank, in any case. The

original fantasy, here in the spring of 1964, had been

that Kesey and four or five others would get a station

wagon and drive to New York for the New York

World's Fair. On the way they could shoot some film,

make some tape, freak out on the Fair and see what

happened. They would also be on hand, in New York,

for the publication of Kesey's second novel, Sometimes

a Great Notion, early in July. So went the original

fantasy.

Then somebody—Babbs?—saw a classified ad for

a 1939 International Harvester school bus. The bus

belonged to a man in Menlo Park. He had a big house

and a lot of grounds and a nice set of tweeds and

flannels and eleven children. He had rigged out the bus

for the children. It had bunks and benches and a refrig-

erator and a sink for washing dishes and cabinets and

shelves and a lot of other nice features for living on the

road. Kesey bought it for $1,500—in the name of

Intrepid Trips, Inc.

Kesey gave the word and the Pranksters set upon

it one afternoon. They started painting it and wiring it

for sound and cutting a hole in the roof and fixing up

the top of the bus so you could sit up there in the open

air and play music, even a set of drums and electric

guitars and electric bass and so forth, or just ride.

Sandy went to work on the wiring and rigged up a

system with which they could broadcast from inside the

bus, with tapes or over microphones, and it would blast

outside over powerful speakers on top of the bus. There

were also microphones outside that would pick up

sounds along the road and broadcast them inside the

bus. There was also a sound system inside the bus so

you could broadcast to one another over the roar of the

engine and the road. You could also broadcast over a

tape mechanism so that you said something, then heard

your own voice a second later in variable lag and could

rap off of that if you wanted to. Or you could put on

earphones and rap simultaneously off sounds from

outside, coming in one ear, and sounds from inside,

your own sounds, coming in the other ear. There was

going to be no goddamn sound on that whole trip,

outside the bus, inside the bus, or inside your own

freaking larynx, that you couldn't tune in on and rap off

of.

The painting job, meanwhile, with everybody

pitching in in a frenzy of primary colors, yellows,

oranges, blues, reds, was sloppy as hell, except for the

parts Roy Seburn did, which were nice manic mandalas.

Well, it was sloppy, but one thing you had to say for it;

it was freaking lurid. The manifest, the destination sign

in the front, read: "Furthur," with two u's.

THEY TOOK A TEST RUN UP INTO

NORTHERN CALIFORNIA AND right away this

wild-looking thing with the wild-looking people was

great for stirring up consternation and vague

befuddling resentment among the citizens. The

Pranksters were now out among them, and it was

exhilarating—look at the mothers staring!—and there

was going to be holy terror in the land. But there would

also be people who would look up out of their poor

work-a-daddy lives in some town, some old guy,

somebody's stenographer, and see this bus and register

... delight, or just pure open-invitation wonder. Either

way, the Intrepid Travelers figured, there was hope for

these people. They weren't totally turned off. The bus

also had great possibilities for altering the usual order

of things. For example, there were the cops.

One afternoon the Pranksters were on a test run

in the bus going through the woods up north and a

forest fire had started. There was smoke beginning to

pour out of the woods and everything. Everybody on

the bus had taken acid and they were zonked. The acid

was in some orange juice in the refrigerator and you

drank a paper cup full of it and you were zonked. Cas-

sady was driving and barreling through the burning

woods wrenching the steering wheel this way and that

way to his inner-wired beat, with a siren wailing and

sailing through the rhythm.

A siren? It's a highway patrolman, which

immediately seems like the funniest thing in the history

of the world. Smoke is pouring out of the woods and

they are all sailing through leaf explosions in the sky,

but the cop is bugged about this freaking bus. The cop

yanks the bus over to the side and he starts going

through a kind of traffic-safety inspection of the big

gross bus, while more and more of the smoke is

billowing out of the woods. Man, the license plate is on

wrong and there's no light over the license plate and

this turn signal looks bad and how about the brakes,

let's see that hand brake there. Cassady, the driver, is

already into a long monologue for the guy, only he is

throwing in all kinds of sirs: "Well, yes sir, this is a

Hammond bi-valve serrated brake, you understand, sir,

had it put on in a truck ro-de-o in Springfield, Oregon,

had to back through a slalom course of baby's bottles

and yellow nappies, in the existential culmination of

Oregon, lots of outhouse freaks up there, you

understand, sir, a punctual sort of a state, sir, yes sir,

holds to 28,000 pounds, 28,000 pounds, you just look

right here, sir, tested by a pureblooded Shell Station

attendant in Springfield, Oregon, winter of '62, his

gumball boots never froze, you understand, sir, 28,000

pounds hold, right here—" Whereupon he yanks back

on the hand-brake as if it's attached to something,

which it isn't, it is just dangling there, and jams his

foot on the regular brake, and the bus shudders as if the

hand brake has a hell of a bite, but the cop is

thoroughly befuddled now, anyway, because Cassady's

monologue has confused him, for one thing, and what

the hell are these... people doing. By this time

everybody is off the bus rolling in the brown grass by

the shoulder, laughing, giggling, ya-hooing, zonked to

the skies on acid, because, mon, the woods are burning,

the whole world is on fire, and a Cassady monologue

on automotive safety is rising up from out of his throat

like weenie smoke, as if the great god Speed were

frying in his innards, and the cop, representative of the

people of California in this total freaking situation, is

all hung up on a hand brake that doesn't exist in the

first place. And the cop, all he can see is a bunch of

crazies in screaming orange and green costumes,

masks, boys and girls, men and women, twelve or

fourteen of them, lying in the grass and making

hideously crazy sounds—christ almighty, why the hell

does he have to contend with ... So he wheels around

and says, "What are you, uh—show people?"

"That's right, officer," Kesey says. "We're show

people. It's been a long row to hoe, I can tell you, and

it's gonna be a long row to hoe, but that's the

business."

"Well," says the cop, "you fix up those things

and ..." He starts backing off toward his car, cutting

one last look at the crazies. "... And watch it next time

..." And he guns on off.

That was it! How can you give a traffic ticket to

a bunch of people rolling in the brown grass wearing

Day-Glo masks, practically Greek masques, only with

Rat phosphorescent élan, giggling, keening in their

costumes and private world while the god Speed sizzles

like a short-order French fry in the gut of some guy

who doesn't even stop talking to breathe. A traffic

ticket? The Pranksters felt more immune than ever.

There was no more reason for them to remain in

isolation while the ovoid eyes of La Honda supurated.

They could go through the face of America muddling

people's minds, but it's a momentary high, and the bus

would be gone, and all the Fab foam in their heads

would settle back down into their brain pans.

SO THE HIERONYMUS BOSCH BUS

HEADED OUT OF KESEY'S place with the

destination sign in front reading "Furthur" and a sign in

the back saying "Caution: Weird Load." It was weird,

all right, but it was euphoria on board, barreling

through all that warm California sun in July, on the

road, and everything they had been working on at

Kesey's was on board and heading on Furthur. Besides,

the joints were going around, and it was nice and high

out here on the road in America. As they headed out,

Cassady was at the wheel, and there was Kesey, Babbs,

Page Browning, George Walker, Sandy, Jane Burton,

Mike Hagen, Hassler, Kesey's brother Chuck and his

cousin Dale, a guy known as Brother John, and three

newcomers who were just along for the ride or just

wanted to go to New York.

One of them was a young, quite handsome kid—

looked sort of like the early, thin Michael Caine in

Zulu—named Steve Lambrecht. He was the brother-in-

law of Kesey's lawyer, Paul Robertson, and he was just

riding to New York to see a girl he knew named Kathy.

Another was a girl named Paula Sundsten. She was

young, plump, ebullient, and very sexy. Kesey knew

her from Oregon. Another one was some girl Hagen of

the Screw Shack had picked up in San Francisco, on

North Beach. She was the opposite of Paula Sundsten.

She was thin, had long dark hair, and would be moody

and silent one minute and nervous and carrying on the

next. She was good-looking like a TV witch.

By the time they hit San Jose, barely 30 miles

down the road, a lot of the atmosphere of the trip was

already established. It was nighttime and many souls

were high and the bus had broken down. They pulled

into a service station and pretty soon one of the help

has his nose down in under the hood looking at the en-

gine while Cassady races the motor and the fluorescent

stanchion lights around the station hit the bus in weird

phosphorescent splashes, the car lights stream by on

the highway, Cassady guns the engine some more, and

from out of the bus comes a lot of weird wailing, over

the speakers or just out the windows. Paula Sundsten

has gotten hold of a microphone with the variable-lag

setup and has found out she can make weird radio-

spook laughing ghoul sounds with it, wailing like a

banshee and screaming "How was your stay-ay-ay-ay ...

in San Ho-zay-ay-ay-ay-ay," with the variable lag

picking up the ay-ay-ay-ays and doubling them,

quadrupling them, octupling them. An endless

ricocheting echo—and all the while this weird, slightly

hysterical laugh and a desperate little plunking

mandolin sail through it all, coming from Hagen's girl

friend, who is lying back on a bench inside, plunking a

mandolin and laughing—in what way . ..

Outside, some character, some local, has come

over to the bus, but the trouble is, he is not at all

impressed with the bus, he just has to do the American

Man thing of when somebody's car is broken down you

got to come over and make your diagnosis.

And he is saying to Kesey and Cassady, "You

know what I'd say you need? I'd say you need a good

mechanic. Now, I'm not a good mechanic, but I—" And

naturally he proceeds to give his diagnosis, while Paula

wails, making spook-house effects, and the Beauty

Witch keens and goons—and—

"—like I say, what you need is a good mechanic,

and I'm not a good mechanic, but—"

And—of course!—the Non-people. The whole

freaking world was full of people who were bound to

tell you they weren't qualified to do this or that but

they were determined to go ahead and do just that thing

anyway. Kesey decided he was the Non-navigator.

Babbs was the Non-doctor. The bus trip was already

becoming an allegory of life.

* * *

BEFORE HEADING EAST, OUT ACROSS THE

COUNTRY, THEY stopped at Babbs's place in San

Juan Capistrano, down below Los Angeles. Babbs and

his wife Anita had a place down there. They pulled the

bus into Babbs's garage and sat around for one final big

briefing before taking off to the east.

Kesey starts talking in the old soft Oregon drawl

and everybody is quiet.

"Here's what I hope will happen on this trip," he

says. "What I hope will continue to happen, because it's

already starting to happen. All of us are beginning to

do our thing, and we're going to keep doing it, right out

front, and none of us are going to deny what other

people are doing."

"Bullshit," says Jane Burton.

This brings Kesey up short for a moment, but he

just rolls with it.

"That's Jane," he says. "And she's doing her

thing. Bullshit. That's her thing and she's doing it."

"None of us are going to deny what other people

are doing. If saying bullshit is somebody's thing, then

he says bullshit. If somebody is an ass-kicker, then

that's what he's going to do on this trip, kick asses.

He's going to do it right out front and nobody is going

to have anything to get pissed off about. He can just

say, 'I'm sorry I kicked you in the ass, but I'm not sorry

I'm an ass-kicker. That's what I do, I kick people in the

ass.' Everybody is going to be what they are, and

whatever they are, there's not going to be anything to

apologize about. What we are, we're going to wail with

on this whole trip."

HAUL ASS, AND WHAT WE ARE, OUT

ACROSS THE SOUTHWEST, and all of it on film

and on tape. Refrigerator, stove, a sink, bunk racks,

blankets, acid, speed, grass—with Hagen handling the

movie camera and everybody on microphones and the

music blaring out over the roar of the bus, rock 'n' roll,

Jimmy Smith. Cassady is revved up like they've never

seen him before, with his shirt off, a straw version of a

cowboy hat on his head, bouncing up and down on the

driver's seat, shifting gears—doubledy-clutch,

doubledy-clutch, blamming on the steering wheel and

the gearshift box, rapping over the microphone rigged

up by his seat like a manic tour guide, describing every

car going by,

"—there's a barber going down the highway

cutting his hair at 500 miles an hour, you understand—

"So remember those expressions, sacrifice,

glorious and in vain!" Babbs says.

"Food! Food! Food!" Hagen says.

"Get out the de-glom ointment, sergeant!" says

Babbs, rapping at Steve Lambrecht. "The only cure for

joint glom, gets the joint off the lip in instant De-

Glom—"

—and so on, because Steve always has a joint

glommed onto his lip and, in fact, gets higher than any

man alive, on any and all things one throws his way,

and picks up the name Zonker on this trip—

"—De-Glom for the Zonker!—"

—and then Babbs parodies Cassady—

"—and there's a Cadillac with Marie Antoinette—

—and the speakers wail, and the mandolin wails

and the ! weird laugh wails, and the variable lag

wails-ails-ails-ails-ails-ails, and somebody—who?—

hell, everybody wails,

"—we're finally beginning to move, after three

fucking days!"

ON THE SECOND DAY THEY

REACHED WIKIEUP, AN OLD WILD West oasis

out in the Arizona desert along Route 60. It was all

gray-brown desert and sun and this lake, which was

like a huge slimy kelp pond, but the air was fantastic.

Sandy felt great. Then Kesey held the second briefing.

They were going to take their first acid of the trip here

and have their first major movie production. He and

Babbs and the gorgeous sexy Paula Sundsten were

going to take acid—Wikieup!—and the others were

going to record what happened. Hagen and Walker were

going to film it, Sandy was going to handle the sound,

and Ron Bevirt was going to take photographs.

Sandy feels his first twinge of—what? Like ...

there is going to be Authorized Acid only. And like ...

they are going to be separated into performers and

workers, stars and backstage. Like . .. there is an inner

circle and an outer circle. This was illogical, because

Hagen and Walker, certainly, were closer to Kesey than

any other Pranksters besides Babbs, and they were

"workers," too, but that was the way he feels. But he

doesn't say anything. Not... out front.

Kesey and Babbs and Paula hook down some acid

orange juice from the refrigerator and wait for the

vibrations. Paula is in a hell of a great mood. She has

never taken LSD before, but she looks fearless and

immune and ready for all, and she hooks down a good

slug of it. They wait for the vibrations ... and here they

come.

Babbs has a big cane, a walking stick, and he is

waving it around in the air, and the three of them,

Babbs, Kesey and Paula, go running and kicking and

screaming toward the lake and she dives in—and comes

up with her head covered in muck and great kelpy

strands of green pond slime—and beaming in a way that

practically radiates out over the face of the lake and the

desert. She has surfaced euphoric—

"Oooooh! It sparkles!"

—pulling her long strands of slime-slithering

hair outward with her hands and grokking and freaking

over it—

"Ooooooooh! It sparkles!"

—the beads of water on her slime strands are like

diamonds to her, and everybody feels her feeling at

once, even Sandy—

"Oooooooooh! It sparkles!"

—surfaced euphoric! euphorically garlanded in

long greasy garlands of pond slime, the happiest slime

freak in the West—

—and Babbs is euphoric for her—

Gretchen Fetchin the Slime Queen!" he yells and

waves his

ane at the sky.

"Ooooooooh! It sparkles!"

"Gretchen Fetchin the Slime Queen!"

"It sparkles!"

"Gretchen Fetchin!"

And it is beautiful. Everybody goes manic and

euphoric like a vast contact high, like they have all

suddenly taken acid themselves. Kesey is in an athletic

romp, tackling the ferns and other slimy greenery in the

lake. Babbs and Paula—Gretchen Fetchin!—are

yahooing at the sky. Hagen is feverishly filming it all,

Sandy has a set of huge cables stretched out to the very

edge of the lake, picking up the sound, Ron Bevirt is

banging away with his camera. Babbs and Paula—

Gretchen Fetchin!—and Kesey keep plunging out into

the mucky innards of the lake.

"Come back!" Hagen the cameraman starts

yelling. "You're out of range ! "

But Babbs and Paula and Kesey can't hear him.

They are cartwheeling further and further out into the

paradise muck—

"It sparkles!"

"Gretchen Fetchin—Queen of the Slime!"

But meanwhile Hagen's Beauty Witch, in the

contagion of the moment, has slipped to the refrigerator

and taken some acid, and now she is outside of the bus

on the desert sand wearing a black snakeskin blouse

and a black mantle, with her long black hair coming

down over it like in a pre-Raphaelite painting and a

cosmic grin on her witch-white face, lying down on the

desert, striking poses and declaiming in couplets. She's

zonked out of her nut, but it's all in wild manic

Elizabethan couplets:

"Methinks you need a gulp of grass

And so it quickly came to pass

You fell to earth with eely shrieking,

Wooing my heart, freely freaking!"

—and so forth. Well, she wins Hagen's manic

heart right away, and soon he has wandered off from

the Lake of the Slime Euphoria and is in a wide-legged

stance over her with the camera as she lies declaiming

on the desert floor, camera zeroed in on her like she is

Maria Montez in a love scene—and now the Beauty

Witch is off on her trip for good . . .

BACK ON THE BUS AND OFF FOR

PHOENIX IN THE SLIME-Euphoric certitude

that they and the movie—The Movie!— many allegories

of life—that they could not miss now. Hagen pressed

on with the film, hour after hour in the bouncing

innards of the bus. There were moments in the History

of Film that broke everybody up. One was when they

reached Phoenix. This was during the 1964 election

excitement and they were in Barry Goldwater's home

town, so they put a streamer on the bus reading: "A

Vote for Barry is a Vote for Fun." And they put Ameri-

can flags up on the bus and Cassady drove the bus

backward down the main drag of Phoenix while Hagen

recorded it on film and the flags flew backward in the

wind-stream. The citizens were suitably startled,

outraged, delighted, nonplused, and would wheel

around and start or else try to keep their cool by sidling

glances like they weren't going to be impressed by any

weird shit—and a few smiled in a frank way as if to

say, I am with you—if only I could be with you!

The fact that they were all high on speed or

grass, or so many combinations thereof that they

couldn't keep track, made it seem like a great secret

life. It was a great secret life. The befuddled citizens

could only see the outward manifestations of the

incredible stuff going on inside their skulls. They were

all now characters in their own movies or the Big

Movie. They took on new names and used them.

Steve Lambrecht was Zonker. Cassady was Speed

Limit. Kesey was Swashbuckler. Babbs was Intrepid

Traveler. Hagen, bouncing along with the big camera,

soaring even while the bus roared, was Mai Function.

Ron Bevirt had charge of all the equipment, the tools,

wires, jacks, and stuff, and became known as

Equipment Hassler, and then just Hassler. George

Walker was Hardly Visible. And Paula Sundsten

became ... Gretchen Fetchin the Slime Queen, of course

...

A notebook!—for each of the new characters in

The Movie, a plain child's notebook, and each character

in this here movie can write in his notebook himself or

other people can pick up the notebook and write in it—

who knows who wrote what?—and in Gretchen Fetchin

it says:

Bury them in slime!

She cried, flailing about the garden—

With a sprig of parsley clutched in

her hands—which had always been

clamped in her hands.

This is strange business,

Gets weirder all the time,

She said, wrapping some around

her finger, for we are always

moist in her hand ... "Naturally," she

said, "The roots are deep."

That was no surprise, but she

was mildly curious to

know what the hell is

THAT

Whereupon he got very

clumsy, giggled confidentially,

and tripped over her shadow,

carrying them both into

an unaccountable adventure.

Barely a week out and already beautiful ebullient

sexy Gretchen Fetchin the Slime Queen, Gretch, is

synched in. Kesey, the very Swashbuckler himself,

makes a play for her, and that should be that, but she

looks at—Babbs—who tripped over her

shadow?—Hmmmmmmmm? So many shadows

and shafts of Southwest sun bouncing in through the

windows and all over the floor, over the benches over

the bunk uprights bouncing out of the freaking roar of

the engine bouncing two sets of Gretch eyes two sets of

Babbs eyes, four sets of Gretch eyes four sets of Babbs

eyes eight sets of Gretch eyes eight sets of Babbs eyes

all grinning vibrating bouncing in among one another

carrying them both into an unaccountable adventure,

you understand. Kesey sulks a bit—Kesey himself—but

the sulk bounces and breaks up into Southwestern

sunballs. Drivin' on dirt in Utah, a '46 Plymouth with

an overhead cam, says Cassady. The refrigerator door

squeaks open, gurgle gurgle, this acid O.J. makes a

body plumb smack his lips, Hagen and his Black Witch

girl friend hook down a cup of acid orange juice apiece

and Hagen's sweet face spirals, turning sweet Christian

boy clockwise and sweet sly Screw Shack

counterclockwise, back and forth, and they disappear,

bouncing, up the ladder, up through the turret hole and

onto the roof where, under the mightily hulking sun of

the Southwest and 70 miles an hour—Pretty soon Hagen

is climbing back down the ladder and heading for the

refrigerator and hooking down another cup of orange

juice and smiling for all, Christian boy and Screw

Shack sly, spiraling this way and that way—and

climbing back up top the bus in order to—

MALFUNCTION!

If only I had $10, then we

could split 1/2 a Ritalin order

with Margo—I eat

Ritalin like aspirin

Now, let's charm Brooks Brothers—

impressed?

At night the goddamn bus still bouncing and the

Southwest silvery blue coming in not exactly bouncing

but slipping and sliding in shafts, sickly shit, and car

beams and long crazy shadows from car beams sliding

in weird bends over the inside, over the love bunk. The

love bunk'll get you if you don't wash out. One shelf on

the bunk has a sleeping bag on it and into this sleeping

bag crawl whoever wants to make it, do your thing,

bub, and right out front, and wail with it, and Sandy

looks over and he can see a human . . . bobbing up and

down in the sleeping bag with the car beams sliding

over it and the motor roaring, the fabulous love bunk,

and everyone—synch—can see that sleeping bag veri-

tably filling up with sperm, the little devils swimming

like mad in there in the muck, oozing into the cheap

hairy shit they quilt the bag with, millions billions

trillions of them, darting around, crafty little

flagellants, looking to score, which is natural, and if

any certified virgin on the face of the earth crawled

into that sleeping bag for a nap after lunch she would

be a hulking knocked-up miracle inside of three

minutes—but won't this goddamn bouncing ever stop—

THIS BEING A SCHOOL BUS, AND

NOT A GREYHOUND, THE springs and the

shock absorbers are terrible and the freaking grinding

straining motor shakes it to pieces and hulking vibra-

tions synched in to no creature on earth keep batting

everybody around on the benches and the bunks. It is

almost impossible to sleep and the days and nights have

their own sickly cycle, blinding sun all day and the

weird car beams and shadows sliding sick and slow at

night and all the time the noise. Jane Burton is nau-

seous practically the whole time. Nobody can sleep so

they keep taking more speed to keep going, psychic

energizers like Ritalin, anything, and then smoke more

grass to take the goddamn tachycardiac edge off the

speed, and acid to make the whole thing turn into

something else. Then it all starts swinging back and

forth between grueling battering lurching flogging

along the highway—and unaccountable delays, stopped,

unendurable frustration by the side of the road in the

middle of nowhere while the feeling of no-sleep starts

turning the body and the skull into a dried-out husk

inside with a sour greasy smoke like a tenement fire

curdling in the brainpan. They have to pull into

gasoline stations to go to the bathroom, cop a urination

or an egestion—keep regular, friends—but 12—how

many, 14?—did we lose somebody—did we pick up

somebody—climbing out of this bus, which is weird-

looking for a start, but all these weird people are too

much, clambering out—the service station attendant

and his Number One Boy stare at this—Negro music is

blaring out of the speakers and these weird people

clamber out, half of them in costume, lurid shirts with

red and white stripes, some of them with weird paint on

their faces, like comic-book Indians, with huge circles

under their eyes, eyes red, noses not blue, not nearly

blue enough, but eyes red—all trooping out toward the

Clean Rest Rooms, already queuing up, practically—

"Wait a minute," the guy says. "What do you

think you're doing?

"Fill 'er up!" says Kesey, very soft and pleasant.

"Yes, sir, she's a big bus and she takes a lotta gas.

Yep."

"I mean what are they doing?"

"Them? I 'spect they're going to the bathroom.

Ay-yup, that big old thing's the worst gas-eater you

ever saw"—all the time motioning to Hagen to go get

the movie camera and the microphone.

"Well, can't all those people use the bathrooms."

"All they want to do is go to the bathroom"—and

now Kesey takes the microphone and Hagen starts

shooting the film—whirrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr—but all very

casual as if, well, sure, don't you record it all, every

last morsel of friendly confrontation whenever you stop

on the great American highway to cop a urination or

two? or a dozen?

"Well, now, listen! You ain't using the

bathrooms! You hear me, now! You see that motel back

there? I own that motel, too, and we got one septic tank

here, for here and there, and you're not gonna overflow

it for me. Now git that thing out of my face!"

—Kesey has the microphone in the guy's face,

like this is all for the six o'clock news, and then he

brings the microphone back to his face, just like the TV

interview shows, and says,

"You see that bus out there? Every time we stop

to fill 'er up we have to lay a whole lot of money on

somebody, and we'd like it to be you, on account of

your hospitality."

"It's an unaccountable adventure in consumer

spending," says Babbs.

"Get those cameras and microphones out of

here," the guy says. "I'm not afraid of you!"

"I should hope not," says Kesey, still talking soft

and down-home. "All that money that big baby's gonna

drink up. Whew!"

Sheerooooooo—all this time the toilets are

flushing, this side and that side and the noise of it roars

and gurgles right through the cinder block walls until it

sounds like there's nothing in the whole wide open U.S.

of A. except for Clean Rest Room toilets and Day-Glo

crazies and cameras and microphones from out of

nowhere, and the guy just caves in under it. He can't fit

it into his movie of Doughty American Entrepreneur—

not no kind of way—

"Well, they better make it fast or there's going to

be trouble around here." And he goes out to fill 'er up,

this goddamn country is going down the drain.

But they don't speed it up. Walker is over to the

coin telephone putting in a call to Faye back in La

Honda. Babbs is clowning around out on the concrete

apron of the gas station with Gretchen Fetchin. Jane

Burton feels bilious—the idea is to go to New York,

isn't it? even on a 1939 school bus it could be done

better than this. What are we waiting, waiting, waiting,

waiting for, playing games with old crocks at gas

stations. Well, we're waiting for Sandy, for one thing.

Where in the hell is Sandy. But Sandy—he hasn't slept

in days and he has an unspecific urge to get off the

bus—but not to sleep, just to get off—for—what?—be-

fore:::::what? And Sandy is back over at the motel,

inspecting this electropink slab out in the middle of

nowhere—somebody finally finds him and brings him

back. Sandy is given the name Dismount in the great

movie.

"There are going to be times," says Kesey, "when

we can't wait for somebody. Now, you're either on the

bus or off the bus. If you're on the bus, and you get left

behind, then you'll find it again. If you're off the bus in

the first place—then it won't make a damn." And

nobody had to have it spelled out for them. Everything

was becoming allegorical, understood by the group

mind, and especially this: "You're either on the bus ...

or off the bus."

EXCEPT FOR HAGEN'S GIRL, THE BEAUTY

WITCH. IT SEEMS LIKE she never even gets off the

bus to cop a urination. She's sitting back in the back of

the bus with nothing on, just a blanket over her lap and

her legs wedged back into the corner, her and her little

bare breasts, silent, looking exceedingly witch-like. Is

she on the bus or off the bus? She has taken to wearing

nothing but the blanket and she sheds that when she

feels like it. Maybe that is her thing and she is doing

her thing and wailing with it and the bus barrels on off,

heading for Houston, Texas, and she becomes Stark

Naked in the great movie, one moment all conked out,

but with her eyes open, staring, the next laughing and

coming on, a lively Stark Naked, and they are all trying

to just snap their fingers to it but now she is getting

looks that have nothing to do with the fact that she has

not a thing on, hell, big deal, but she is now waxing

extremely freaking ESP. She keeps coming up to

somebody who isn't saying a goddamn thing and

looking into his eyes with the all-embracing look of

total acid understanding, our brains are one brain, so

let's visit, you and I, and she says: 'Ooooooooh, you

really think that, I know what you mean, but do you-u-

u-u-u-u-u-u-ueeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee"—finishing off

in a sailing trémulo laugh as if she has just read your

brain and !t is the weirdest of the weird shit ever, your

brain eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee—

STARK-NAKED

in a black blanket—

Reaching out for herself,

she woke up one morning to

find herself accosted on all

sides by LARGE

MEN

surrounding her threatening her

with their voices, their presence, their always

desire reaching inside herself

and touching her obscenely upon her

desire and causing her to laugh

and

LAUGH

with the utter

ridiculousness

of it. . .

—but no one denied her a moment of it, neither

the conked-out bug-eyed paranoia nor the manic

keening coming on, nobody denied her, and she could

wail, nobody tried to cool that inflamed brain that was

now seeping out Stark Naked into the bouncing

goddamn—stop it!—currents of the bus throgging and

roaring 70 miles an hour into Texas, for it was like it

had been ordained, by Kesey himself, back in San Juan

Capistrano, like there was to be a reaction scale in

here, from negative to positive, and no one was to rise

up negative about anything, one was to go positive with

everything—go with the flow—everyone's cool was to

be tested, and to shout No, no matter what happened,

was to fail. And hadn't Kesey passed the test first of

all? Hadn't Babbs taken Gretchen Fetchin, and did he

come back at either one of them uptight over that? And

wasn't it Walker who was calling La Honda from the

Servicenters of America? All true, and go with the

flow. And they went with the flow, the whole goddamn

flow of America. The bus barrels into the superhighway

toll stations and the microphones on top of the bus pick

up all the clacking and ringing and the mumbling by

the toll-station attendant and the brakes squeaking and

the gears shifting, all the sounds of the true America

that are screened out everywhere else, it all came

amplified back inside the bus, while Hagen's camera

picked up the faces, the faces in Phoenix, the cops, the

service-station owners, the stragglers and the strugglers

of America, all laboring in their movie, and it was all

captured and kept, piling up, inside the bus. Barreling

across America with the microphones picking it all up,

the whole roar, and microphone up top gets eerie in a

great rush and then skakkkkkkkkhkkk it is ripping and

roaring over asphalt and thok it's gone, no sound at all.

The microphone has somehow ripped loose on top of

the bus and hit the roadway and dragged along until it

snapped off entirely—and Sandy can't believe it. He

keeps waiting for somebody to tell Cassady to stop and

go back and get the microphone, because this was

something Sandy had rigged up with great love and

time, it was his thing, his part of the power—but

instead they are all rapping and grokking over the

sound it made—"Wowwwwwwwww! Did you—

wowwwwwww"—as if they had synched into a never-

before-heard thing, a unique thing, the sound of an

object, a microphone, hitting the American asphalt, the

open road at 70 miles an hour, like if it was all there on

tape they would have the instant, the moment, of any

thing, anyone ripped out of the flow and hitting the

Great Superhighway at 70 miles an hour—and they had

it on tape—and played it back in variable lag

skakkkkkk-akkkk-akkkk-akkkoooooooooooo.

oooooooooooooooooooooooo—Stark Naked

waxing weirder and weirder, huddled in the black

blanket shivering, then out, bobbing wraith, her little

deep red aureola bobbing in the crazed vibrations—

finally they pull into Houston and head for Larry

McMurtry's house. They pull up to McMurtry's house,

in the suburbs, and the door of the house opens and out

comes McMurtry, a slight, slightly wan, kindly-looking

shy-looking guy, ambling out, with his little boy, his

son, and Cassady opens the door of the bus so

everybody can get off, and suddenly Stark Naked

shrieks out: "Frankie! Frankie! Frankie! Frankie!"—

this being the name of her own divorced-off little

boy—and she whips off the blanket and leaps off the

bus and out into the suburbs of Houston, Texas, stark

naked, and rushes up to McMurtry's little boy and

scoops him up and presses him to her skinny breast,

crying and shrieking, "Frankie! oh Frankie! my little

Frankie! oh! oh! oh!"—while McMurtry doesn't know

what in the name of hell to do, reaching tentatively

toward her stark-naked shoulder and saying, "Ma'am!

Ma'am! Just a minute, ma'am!"—

—while the Pranksters, spilling out of the bus—

stop. The bus is stopped. No roar, no crazed bounce or

vibrations, no crazed car beams, no tapes, no

microphones. Only Stark Naked, with somebody else's

little boy in her arms, is bouncing and vibrating.

And there, amid the peaceful Houston elms on

Quenby Road, it dawned on them all that this woman—

which one of us even knows her?—had completed her

trip. She had gone with the flow. She had gone stark

raving mad.

chapter

VII

Unauthorized Acid

STARK NAKED; STARK NAKED; SILENCE; BUT,

WELL

. . . That this or a couple of other crackups in the

experience of the Pranksters had anything to do with

that goofy baboon, Dope, was something that didn't

cross the minds of the Pranksters at that point.

Craziness was not an absolute. They had all voluntarily

embarked upon a trip and a state of consciousness that

was "crazy" by ordinary standards. The trip, in fact the

whole deal, was a risk-all balls-out plunge into the

unknown, and it was assumed merely that more and

more of what was already inside a person would come

out and expand, gloriously or otherwise. Stark Naked

had done her thing. She roared off into the void and

was picked up by the cops by and by, and the doors

closed in the County psychiatric ward, and that was

that, for the Pranksters were long gone.

The trip had started out as a great bursting forth

out of the forest fastness of La Honda, out into an

unsuspecting America. And for Sandy, anyway, that

was when the trip went best, when the Pranksters were

out among them, and the citizens of the land were

gawking and struggling to summon up the proper

emotion for this—what in the name of God are the

ninnies doing. But the opposite was happening, too. On

those long stretches of American superhighway

between performances the bus was like a pressure

cooker, a crucible, like one of those chambers in which

the early atomic scientists used to compress heavy

water, drive the molecules closer and closer together

until the very atoms exploded. On the bus all traces of

freakiness or competition or bitterness or whatever

were intensified. They were right out front, for sure.

Jane Burton, who was now known as Generally

Famished, and Sandy—Dis-mount—took to going off

whenever they could, like in Houston, for a square

meal. Square on every level, Tonto. They would just go

right into one of those Square American steak houses

with the big plate-glass window with the corny little

plastic windmill in the window advertising Heineken's

Beer and the Diners Club and American Express

stickers on the plate-glass door and go in and have a

square steak and square French fries and boiled bland

peas and carrots and A-l sauce. Jane, now ravaged from

lack of sleep, and ravenously hungry, generally

famished, or slightly bilious the whole time, wondering

what the hell they were now doing on the southern rim

of the United States when New York was way up there.

Sandy—with this subliminal urge to get off the bus,

and yet be on the bus—on that level—and neither of

them knowing what to make of Kesey—always Kesey ...

AND THE HEAT. FROM HOUSTON THEY

HEADED EAST THROUGH the Deep South, and the

Deep South in July was ... lava. The air rushing into the

open windows of the bus came in hot and gritty like

invisible smoke, and when they stopped, it just rolled

over them, pure lava. The rest in Houston didn't do too

much good, because the heat just started it all again,

nobody slept, and it was like all you could do to cut

through the lava with speed and grass and acid.

New Orleans was a relief, because they got out

and walked around the French Quarter and down by the

docks in their red and white striped shirts and Day-Glo

stuff and the people freaked over them. And the cops

came while they were down by the docks, which was

just comic relief, because by now the cops were a piece

of cake. The city cops were no more able to keep their

Cop Movie going than the country cops. Hassler talked

sweet to them like the college valedictorian and Kesey

talked sweet and down-home and Hagen filmed it all

like this was some crazed adventure in cinema verité

and the cops skedaddled in a herd of new Ford cruisers

with revolving turret lights. Sayonara, you all.

They just kept walking around New Orleans in

their striped shirts and wearing shorts, and they could

all see Kesey's big muscular legs, like a football

player's, striding on up ahead like he owned the place,

like they all owned the place, and everybody's spirits

picked up. So they head out to Lake Pontchartrain, on

the northern edge of New Orleans. They all took acid,

but a small dose, about 75 micrograms—everybody

happy and high on acid, and rock 'n' roll records

blaring, Martha and the Vandellas and Shirley Ellis, all

that old stuff pounding away. Lake Pontchartrain is like

a great big beautiful spacious—space!—park on the

water. They pull the bus up in a parking area and there

are nice trees round and all that endless nice water and

they put on their bathing suits. Walker, who has a hell

of a build, puts on a pair of red, yellow, and black

trunks, and Kesey, who has a hell of a build, puts on a

pair of blue and white trunks, and Zonker, who has a

hell of a build, only leaner, puts on a pair of orange

trunks, and the blue of the water and the scorched-out

green of the grass and the leaves and—a little

breeze?—it is all swimming in front of their old acid

eyes like a molten postcard—water! What they don't

know is, it is a segregated beach, for Negroes only. The

spades all sitting there on benches sit there staring at

these white crazies coming out of a weird bus and

heading for New Or-leans 30th-parallel Deep South

segregated water. Zonker is really zonked this time,

and burning up with the heat, about 100 degrees, and he

dives in and swims out a ways and pretty soon he sees

he is surrounded by deep orange men, Negroes, all

treading water around him and giving him rotten looks.

One of them has a gold tooth in the front with a star cut

out in it, so that a white enamel star shows in the

middle of the gold, and the gold starts flashing out at

him in the sun—cheeeakkk—in time with his heartbeat

which is getting faster all the time, these goddamn

flashes of gold and white star after-images, and the

Golden Mouth says, "Man, there sure is a lotta trash in

the water today."

"You ain't shittin', man," says another one of

them.

"Lotta fuckin' trash, man," says another one, and

so on.

Suddenly Golden Mouth is speaking straight to

Zonker: "What's all this trash doing in the water, man?"

Zonker is very nonplused, partly because the

whole day has turned orange on him, because of the

acid—orange trunks, orange water, orange sky, orange

menacing spades.

"Boy, what you doing here!" Golden Mouth says

very sharp all of a sudden. Orange and big and orange

hulking fat back big as an orange manta ray. "Boy, you

know what we gonna do? We gonna cut yo' little balls

off. We gonna take you up on that beach and wail with

you!"

"Heh-hehhhhhhhhhhhh!" The others start this

wailing moaning laugh.

For some reason, however, this makes Zonker

smile. He can feel it spreading across his face, like a

big orange slice of orange sugar-jelly candy and he is

suspended there treading water and grinning while the

Golden Mouth flashes and flashes and flashes.

Then the Golden Mouth says, "Well, it sure is

some kinda trash," and starts laughing, only amiably

this time, and they all laugh, and Zonker laughs and

swims back to shore.

By this time a big crowd of Negroes has gathered

around the mad bus. Funky music is blasting off the

speakers, a Jimmy Smith record. Zonker gets on the

bus. It seems like thousands of Negroes are dancing

around the bus, doing rock dances and the dirty boogie.

Everything is orange and then he looks at the writhing

mass of Negroes, out every window, nothing but

writhing Negroes mashed in around the bus and

writhing, and it all starts turning from orange to brown.

Zonker starts getting the feeling he is inside an

enormous intestine and it is going into peristaltic

contractions. He can feel the whole trip turning into a

horrible bummer. Even Kesey, who isn't afraid of

anything, looks worried. "We better get out of here,"

Kesey says. But squeezed out?—in bummer brown

peristaltic contractions? Luckily for Zonker, maybe for

everybody, the white cops turn up at that point and

break up the crowd and tell the white crazies to drive

on, this is a segregated beach, and for once they don't

pile out and try to break up the Cop Movie. They go

with the Cop Movie and get their movie out of there.

ON INTO THE FLATLANDS OF

MISSISSIPPI AND ALABAMA, Biloxi, Mobile,

U.S. Route 90, the flatlands and the fields and the heat

doesn't let up ever. They are heading for Florida. Sandy

hasn't slept in days:::::how many:::::like total insomnia

and everything is bending in curvy curdling lines. Sun

and flatlands. So damned hot—and everything is

getting torn into opposites. The dead-still heat-stroked

summertime deep Southland—and Sandy's heart racing

at a constant tachycardia and his brain racing and

reeling out and so essential to... keep moving,

Cassady!... but there are two Cassadys. One minute

Cassady looks 58 and crazy—speed!—and the next, 28

and peaceful—acid—and Sandy can tell the peaceful

Cassady in an instant, because his nose becomes... long

and smooth and almost patrician, whereas the wild

Cassady looks beat-up. And Kesey—always Kesey!

Sandy looks. .. and Kesey is old and haggard and his

face is lopsided ... and then Sandy looks and Kesey is

young, serene, and his face is lineless, and round and

smooth as a baby's as he sits for hours on end reading

comic books, absorbed in the plunging purple Steve

Ditko shadows of Dr. Strange attired in capes and

chiaroscuro, saying: "How could they have known that

this gem was merely a device to bridge dimensions! It

was a means to enter the dread purple dimension—from

our own world!" Sandy may wander .. . off the bus, but

it remains all Kesey. Dr. Strange! Always seeing two

Keseys. Kesey the Prankster and Kesey the organizer.

Going through the steams of southern Alabama in late

June and Kesey rises up from out of the comic books

and becomes Captain Flag. He puts on a pink kilt, like

a miniskirt, and pink socks and patent-leather shoes

and pink sunglasses and wraps an American flag around

his head like a big turban and holds it in place with an

arrow through the back of it and gets up on top of the

bus roaring through Alabama and starts playing the

flute at people passing by. The Alabamans drawn into

the PINK DIMENSION do a double-freak take for sure

and it is Too Much! as George Walker always says, too

mullyfogging much. They pull into a gas station in

Mobile and half the Pranksters jump out of the bus,

blazing red and white stripes and throwing red rubber

balls around in a crazed way like a manic ballet of slick

Servicenter flutter decoration while the guy fills up the

tank, and he looks from them to Captain Flag to the bus

itself, and after he collects for the gas he looks through

the window at Cassady in the driver's seat and shakes

his head and says:

"No wonder you're so nigger-heavy in

California." FORNIA-FORNIA-FORNIA-FORNIA-

FORNIA-FOR-NIA-FORNIA-FORNIA as it picked up

inside the bus in variable lag, and that breaks

everybody up.

That was when it was good ... grinding on

through Alabama, and then suddenly, to Sandy, Kesey

is old and haggard and the organizer. Sandy can see

him descending the ladder down from the roof of the

bus and glowering at him, and he knows—inter-

subjectivity!—that Kesey is thinking. You're too

detached, Sandy, you're not out front, you may be

sitting right here grinding and roaring through Alabama

but you're ... off the bus ... And he approaches Sandy,

hunched over under the low ceiling of the bus, and to

Sandy he looks like an ape with his mighty arms

dangling, like The Incredible Hulk, and suddenly Sandy

jumps up and crouches into an ape position, dangling

his arms and mimicking him—and Kesey breaks into a

big grin and throws his arms around Sandy and hugs

him—

He approves! Kesey approves of me! At last I

have responded to something, brought it all out front,

even if it is resentment, done something, done my

thing—and in that very action, just as he taught, it is

gone, the resentment... and I am back on the bus again,

synched in .. .

Always Kesey! And in that surge of euphoria—

Kesey approves!—Sandy knew that Kesey was the key

to whatever was going right and whatever was going

wrong on this trip, and nobody, not one of them who

ever took this trip, got in this movie, would ever have

even the will to walk up to Kesey and announce

irrevocably: I am off the bus. It would be like saying, I

am off this... Unspoken Thing we are into ...

PENSACOLA, FLORIDA. 110 DEGREES. A

FRIEND OF BABBS HAS A little house near the

ocean, and they pull in there, but the ocean doesn't help

at all. The heat makes waves in the air, like over a

radiator. Most of the Pranksters are in the house or out

in the yard. Some of the girls are outside the bus

barbecuing some meat. Sandy is by himself inside the

bus, in the shade. The insomnia is killing him. He has

got to get some sleep or keep moving. He can't stand it

in here stranded in between with his heart pounding. He

goes to the refrigerator and takes out the orange juice.

The acid in New Orleans, the 75 micrograms, wasn't

enough. It's like he hasn't had a good high the whole

trip, nothing ... blissful. So he hooks down a big slug

of Unauthorized Acid and sits back.

He would like something nice and peaceful,

closed in softly alone on the bus. He puts on a set of

earphones. The left earphone is hooked into a

microphone inside the house and picks up Kesey's

cousin Dale playing the piano. Dale, for all his country

ways, has studied music a long time and plays well and

the notes come in like liquid drops of amethyst

vibrating endlessly in the . .. acid . . . atmosphere and

it is very nice. The right earphone is hooked into a

microphone picking up the sounds outside the house,

mainly the barbecue fires crackling. So Dale concerto

and fire crackling in these big padded earphones closed

in about his head ... only the sounds are somehow

sliding out of control. There is no synch. It is as if the

two are fighting for his head. The barbecue crackles

and bubbles in his head and the amethyst droplets

crystallize into broken glass, and then tin, a tin piano.

The earphones seem to get bigger and bigger, huge

padded shells about to enclose his whole head, his face,

his nose—amok sound overpowering him, as if it is all

going to end right here inside this padded globe—

panic—he leaps up from the seat, bolts a few feet with

the earphones still clamped on his skull, then rips them

off and jumps out of the bus—Pranksters everywhere in

the afternoon sun, in red and white striped shirts.

Babbs has the power and is directing the movie and is

trying to shoot something—Acid Piper. Sandy looks

about. Nobody he can tell it to, that he has taken acid

by himself and it is turning into a bummer, he can't

bring this out front... He runs into the house, the walls

keep jumping up so goddamn close and all the angles

are under extreme stress, as if they could break. Jane

Burton is sitting alone in the house, feeling bilious.

Jane is the only person he can tell.

"Jane," he says, "I took some acid ... and it's

really weird ..." But it is such an effort to talk ...

The heat waves are solidifying in the air like the

waves in a child's marble and the perspectives are all

berserk, walls rushing up then sinking way back like a

Titian banquet hall. And the heat—Sandy has to do

something to pull himself together, so he takes a

shower. He undresses and gets in the shower and ...

flute music, Babbs! flute music comes spraying out of

the nozzle and the heat is inside of him, it is like he

can look down and see it burning there and he looks

down, two bare legs, a torso rising up at him and like

he is just noticing them for the first time. They exist

apart from, like another human being's, such odd turns

and angles they take amid the flute streams, swells and

bony processes, like he has never seen any of this

before, this flesh, this stranger. He groks over that—

only it isn't a stranger, it is his . . . mother . .. and

suddenly he is back in this body, only it is his mother's

body—and then his father's—he has become his mother

and his father. No difference between I and Thou inside

this shower of flutes on the Florida littoral. He

wrenches the water off, and it stops the flute. He is

himself again—hide from the panic—no, gotcha—and

he pulls on his clothes and goes back out in the living

room. Jane is still sitting there. Talk, christ, to some-

body—Jane!—but the room goes into the zooms, wild

lurches of perspective, a whole side of the room

zooming right up in front of his face, then zooming

back to where it was—Jane!—Jane in front of his face,

a foot away, then way back over there on the sofa, then

zooming up again, all of it rocketing back and forth in

the hulking heat—"Sandy!"—somebody is in the house

looking for him, Hagen? who is it?—seems Babbs

wants him in the movie. Red-and-white striped

Pranksters burning in the sun. Seems Babbs has an idea

for a section of the movie. In this scene Babbs is the

Pied Piper, tootling on a flute, and all the red-and-

white striped children are running after him in colorful

dances. They hand Sandy a Prankster shirt, which he

doesn't want. It is miles too big. It hangs on him in this

sick loose way like he is desiccating in the sun. Into

the sun—the shirt starts flashing under his face in the

sun in explosive beams of sunball red and sunball

silver-white as if he is moving through an aura of

violent beams. Babbs gives him his cue and he starts a

crazy dance out by a clothesline while the camera

whirrs away. He can feel the crazy look come over his

face and feel his eyeballs turning up and white with

just vague flashes of red and silver-white exploding in

under his eyelids... and the freaking heat, dancing like

a crazy in the sun, and he goes reeling off to one side.

It becomes very important that nobody know he

has taken Unauthorized Acid. He can trust Jane ... This

is not very out front, but he must remain very cool.

Chuck Kesey is marching around the yard blowing a

tuba, going boop boop a boop boop very deep and loud,

then he comes by Sandy and looks at him and smiles

over the mouthpiece and goes bup bup a bup bup, very

tender and soft and—intersubjectivity!—he knows and

understands—and that is nice because Chuck is one of

the nicest people in the world and Sandy can trust him.

If only he can remain cool...

There is a half pound of grass in a tin can by the

bus and Sandy gets down on all fours to help and starts

digging his playing in the sun, and he somehow kicks

over the can and the grass spills all over this silty

brown dirt. Everybody is upset and Hagen gets down to

try to separate the grass from the dirt, and Sandy gets

down on all fours to help and starts digging his fingers

into the dirt to try to dig out the grass, only as he starts

digging, the dirt gets browner and browner as he digs,

and he starts grooving over the brownness of it, so

brown, so deep, so rich, until he is digging way past

the grass, on down into the ground, and Hagen says,

"Hey! What the hell's the matter with you?"

And Sandy knows he should just come out with it

and say, I'm stoned man, and this brown is a groove,

and then it would be all out front and over with. But he

can't bring himself to do it, he can't bring himself all

the way out front. Instead, it gets worse.

Kesey comes over with a football and a spray can

of Day-Glo. He wants Sandy to spray it Day-Glo, and

then he and Babbs and some others are going to take it

out near the water at dusk and pass the Day-Glo ball

around, and Sandy starts spraying it, only it's all one

thing, the ball and Kesey's arm, and he is spraying Ke-

sey's arm in the most dedicated, cool way, and Kesey

says:

"Hey! What the hell's the matter with you—"

And as soon as he says it, he knows, which is

suddenly very bad.

"I'm ... stoned," says Sandy. "I took some acid,

and I . .. took too much and it's going very bad."

"We wanted to save that acid for the trip back,"

Kesey says. "We wanted to have some for the Rockies."

"I didn't take that much"—he's trying to explain

it, but now a Beatles record is playing over the

loudspeaker of the bus and it's raining into his head

like needles—"but it's bad."

Kesey looks exasperated, but he tries some

condolence. "Look—just stay with it. Listen to the

music—"

"Listen to the music!" Sandy yells. "Christ! Try

and stop me!"

Kesey says very softly: "I know how you feel,

Sandy. I've been there myself. But you just have to stay

with it"—which makes Sandy feel good: he's with me.

But then Kesey says, "But if you think I'm going to be

your guide for this trip, you're sadly mistaken." And he

walks off.

Sandy starts feeling very paranoid. He walks off,

away from the house, and comes upon some sort of

greeny glade in the woods. Babbs and Gretchen Fetchin

are lying on the ground in the shade, just lazing on it,

but Babb's legs shift and his arms move and Gretch's

legs shift, and Sandy sees ... Babbs and Gretch in a

pond, swimming languidly. He knows they are on

ground, and yet they are in the water—and he says,

"How is it?"

"Wet!" says Babbs.

—and—marvelous—it is very nice—as if Babbs

knows exactly what is in his mind—synch—and is

going to swing with it. We are all one brain out here

and we are all on the bus, after all. And suddenly there

in the Florida glade it is like the best of the whole

Prankster thing all over again.

HE CAME BACK TO THE HOUSE AT DARK, INTO THE

YARD, AND there were a million stars in the sky, like

tiny neon bulbs, and you could see them between the

leaves of the trees, and the trees seemed to be covered

with a million tiny neon bulbs, and the bus, it broke up

into a sculpture of neon bulbs, millions of them massed

together to make a bus, like a whole nighttime of neon

dust, with every particle a neon bulb, and they all

vibrated like a huge friendly neon cicada universe.

He goes down to the water where the Pranksters

all are, a little inlet, and it is dark and placid and he

gets in and wades out until the water laps almost even

with his mouth, which makes it very secure and warm

and calm and nice and he looks at the stars and then at

a bridge in the distance. All he can see of the bridge is

the lights on it, swooping strands of lights, rising,

rising, rising—and just then Chuck Kesey comes

gliding toward him through the water, smiling, like a

great friendly fish. Chuck knows and it is very nice—

and the lights of the bridge keep rising, rising, until

they merge with the stars, until there is a bridge

leading right up into heaven.

chapter

VIII

Tootling the Multitudes

IN GEORGIA THEY PULLED OVER TO THE

SIDE OF THE HIGH-way at a rest area, by a lake. Old

Brother John put on a Robin Hood hat and sang a lot of

salty songs and got the MDT Award, Most Disgusting

Trip. Babbs nailed a baby doll up on a post and painted

it Day-Glo and nailed a lot of nails through it and burnt

it, and he got an MDT Award, too. Then something

happened that made Sandy very happy. He got the idea

of spraying his hand in Day-Glo designs and getting in

the water and then rushing up out of the water with his

hand stretched out toward Hagen's movie camera so the

film would show an enormous Day-Glo hand rushing up

in frantic foreshortening. Everybody grooved on that

and started doing it, and Sandy felt like he now shared

part of the power. Everybody started painting one hand

Day-Glo and opening it and sticking one vast vibrating

Day-Glo palm out at the straight world floating by

comatose .. . Kesey held another briefing, and without

anybody having to say anything, they all began to feel

that the trip was becoming a ... mission, of some sort.

Kesey said he wanted them all to do their thing and be

Pranksters, but he wanted them to be deadly competent,

too. Like with the red rubber balls they were always

throwing around when they got out of the bus. The idea

of the red rubber balls was that every Prankster should

always be ready to catch the ball, even if he wasn't

looking when it came at him. They should always be

that alert, always that alive to the moment, always that

deep in the whole group thing, and be deadly

competent.

Well, one Prankster who was proving out deadly

competent was Cassady. They highballed on up the

Eastern seaboard to New York, and highballing was

about it. Cassady had never been in better form. By this

time everybody who had any reservations about

Cassady had forgotten it. Cassady had been a rock on

this trip, the totally dependable person. When

everybody else was stroked out with fatigue or the

various pressures, Cassady could still be counted on to

move. It was as if he never slept and didn't need to. For

all his wild driving he always made it through the last

clear oiled gap in the maze, like he knew it would be

there all the time, which it always was. When the bus

broke down, Cassady dove into the ancient innards and

fixed it. He changed tires, lugging and heaving and

jolting and bolting, with his fantastic muscles popping

out striation by striation and his basilic veins gorged

with blood and speed.

Coming up over the Blue Ridge Mountains

everybody was stoned on acid, Cassady included, and it

was at that moment that he decided to make it all the

way down the steepest, awfulest windingest mountain

highway in the history of the world without using the

brakes. The lurid bus started barreling down the Blue

Ridge Mountains of Virginia. Kesey was up on top of

the bus to take it all in. He was up there and he could

feel the motion of the thing careening around the

curves and the road rippling and writhing out in front

of him like someone rippling a bull-whip. He felt

totally synched with Cassady, however. It was as if, if

he were panicked, Cassady would be panicked, panic

would rush through the bus like an energy. And yet he

never felt panic. It was an abstract thought. He had

total faith in Cassady, but it was more than faith. It was

as if Cassady, at the wheel, was in a state of satori, as

totally into this very moment, Now, as a being can get,

and for that moment they all shared it.

THEY REACHED NEW YORK IN THE MIDDLE

OF JULY, AND THEY were like horses in the home

stretch. Everybody felt good. They tooled across 42nd

Street and up Central Park West with the speakers

blaring and even New York had to stop and stare. The

Pranksters gave them the Day-Glo glad hands, Kesey

and Babbs got up on top of the bus with their red-and-

white striped shirts on and tootled the people. This

tootling had gotten to be a thing where you got on top

of the bus and played people like they were music, the

poor comatose world outside. If a guy looked at you fat

and pissed off, you played on the flute in dying

elephant tones. If a woman looked up nervous and

twittering, you played nervous and twittering. It was

saying it right to their faces, out front, and they never

knew what to do. And New York—what a dirge New

York was. The town was full of solemn, spent, irritable

people shit-kicking their way down the sidewalks. A

shit kicker is a guy with a frown on and his eyes on the

ground, sloughing forward with his shoes scuffing the

pavement like he's kicking horseshit out of the way

saying oh that this should happen to me. The shit

kickers gave them many resentful looks, which was the

Pranksters' gift to the shit kickers. They could look up

at the bus and say those are the bastids who are causing

it, all the shit. They pulled into the big driveway out

front of the Tavern on the Green, a big restaurant in

Central Park, and tootled the people there. One way or

another they were drawing the whole freaking town into

their movie, and Hagen got it all on film.

One of the old Perry Lane crowd, Chloe Scott,

had arranged to get them an apartment of some friends

of hers who were away for the summer, up on Madison

Avenue at 90th Street. They parked the bus out front

and had a time for themselves. Cassady looked up all

his old pals from the On the Road days. Two of them

were Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg.

They gave a party up at the apartment at Madison

and 90th and Kerouac and Ginsberg were there. A guy

also showed up saying, Hi, I'm Terry Southern and this

is my wife Carol. He was a pretty funny guy and talked

a blue streak most amiably. It was a week before they

found out he wasn't Terry Southern and didn't even

look like him. It was just some guy's little freaky prank

and they were glad they had gone ahead and wailed

with it. Kesey and Kerouac didn't say much to each

other. Here was Kerouac and here was Kesey and here

was Cassady in between them, once the mercury for

Kerouac and the whole Beat Generation and now the

mercury for Kesey and the whole—what?—something

wilder and weirder out on the road. It was like hail and

farewell. Kerouac was the old star. Kesey was the wild

new comet from the West heading christ knew where.

Sometimes a Great Notion came out and the

reviews ran from the very best to the very worst. In the

daily New York Herald Tribune, Maurice Dolbier said:

"In the fiction wilderness, this is a towering redwood."

Granville Hicks said: "In his first novel, One Flew

Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Ken Kesey demonstrated that

he was a forceful, inventive and ambitious writer. All

of these qualities are exhibited, in even higher degree,

in Sometimes a Great Notion. Here he has told a

fascinating story in a fascinating way." John Barkham

of the Saturday Review said: "A novelist of unusual

talent and imagination ... a huge, turbulent tale ..."

Time said it was a big novel—but that it was

overwritten and had failed. Some of the critics seemed

put out with the back-woodsy, arch, yep-bub-golly

setting of the novel and the unusual theme of the heroic

strikebreaker and the craven union men. Leslie Fiedler

wrote an ambivalent review in the Herald Tribune's

Book Week, but in any case it was a long, front-page

review by a major critic. Newsweek said the book

"rejects the obligations of art and therefore ends up as

a windy, detailed mock-epic barrel-chested counterfeit

of life." Orville Prescott in The New York Times called

it "A Tiresome Literary Disaster" and said: "His

monstrous book is the most insufferably pretentious

and the most totally tiresome novel I have had to read

in many years." He referred to Kesey as "a beatnik

type" who had been the model for Dean Moriarty in

Kerouac's On the Road, confusing Kesey with Cassady.

The Pranksters got a good laugh over that. The old guy

was mixed up and ... maybe put out by the whole thing

of the bus and the big assault upon New York: stop the

Huns...

But the hell with it. Kesey was already talking

about how writing was an old-fashioned and artificial

form and pointing out, for all who cared to look . . . the

bus. The local press, including some of the hipper,

smaller sheets, gave it a go, but nobody really com-

prehended what was going on, except that it was a

party. It was a party, all right. But in July of 1964 not

even the hip world in New York was quite ready for the

phenomenon of a bunch of people roaring across the

continental U.S.A. in a bus covered with swirling Day-

Glo mandalas aiming movie cameras and microphones

at every freaking thing in this whole freaking country

while Neal Cassady wheeled the bus around the high

curves like Super Hud and the U.S. nation streamed

across the windshield like one of those goddamned

Cinemascope landscape cameras that winds up your

optic nerves like the rubber band in a toy airplane and

let us now be popping more speed and acid and smok-

ing grass as if it were all just coming out of Cosmo the

Prankster god's own local-option gumball machines—

Cosmo!

Furthur.

chapter

The Crypt Trip

IF THERE WAS ANYBODY IN THE WORLD

WHO WAS GOING TO comprehend what the

Pranksters were doing, it was going to be Timothy

Leary and his group, the League for Spiritual Dis-

covery, up in Millbrook, New York. Leary and his

group had been hounded out of Harvard, out of Mexico,

out of here, out of there, and had finally found a home

in a big Victorian mansion in Millbrook, on private

land, an estate belonging to a wealthy New York

family, the Hitchcocks. So the bus headed for Mill-

brook.

They headed off expecting the most glorious

reception ever. It is probably hard at this late date to

understand how glorious they thought it was going to

be. The Pranksters thought of themselves and Leary's

group as two extraordinary arcane societies, and the

only ones in the world, engaged in the most fantastic

experiment in human consciousness ever devised. The

thing was totally new. And now the two secret societies

bearing this new-world energy surge were going to

meet.

The Pranksters entered the twisty deep green

Gothic grounds of Millbrook with flags flying,

American flags all over the bus, and the speakers

blaring rock 'n' roll, on in over the twisty dirt road,

through the tangled greeny thickets, past the ponds and

glades, like a rolling yahooing circus. When they got in

sight of the great gingerbread mansion itself, all towers

and turrets and jigsaw shingles, Sandy Lehmann-Haupt

started throwing green smoke bombs off the top of the

bus, great booms and blooms of green smoke exploding

off the sides of the bus like epiphytes as the lurid thing

rolled and jounced around the curves. We are here ! We

are here !

The Pranksters expected the Learyites to come

rolling out of the house like the survivors of the siege

of Khartoum. Instead—a couple of figures there on the

lawn dart back into the house. The Pranksters stop in

front and there is just the big house sitting there

sepulchral and Gothic—and them jumping off the bus

still yahooing and going like hell. Finally a few souls

materialize. Peggy Hitchcock and Richard Alpert and

Susan Metzner, the wife of Dr. Ralph Metzner, another

leading figure in the Leary group. Alpert looks the bus

up and down and shakes his head and says, "Ke-n-n-n

Ke-e-e-esey ..." as if to say I might have known that

you would be the author of this collegiate prank. They

are friendly, but it is a mite ... cool here, friends.

Maynard Ferguson, the jazz trumpet player, and his

wife, Flo, are there, and they groove over the bus, but

the others . . . there is a general. . . vibration ... of: We

have something rather deep and meditative going on

here, and you California crazies are a sour note.

Finally, Peggy Hitchcock invites some of them

over to her house, a big modern house, known as The

Bungalow, off from the gingerbread manse. Babbs is

one of them. Babbs and the Pranksters are not ready for

a lazy afternoon in the country, meditative or not.

Inside The Bungalow, Babbs came upon a big framed

photograph on the wall, looking like a Yale class

picture from the year '03, a lot of young fellers seated,

in tiers, in a clump and staring full-face at the camera.

"There's Cassady!" says Babbs.

"There's Hassler!"

"There's Kesey!"

"There's Sandy!"

They found every single man on the bus in the

picture, while the Learyites looked on, tolerantly, and

Babbs got the idea of "The Pranksters' Ancestral

Mansion."

The Learyites were going to take them on a tour

of the great gingerbread mansion, but it became

Babbs's tour. He started leading it.

"Now ladies and gentlemen," he said, "we are

embarked upon the first annual tour of the Pranksters'

Ancestral Mansion. Now over here you may regard"—

he points to a big lugubrious oil portrait, or something

of the sort, up on the wall—"one of the Pranksters'

great forefathers, sire and scion of the fabulous line,

the fabulous lion, Sir Edward the Freak. Sir Edward the

Freak, a joke in his own time. I've heard if he got

aroused, he would freak a whole block of city, Sir

Edward the Freak—"

—and so on, while the Learyites tagged along,

looking more and more dour, as if they sensed disaster,

Babbs looking more and more animated, rapping off

everything, the ancestral staircase, the ancestral

paneling, the ancestral fireplace, his rheostat eyes

turning up to 300 watts—

—then down to one of the four "meditation

centers," little sanctums where the Learyites retreated

for the serious business of meditation upon inner

things—

"—and now, for this part of our tour, the Crypt

Trip—" And the Pranksters started rapping off the

Crypt Trip, while Babbs entered into a parody rendition

of The Tibetan Book of the Dead. This was one of the

Learyites' most revered texts. "This is where we take

our followers to hang them up when they're high," says

Babbs, "the Crypt Trip." The clear message was Fuck

you, Mill-brook, for your freaking frostiness.

Other Pranksters were out playing under a little

waterfall in the woods. Zonker's girl friend Kathy,

whom he had picked up in New York, sat under the

waterfall and the water pasted her bikini, or her bra and

panties, or whatever it was she had on, pasted it most

nicely to her body and Hagen filmed it. She became

Sensuous X in the great movie.

Where was Leary? Everyone was waiting for the

great meeting of Leary and Kesey.

Well, word came down that Leary was upstairs in

the mansion engaged in a very serious experiment, a

three-day trip, and could not be disturbed.

Kesey wasn't angry, but he was very

disappointed, even hurt. It was unbelievable—this was

Millbrook, one big piece of uptight constipation, after

all this.

The Pranksters made a few more stabs at getting

things going around Millbrook, but it seemed like

everybody in the place was retreating to some corner or

other. Finally they pulled out. Before they left, Kesey

asked Alpert if he could get them some more acid. He

said he couldn't, but he could give them some morning-

glory seeds. Morning-glory seeds. The idea of morning-

glory seeds sloshing around in your belly like a

ptomaine bean bag while the bus bounced and shook

and swayed and leaned out on the curves was more than

a body could bear. So thanks anyway, and sayonara,

you all, League for Spiritual Discovery.

chapter

Dream Wars

ON THE TRIP BACK WEST THEY TOOK THE

NORTHERN ROUTE, through Ohio, Indiana, Illinois,

Wisconsin, Minnesota, South Dakota—

South Dakota! 191 miles in South Dakota ...

—which made it all cooler, for a start... In fact,

the trip back was a psychic Cadillac, a creamy groove

machine, and they soon found themselves grooving in a

group mind. Now they could leave behind all the mind-

blown freaky binds and just keep going Furthur! on the

bus. For example, Zonker meant to stay in New York

but he went back with them. He couldn't break off from

the group mind takeoff that had begun, the Unspoken

Thing, the all-in-one ... He brought with him his

gorgeous blond telepathic girl friend Kathy, who felt at

once the careening, crazydreaming, creamy bobbing

rhythm of the bus and became at once recklessly and

infectiously and insenescibly and ultra-infra-sexily one

of them: most sinuous Prankstress in their ranks. The

Pranksters named her Sensuous X, glowing girl friend

resolutely going ... Furthur ... Kesey laid eyes on the

Sensuous horizon—loved it! On the bus. Next, she

became Zonker's sensuous ex—lost her! On the bus. At

first Zonker's mad, feels he's been had—affront! But

then thanks to his feeling for the Prankster experiment,

he sees nothing to resent. There can be no hard feelings

when one is dealing totally out front on the bus.

There was very little LSD left, so they were

taking mostly speed and grass, soaring through the

Northlands, on Speed. For Sandy—at Millbrook a Main

Guru had taken Sandy and Jane aside and confided: It

would be good if you took the Millbrook trip alone ...

meaning, probably, without your obstreperous

companions, i.e., off the bus, and Sandy had... Dis-

Mounted again and returned to Millbrook, with Jane,

and the Main Guru turned him on to DMT, a 30-minute

trip like LSD but with a fierce roan-mad intensity—

fragments! Sandy had a mad sense of the world torn

apart into stained-glass shards behind his eyelids. No

matter what he did, eyes open, eyes shut, the world

erupted into electric splinters and the Main Guru said,

"I wish to enter your metaphysical soul." But to

Sandy—paranoia!—he seemed like a randy-painted lulu

bent on his rectococcygeal shoals, a randy boy-enjoyer,

while the world exploded and there was no antidote for

this rocketing, rocketing, rocketing, rocketing... They

returned to New York and Jane disembarked from the

bus, stayed behind, but Sandy felt impelled to ride it

out on the bus with the rest of the Pranksters, heading

west, rocketing, rocketing, rocketing, rocketing Furthur

... And now in the Midwest it ' was as if the DMT trip

at Millbrook had been the last stage of a rocket and his

whole psyche was now committed to speed and motion,

and it was necessary to keep soaring through the North-

lands. Certain vibrations of the bus would trip his brain

somehow and suddenly bring back the sensation of the

rocketing DMT trip and it would be necessary to speed

up and keep moving. The sweet wheatfields and dairy

lands of America would be sailing by beauty rural

green and curving, and Sandy is watching the serene

beauty of it... and then he happens to look into the big

rear-view mirror outside the bus and—the fields are—

in flames :::::::: curve and curdle straight up in hideous

orange flames ::::: So he whips his head around and

looks way back as far as he can see and over over to

the horizon and it is nothing but flat and sweet and

green again, sailing by serene. Then he looks back into

the mirror—and the flames shoot up again, soaring,

corn and lespedeza turning brown like burning color

film when the projector is too hot and bursting into

flames, corn, wheat, lespedeza turning into brown

scouring rush, death camass, bloodwort, wild iris, blue

flag, grease wood, poison sucklyea, monkshood

mandrake, moonseed, fitweed, locoweed, tumble

mustard, spurge nettle, coyote tobacco, crab's eye

bursting into flames—a sea of flames—a mirror with a

sea of flames, Narcissus, Moon, twins, thesis and anti-

thesis, infirmity of life, as if he is forced to endure at

any moment the visual revelation of a pa-leopsychic

mystery—and Sandy looks away and forces himself not

to look toward the rearview mirror and once again just

sun and the green belly of America sailing by . ..

... serene. Certain things worked smoothly on

every level. They knew how to run the bus better, for

one thing, even though Cassady had had to go back

ahead of time by car with Hassler, who had to report

back to Fort Ord. The Pranksters took turns driving.

Getting food, copping urinations, shooting the movie,

making tapes—they managed it all like a team. Once a

few minor personal hassles were worked out—out

front—and the bus crossed the Mississippi, and they

were way out West—then it all merged into the Group

Mind and became very psychic . . .

Intersubjectivity!

.. . Sandy himself wheeling the bus through dour

Roosian South Dakota with cold shadows sweeping

over the green and golden grasslands. No sea of flames

now, just a green and gold sea, serene, coming from out

of the stream of the Northlands themselves—and sleep

means nothing, because there is no time, only Now, a

perfect experience in the perfect momentum set

perfectly by his foot on the accelerator—for 191 miles

he drove, by the speedometer. Then he goes to the back

of the bus and there up on the ceiling is a map of the

U.S. pasted up there, and—see!—there is a red line on

the map, leaping out on, and it is exactly those 191

miles he drove, glowing on the ceiling of the bus. He

looks around, starts asking, very excited—and

Sensuous X said she made the line—

"Why!"

Sensuous doesn't know. No why to it. She just

had the crayon and that was where the line went—

—but no need to explain. Telepathic Kathy ! Just

one line, one current, running through the entire bus.

Group Mind, and Cosmic Control, on the bus ...

Then the bus heads up into Canada, to Calgary,

to catch the Calgary Stampede. The unquenchable

Hagen of the Screw Shack prowls the Stampede for

ginch ahoof and comes back to the bus with nice little

girl with lips as raunchy as a swig of grape soda, tender

in age but ne'mind, ready to go, and she is on the bus,

christened Anonymous, down to her bra and panties,

which she prefers. The call goes out to the Canadian

Royal Mounties for the runaway, or stowaway, the little

girl from the Stampede, and they stop the bus in the

road check—

—Why, come right on in, officers, take a look

around—

—while Hagen grinds the camera at them—

—while the Head Mountie rereads the long

description, five feet two, dark hair, etc., and checks

out Sensuous X and Gretch and Anonymous in the

window—

—Anonymous reads the description over the

Mountie's shoulder, perched up at the window, and

laughs merrily at such a funny-sounding girl—she by

now having her face all painted up in Prankster designs

and half her grape-soda body as well so that she doesn't

look too much like the pretty helpless waif Grandma

described to the Mounties, and the Mounties wave them

by and peer on down the road for the next.

Next down to Boise, Idaho, and everywhere

Kesey and Babbs up top the bus with flutes, mercilessly

tootling the people of America as they crowd around

the bus and getting pretty good at it even. Winces here

and there as some little cringing shell in the population

pinioned in his crispy black shiny shoes knows, no

mistake, that it is him they have singled out—they are

playing my song, the desperate sound track from my

movie—and Kesey and Babbs score again and again,

like the legendary Zen archers, for they no longer play

their music at people but inside them. They play inside

them, oh merciless flow. And many things are clear in

the flow. They are above the multitudes, looking down

from the Furthur heights of the bus, and the billion

eyes of America glisten at them like electric kernels,

and yet the Pranksters are grooving with this whole

wide-screen America and going with its flow with

American flags flying from the bus and taking energy,

as in solar heat, from its horsepower and its neon and

there is no limit to the American trip. Bango!—that's

it!—the trouble with Leary and his group is that they

have turned back. But of course! They have turned back

into that old ancient New York intellectual thing,

ducked back into the romantic past, copped out of the

American trip. New York intellectuals have always

looked for . .. another country, a fatherland of the

mind, where it is all better and more philosophic and

purer, gadget-free, and simpler and pedigreed: France

or England, usually—oh, the art of living, in France,

boys. The Learyites have done the same thing, only

with them it's—India—the East—with all the ancient

flap-doodle of Gautama Buddha or the Rig-Veda

blowing in like mildew, and Leary calls for blue grass

growing in the streets of New York, and he decrees that

everyone should have such a dwelling place of such

pristine antique décor, with everyone hunkered down

amid straw rugs and Paisley wall hangings, that the

Gautama Buddha himself from 485 B.C. could walk in

and feel at home instantly. Above all, keep quiet, for

God's sake, hold it down, whisper, moan, mumble,

meditate, and for chris-sake, no gadgets—no tapes,

video tapes, TV, movies, Hagstrom electric basses,

variable lags, American flags, no neon, Buick Electras,

mad moonstone-faced Servicenters, and no manic

buses, f r chrissake, soaring, doubledyclutch

doubledyclutch, to the Westernmost edge—

And in Boise they cut through a funeral or

wedding or something, so many dressed-up people in

the sun gawking at Pranksters gathered at a fountain

and all cutting up in the sunspots, and a kid—they have

tootled his song, and he likes it, and he runs for the bus

and they all pile on and pull out, just ahead of him, and

he keeps running for the bus, and Kesey keeps slowing

down and then pulling out just out of his reach, six or

eight blocks this way, and then they speed up for good,

and they can still see him floating away in the

background, his legs still running, like a preview—

—allegory of life!—

—of the multitudes who very shortly will want to

get on the bus . . . themselves . . .

Back at Kesey's in La Honda,

Deep into the rusky-dusky neon dusty,

More synched in than

They had ever been,

Deep into the Unspoken Thing,

The Pranksters now aligned

Along a sheerly dividing line:

Before the bus and

After the bus,

On the bus or

Off the bus,

A sheerly Diluvial divide:

Did you take the Epoch Ride?

One-way ticket into the nirvana thickets

Of the ex redwood cathedra Unspoken Thing.

Most peaceful synching in,

Serene bacchanal

For all...

... except Sandy. For Sandy, the bus had stopped

but he hadn't. It was as if the bus had hit a wall and he

had shot out the window and was living in the

suspended interminable moment before he hit—what?

He didn't know. All he knew was that there would be a

crash unless the momentum of the Pranksters suddenly

resumed and caught up with him the way the Flash, in

the Pranksters' ubiquitous comic books, caught

speeding bullets by streaking at precisely their speed

and reaching out and picking them up like eggs...

Sandy went about wide-eyed and nervous, an

endless ratchet of activity that no one quite

comprehended at first. The bus was parked out in front

of the log house and Kesey would be inside the bus

doing something and Sandy, outside the door, would

suddenly begin arguing with him over some esoteric

point of the sound system. Kesey was keeping the tapes

on a hick level, he was saying. Kesey was, like,

rustling cellophane in front of a microphone for "fire,"

and so forth and so on. So many complaints! Until

Kesey puts his arms up on the walls of the bus in the

Christ on the Cross gesture—which is precisely what

one of Sandy's brothers used to do when he started

complaining—and this drives Sandy into a rage and he

yells Fuck you! and gives Kesey the finger. Kesey

streaks out of the door of the bus and pins Sandy up

against the side of the bus—and it is all over as fast as

that. Sandy is overwhelmed. He has never seen Kesey

use his tremendous strength against anyone before, and

it is overwhelming, the idea of it even. But it is all

over in no time. Kesey is suddenly calm again and asks

Sandy to come with him to the backhouse, the shack by

the creek. He wants to talk to him.

So they go out there and Kesey talks to Sandy

about Sandy's attitude. Sandy is still Dis-mount, still

getting off the bus continually, and why? You don't

understand, says Sandy. You don't understand my dis-

mounting. It's like climbing a mountain. Would you

rather climb the mountain or have a helicopter deposit

you on the top? The continual climb, the continual

remounting, makes it a richer experience, and so on.

Kesey nods in a somewhat abstracted way and says

O.K., Sandy ...

But Sandy feels paranoid . .. what do they really

think of him? What are they planning? What insidious

prank? He can't get it out of his mind that they are

building up to some prank of enormous proportions, at

his expense. A Monstrous Prank ... He can't sleep, his

brain keeps going at the furious speed of the bus on the

road, like an eternal trip on speed.

Then Kesey devised a game called "Power." He

took a dart-board and covered it with Masonite and put

a spinner in the middle and marked off spoke lines

forming one section for each Prankster. Each person's

Prankster name was written in his section, Intrepid

Traveler for Babbs, Mai Function for Hagen, Speed

Limit for Cassady, Hassler for Ron Bevirt, Gretchen

Fetchin for Paula—in truth, her old name and persona

were gone entirely and she was now a new person

known as Gretchen Fetchin or Gretch. Sandy looked

and in his section it said: "dis-MOUNT," with the

heavy accent on Mount, even as he had explained it to

Kesey in the backhouse. He was overwhelmed with

relief and gratitude. Kesey knew! Kesey understood! He

was back in the bus.

Everybody was to write out some "tasks" on slips

of paper and they would all be put in a big pile. Then

the spinner was spun, and if it landed on you, you

reached into the pile and pulled out a "task," which you

then had to do, and the others gave you points

according to how well you had done the task, on a scale

of one to five points, five being the best. A lot of the

tasks were very pranked-up, like "put on an article of

somebody else's clothing." There was a scoreboard and

everybody moved his counter up the scoreboard as he

picked up points. Everybody made his own counter.

Sandy was making his out of Sculpt Metal. He stretched

it to a long spidery length, then suddenly compressed it

into an ugly wad, because that was the way he was

beginning to feel. So Page picked it up and made a nice

little form out of it, like a bridge, and everybody said

that's the way it should be done—and Sandy feels the

paranoia coming back ...

The prize for winning was: Power. Thirty

minutes of absolute power in which your word was law

and everyone had to do whatever you wanted. Very

allegorical, this game. By and by Babbs won a game

and he ordered everybody to bring everything they

possessed into the living room. Everybody went forth

and hauled in all their stuff, out to the bedrooms, tents,

Kampers, sleeping bags, the bus, and brought in a

ragamuffin mountain of clothes, shoes, boots, toys,

paint pots, toothbrushes, books, boxes, capsules,

stashes, letters, litter, junk. It was all piled up in the

center of the room, a marvelous Rat mountain of junk.

"Now," said Babbs, "we redistribute the wealth." And

he would hold up some piece of it and say, "Who wants

one 1964 Gretchen Fetchin toothbrush?" and somebody

would hold up his hand and it would go to him and

somebody else would catalogue it all solemnly on a le-

gal pad.

Then the pointer hits Sandy and he picks up a

task, a slip of paper. It is in Gretch's handwriting, and

it says: "Go out and build a fire." He reads it out loud

and just keeps staring at it. Then they all stare at him,

waiting for him to get up and go out and build a fire,

and he feels them staring and then he knows—it is a

very clever plot to get him out of the house, get him

outside in the dark, and then pull the Monstrous

Prank—

And he starts blurting it all out. / can't do it.

Can't you see how it is? It's getting awful—/ can't sleep

and everything is like this:

He lays the fingers of one hand over the fingers

of the other, forming a trellis pattern, and peers

through the spaces in between to show how everything

keeps breaking up, fragmenting, his whole field of

vision, ever since the DMT trip at Millbrook, and the

sea of flames and the paranoia, the everlasting

paranoia, he blurts it all out, everything that is hanging

him up and rocketing him toward—what?

And suddenly it is very quiet in the log house.

Every Prankster eye is upon him, absorbed, giving him

total... Attention, He has come all the way out front.

The furious motion stops, and he suddenly feels ::::

peace.

"How many points do we give him?" says Kesey.

And around the circle everyone says "Five!"

"Five!" "Five!" "Five!" "Five!"—

"Three," says Gretch, who had written the task in

the first place—and Sandy—a small microgram of

paranoia creeps back in like a mite...

THE PRANKSTERS NOW REALIZED

THAT SANDY WAS IN A BAD way. Kesey had

a saying, "Feed the hungry bee." So the Pranksters set

about showering . . . Attention on Sandy, to try to give

him a feeling of being at the cool center of the whole

thing. But he kept misinterpreting their gestures. Why

are they staring? His insomnia became more and more

severe. One night he walked down the road to the

housing development, Redwood Terrace, to try to

borrow some Sominex. He was just going to walk up to

a door in the middle of the night and knock and ask for

some Sominex. Somehow he had the old New York

apartment-house idea that you walk down the hall and

borrow a cup of sugar, even if you don't know the

people. So he starts knocking on doors and asking for

Sominex. Of course, they all either panic and shut the

door or tell him to fuck off. The people of Redwood

Terrace were a little paranoid themselves by this time

about the crazies down the road at Kesey's.

By day it was no better. As his insomnia got

worse, he started having more fragmented vision and

finally ... he looks at the wild-painted bus and the lurid

chaos of the swirls changes into ... the tunnel ! A

tunnel they had gone through, a long tunnel, in which

he had been possessed by intense claustrophobia and

the paranoid certainty that they would never emerge

from the tunnel, and now the tunnel appears on the side

of the bus in horrifying detail. He turns away ... there

is the cool limelit bower, cathedral in the redwoods,

serenity... he turns back to the bus slowly :::::::: IT IS

STILL THERE

! THE TUNNEL! ::::: THE BUS! ::::: Now

PAINTED AS IF BY A MASTER, A VERY TITIAN :::: AN

HIERONYMUS BOSCH :::: A MATTHIAS GRÜNEWALD ::::

WITH THE MOST HORRIFYING SCENES OF MY LIFE.

SALVATION? KESEY ANNOUNCES THEY

ARE GETTING BACK ON the bus—moving

again—and going up to Esalen Institute up in Big Sur,

four hours drive to the south. Esalen was an

"experiment in living," as they say, a sort of Roughin-it

resort perched on a cliff about 1,000 feet above the

Pacific. A very dramatic piece of Nature, in the

nineteenth-century seascape fashion. Waves crashing

way down below and sparkling air way up here and a

view of half the world, mountains, ocean, sky, the

whole show, in a word, for which Big Sur is famous.

There was a lodge and a swimming pool and a stretch

of greensward out to the edge of the cliff and some hot

sulphur springs about 100 yards away, also perched on

the side of a cliff, in which one could bathe and gaze

out over the eternal ocean. Behind the lodge were rows

of tiny cabins and a few trailers. These were for the

clientele. The clients—well, to put it simply, Esalen

was a place where educated middle-class adults came in

the summer to try to get out of The Rut and wiggle

their fannies a bit.

The main theoretician at Esalen was a Gestalt

psychologist named Fritz Perls. Perls was a great

goateed man in his seventies who went about in a jump

suit made of blue terrycloth. He had the air of a very

learned, dignified, and authoritative blue bear. Perls

was the father of the Now Trip. His theory was that

most people live fantasy lives. They live totally in the

past or in terms of what they expect in the future,

which amounts to fear, generally. Perls tried to teach

his patients, pupils, and the clients at Esalen to live

Now for a change, in the present, to become aware of

their bodies and all the information their senses

brought them, to shelve their fears and seize the

moment. They went through "marathon encounters," in

which a group stayed together for days and brought

everything out front, no longer hiding behind custom,

saying what they really felt—shouts, accusations, em-

braces, tears—a perfect delight, of course: "You want

to know what I really think of you ..." One of the

exercises at Esalen was the Now Trip exercise, in

which you try to catalogue the information your senses

are bringing you in the present moment. You make a

rapid series of statements beginning with the word

"Now": "Now I feel the wind cooling the perspiration

on my forehead ... Now I hear a bus coming up the

drive in low gear ... Now I hear a Beatles record

playing over a loudspeaker ..."

A bus? A Beatles record? The Pranksters are

here, Now Trippers. Kesey had been invited to Esalen

to conduct a seminar entitled "A Trip with Ken Kesey."

Nobody had quite counted on the entire fully wired and

wailing Prankster ensemble, however. The clientele at

Esalen had come a long way in a few weeks and many

were beginning to peek over the edge of The Rut. And

what they saw ... it could be scary out there in

Freedomland. The Pranksters were friendly, but they

glowed in the dark. They pranked about like maniacs in

the serene Hot Springs. Precious few signed up for a

trip with Ken Kesey, even in seminar form. Sandy,

meanwhile, was swinging wildly from feelings of para-

noia to feelings of godly . . . Power. And the trip was

always the bus. One moment it was covered with the

Hieronymus Bosch scenes of his most private Hell. The

next—he controls the bus. One night he discovers he

can unpaint the bus just by staring at it. He has

psychokinetic powers. His stare bears the power of life

or death. The waves crash below the Esalen cliff—and

he stares at the bus and... unpaints it. He strips one

whole side down to its original sunny school-bus

yellow. The whole Prankster overlay is gone. A trick of

the mind? He looks away, out over the Pacific and at

the stars—then swings back suddenly toward the bus

::::: IT IS STILL UNPAINTED :::: STILL VIRGIN SCHOOL-

BUS YELLOW.

He has the power—but can it ward off the

Monstrous Prank ? The Pranksters take the bus into

Monterey to see a movie, The Night of the Iguana. He

sits in the back of the bus, so he can watch them. If any

of them tries anything, with one stare he can ... They

go into the theater and he lags behind, then sits several

rows behind them. To keep an eye out... There is a Tom

and Jerry cartoon on the screen. The mouse, Jerry,

tricks the cat, Tom, and the cat goes off a cliff and hits,

flattened in an explosion of eyeballs, thousands of

eyeballs. Everyone is laughing, but to Sandy it is

sickening, incredibly brutal. He jumps up and runs out

of the theater and wanders around Monterey for an hour

and a half or so. Then he wanders back to the theater,

and Hagen is standing outside.

"Where the hell have you been? Kesey is looking

all over for you.

Sandy runs back into the theater. Kesey! He looks

up on the screen—and the mouse, Jerry, tricks the cat,

Tom, and the cat goes off a cliff and hits, flattened in

an explosion of eyeballs, thousands of eyeballs... Sandy

flees again. Kesey is now waiting outside. He coaxes

Sandy on to the bus and they head back to Esalen.

Back in Esalen, in his cabin, Sandy falls half

asleep into ... DREAM WARS! It is his Power vs. Kesey's,

like Dr. Strange vs. Aggamon, and one of them will kill

the other in the Dream War ... He exerts the utmost

psychic energy ... opens his eyes and makes out a

machine in the cabin—a heater? It looks like a heater

but it is Kesey's death instrument, and in that moment

the thermostat turns on the machine and a tiny red light

comes on—-Kesey's ray gun—has triumphed, filled

him, and Sandy falls off the bed, dead, lying on the

floor, and he leaves his body in astral projection and

sails out over the Pacific, out from the Esalen cliff, out

for 40 or 50 miles, soaring, and the wind goes in gusts,

huhhhh-hhnnnhh, huhhhhhhhhhnnnh,

huhhhhhhhhhnnnh, and he is the wind, not even a

compact spirit flying but a totally diffuse being,

dissolved in the upper ethers, and he can see the whole

moonlit ocean and Esalen way back there. Then he

comes to, and he is on the floor of the cabin, breathing

hard, huhhhhhhhhnnnh, huhhhh-hhhhhnnh,

huhhhhhhhnnnh.

"San-dy! San-dy! San-dy!"—daylight, and they're

outside the cabin, calling him, the Pranksters... what

Monstrous Prank?—

In fact, Kesey had instructed the Pranksters to

give Sandy total Attention to try to bring him around,

to put him at the center of everything. Sandy comes

out, sees them staring but takes it for glowers and

aggression . .. Nevertheless—on to the bus, and they

ride out along Big Sur in the sunlight. Kesey and the

Pranksters have prepared a long Sandy document,

twelve pages of text and drawings, very fanciful, like a

psychic brief, bringing all of Sandy's fears out front

and dispelling them in camaraderie—and it begins to

work. Then as they roll along the cliff highway Kesey

takes Sandy up on top of the bus for a Now Trip. They

sit up there in the sun with the wind streaming by and

Kesey is grooving off the designs on the hood of the

bus: "Now I see the green snake form going into the red

and the edge of it melts into ..." and so forth, and

Sandy grooves off Kesey's Now Trip—Kesey!—Total

Attention!—and it is like he is coming around at last,

he feels on the bus again. And then he decides to take

Kesey on a Now Trip, sailing along the cliff highway.

"Now," says Sandy, "I see the ocean like a sheet of ice

slanting in toward the shore . .. Now I see three

suns..."—in truth! the vibration of the bus has thrown

him into the DMT reaction. He gets a triple image from

the vibration and shaking of the bus, but instead of

refocusing on one sun, he keeps seeing three. Kesey

looks up at the sky, and says, "Yeah, yeah," grooving

with it, which makes Sandy feel very good . . .

But then nighttime. "San-dy! San-dy!" They're

trying to coax him out of the cabin again. For—what?

Why, the Monstrous Prank, naturally, but... he has

Power. Outside—they have candles, the Pranksters do,

and they're beginning a candlelight march down a path

in a ravine that cuts down through the cliff, all the way

to the water's edge. For—what? Why, the Monst—But

then Kesey's wife, Faye, comes up very silent and

smiling and loving and gives him a candle and lights it,

and Faye is like complete honesty and love, so he starts

off, following them down the path, holding candles,

while the surf booms up the ravine from below. Why do

they want him to join this spooky procession? Why, for

the most Monstrous Prank of all—to kill him at the

water's edge, but he has the power—the candle dims in

the wind, and then comes back up, burning full—but it

is not the wind, it is Sandy—he can make it shrink and

dim down just by staring at it, psychokinesis, then draw

it back up, all with his mind, he can control the flame

utterly, and it can control him, for they are one and the

same, God, and he trudges down the ravine, becoming

more and more powerful—but a girl named Lola has

stopped ahead of him. He draws closer and she has a

candle and is tilting it so that the wax drips on her

fingers and she is grooving over the wax dripping over

her fingers and grinning, and her hand, in wax, turns

white and dead, a skeleton, and her grin, lit from

beneath by the candle, turns waxy and zombie — THE

DEATH STARTS HERE — and Sandy bolts, charging back

up the ravine—

—not knowing that the whole procession had

been set up as a ceremony of love, a love trip, for him,

to bring him around, a candlelit celebration of Sandy

down by the water—

—but he is long gone, running down the cliff

highway now, toward Monterey, running until his lungs

give out, then walking, then running up to the lights in

the houses on the cliffs over the water, Big Sur summer

places, and knocking on the door, screaming

incoherently about jumping off the cliffs; until the po-

lice come. Gotcha! Which is a joke, because he can

annihilate them any moment he chooses, with a

psychokinetic ray—

They put him in the back seat, streaking down

Route 1 toward Monterey, wheeling around the curves,

faster and faster—

"Don't go so fast!" Sandy says.

"What?"

"Don't go so fast!"

"Listen," the cop says. "I'll slow down if you

stop staring at the back of my head."

"Ahhhhhh."

"Look out the window or something. Look at the

scenery. Stop staring at the back of my head."

So he takes his eyes out of the back of the cop's

skull. Two fever hole depressions. Another moment—

THE MONTEREY POLICE HELD HIM IN THE

JAIL IN MONTEREY until his brother Chris could get

there from New York. Chris ran into Kesey at the jail.

We've got to get him out of here, said Kesey. What do

you mean? We've got to get him back where he be-

longs, with the Pranksters. Chris took Sandy back to

New York for treatment. It was a long time before

Chris knew what in the hell Kesey had been talking

about.

chapter

The Unspoken Thing

HOW TO TELL IT! . . . THE CURRENT

FANTASY ... I NEVER heard any of the Pranksters use

the word religious to describe the mental atmosphere

they shared after the bus trip and the strange days in

Big Sur. In fact, they avoided putting it into words.

And yet—

They got on the bus and headed back to La

Honda in the old Big Sur summertime, all frozen

sunshine up here, and no one had to say it: they were

all deep into some weird shit now, as they would just as

soon call it by way of taking the curse . . . off the

Unspoken Thing. Things were getting very psychic. It

was like when Sandy drove 191 miles in South Dakota

and then he had looked up at the map on the ceiling of

the bus and precisely those 191 miles were marked in

red ... Sandy : : : : : back in Brain Scan country the

White Smocks would never in a million years com-

prehend where he had actually been ... which was

where they all were now, also known as Edge City ...

Back in Kesey's log house in La Honda, all sitting

around in the evening in the main room, it's getting

cool outside, and Page Browning: I think I'll close the

window—and in that very moment another Prankster

gets up and closes it for him and smi-i-i-i-les and says

nothing . .. The Unspoken Thing—and these things

keep happening over and over. They take a trip up into

the High Sierras and Cassady pulls the bus off the main

road and starts driving up a little mountain road—see

where she goes. The road is so old and deserted the

pavement is half broken up and they keep climbing and

twisting up into nowhere, but the air is nice, and up at

the top of the grade the bus begins bucking and gulping

and won't pull any more. It just stops. It turns out

they're out of gas, which is a nice situation because it's

nightfall and they're stranded totally hell west of

nowhere with not a gas station within thirty, maybe

fifty miles. Nothing to do but stroke themselves out on

the bus and go to sleep ... hmmmmmm ... scorpions

with boots on red TWA Royal Ambassador slumber

slippers on his big Stinger Howard Hughes in a

sleeping bag on the floor in a marble penthouse in the

desert

DAWN

All wake up to a considerable fetching and

hauling and grinding up the grade below them and over

the crest comes a

CHEVRON

gasoline tanker, a huge monster of a tanker.

Which just stops like they all met somewhere before

and gives them a tankful of gas and without a word

heads on into the Sierras toward absolutely

NOTHING

Babbs—Cosmic control, eh Hassler!

And Kesey—Where does it go? I don't think man

has ever been there. We're under cosmic control and

have been for a long long time, and each time it builds,

it's bigger, and it's stronger. And then you find out...

about Cosmo, and you discover that he's running the

show. ..

The Unspoken Thing; Kesey's role and the whole

direction the Pranksters were taking—all the Pranksters

were conscious of it, but none of them put it into

words, as I say. They made a point of not putting it into

words. That in itself was one of the unspoken rules. If

you label it this, then it can't be that... Kesey took

great pains not to make his role explicit. He wasn't the

authority, somebody else was: "Babbs says..." "Page

says..." He wasn't the leader, he was the "non-

navigator." He was also the non-teacher. "Do you

realize that you're a teacher here?" Kesey says, "Too

much, too much," and walks away... Kesey's explicit

teachings were all cryptic, metaphorical; parables,

aphorisms: "You're either on the bus or off the bus."

"Feed the hungry bee," "Nothing lasts," "See with your

ears and hear with your eyes," "Put your good where it

will do the most," "What did the mirror say? It's done

with people." To that extent it was like Zen Buddhism,

with the inscrutable koans, in which the novice says,

"What is the secret of Zen?" and Hui-neng the master

says, "What did your face look like before your parents

begat you?" To put it into so many words, to define it,

was to limit it. If it's this, then it can't be that... Yet

there it was! Everyone had his own thing he was

working out, but it all fit into the group thing, which

was—"the Unspoken Thing," said Page Browning, and

that was as far as anyone wanted to go with words.

For that matter, there was no theology to it, no

philosophy, at least not in the sense of an ism. There

was no goal of an improved moral order in the world or

an improved social order, nothing about salvation and

certainly nothing about immortality or the life

hereafter. Hereafter! That was a laugh. If there was

ever a group devoted totally to the here and now it was

the Pranksters. I remember puzzling over this. There

was something so... religious in the air, in the very

atmosphere of the Prankster life, and yet one couldn't

put one's finger on it. On the face of it there was just a

group of people who had shared an unusual

psychological state, the LSD experience—

But exactly! The experience—that was the word!

and it began to fall into place. In fact, none of the great

founded religions, Christianity, Buddhism, Islam,

Jainism, Judaism, Zoroastrian-ism, Hinduism, none of

them began with a philosophical framework or even a

main idea. They all began with an overwhelming new

experience, what Joachim Wach called "the experience

of the holy," and Max Weber, "possession of the deity,"

the sense of being a vessel of the divine, of the All-

one. I remember I never truly understood what they

were talking about when I first read of such things. I

just took their weighty German word for it. Jesus,

Mani, Zoroaster, Gautama Buddha—at the very outset

the leader did not offer his circle of followers a better

state hereafter or an improved social order or any

reward other than a certain "psychological state in the

here and now," as Weber put it. I suppose what I never

really comprehended was that he was talking about an

actual mental experience they all went through, an

ecstasy, in short. In most cases, according to scriptures

and legend, it happened in a flash. Mohammed fasting

and meditating on a mountainside near Mecca and—-

flash!—ecstasy, vast revelation and the beginning of

Islam. Zoroaster hauling haoma water along the road

and—-flash!—he runs into the flaming form of the

Archangel Vohu Mano, messenger of Ahura Mazda, and

the beginning of Zoroastrianism. Saul of Tarsus

walking along the road to Damascus and—flash!—he

hears the voice of the Lord and becomes a Christian.

Plus God knows how many lesser figures in the 2,000

years since then, Christian Rosenkreuz and his "God-

illuminated" brotherhood of Rosicrucians, Emanuel

Swedenborg whose mind suddenly "opened" in 1743,

Meister Eck-hart and his disciples Suso and Tauler, and

in the twentieth-century Sadhu Sundar Singh—with—

flash!—a vision at the age of 16 and many times

thereafter; ".. . often when I come out of ecstasy I think

the whole world must be blind not to see what I see,

everything is so near and clear ... there is no language

which will express the things which I see and hear in

the spiritual world ..." Sounds like an acid head, of

course. What they all saw in... a flash was the solution

to the basic predicament of being human, the personal

I, Me, trapped, mortal and helpless, in a vast

impersonal It, the world around me. Suddenly!—All-in-

one!—flowing together, I into It, and It into Me, and in

that flow I perceive a power, so near and so clear, that

the whole world is blind to. All the modern religions,

and the occult mysteries, for that matter, talk about an

Other World—whether Brahma's or the flying

saucers'—that the rational work-a-day world is blind

to. The—so called! friends—rational world. If only

they, Mom&Dad&Buddy&Sis, dear-but-square ones,

could but know the pairos, the supreme moment... The

historic visions have been explained in many ways, as

the result of epilepsy, self-hypnosis, changes in

metabolism due to fasting, or actual intervention by

gods—or drugs: Zoroastrianism began in a grand bath

of haoma water, which was the same as the Hindu

soma, and was unquestionably a drug. The experience!

And following the experience—after I got to

know the Pranksters, I went back and read Joachim

Wach's paradigm of the way religions are founded,

written in 1944, and it was almost like a piece of occult

precognition for me if I played it off against what I

knew about the Pranksters:

Following a profound new experience, providing

a new illumination of the world, the founder, a highly

charismatic person, begins enlisting disciples. These

followers become an informally but closely knit

association, bound together by the new experience,

whose nature the founder has revealed and interpreted.

The association might be called a circle, indicating

that it is oriented toward a central figure with whom

each of the followers is in intimate contact. The follow-

ers may be regarded as the founder's companions,

bound to him by personal devotion, friendship and

loyalty. A growing sense of solidarity both binds the

members together and differentiates them from any

other form of social organization. Membership in the

circle requires a complete break with the ordinary

pursuits of life and a radical change in social

relationships. Ties of family and kinship and loyalties

of various kinds were at least temporarily relaxed or

severed. The hardships, suffering and persecution that

loomed for those who cast their lot with the group were

counterbalanced by their high hopes and firm expec-

tations ... and so on. And of the founder himself: he has

"visions, dreams, trances, frequent ecstasies" ...

"unusual sensitiveness and an intense emotional life" ...

"is ready to interpret manifestations of the divine" . . .

"there is something elemental about [him], an

uncompromising attitude and an archaic manner and

language" . . . "He appears as a renewer of lost

contracts with the hidden powers of life" .. . "does not

usually come from the aristocracy, the learned or

refined; frequently he emerges from simpler folk and

remains true to his origin even in a changed

environment" ... "speaks cryptically, with words, signs,

gestures, many metaphors, symbolic acts of a diverse

nature" . .. "illuminates and interprets the past and

anticipates the future in terms of the kairos (the

supreme moment)"—

The kairos!—the experience!

—in one of two ways, according to Max Weber:

as an "ethical" prophet, like Jesus or Moses, who

outlines rules of conduct for his followers and

describes God as a super-person who passes judgment

on how they live up to the rules. Or as an "exemplary"

prophet, like Buddha: for him, God is impersonal, a

force, an energy, a unifying flow, an All-in-one. The

exemplary prophet does not present rules of conduct.

He presents his own life as an example for his

followers . . .

In all these religious circles, the groups became

tighter and tighter by developing their own symbols,

terminology, life styles, and, gradually, simple cultic

practices, rites, often involving music and art, all of

which grew out of the new experience and seemed

weird or incomprehensible to those who have never had

it. At that point they would also ... "develop a strong

urge to extend the message to all people."

... all people ... Within the religious circle, status

was always a simple matter. The world was simply and

sheerly divided into "the aware," those who had had the

experience of being vessels of the divine, and a great

mass of "the unaware," "the unmusical," the

unattuned." Or: you're either on the bus or off the bus.

Consciously, the Aware were never snobbish toward the

Unaware, but in fact most of that great jellyfish blob of

straight souls looked like hopeless cases—and the

music of your flute from up top the bus just brought

them up tighter. But these groups treated anyone who

showed possibilities, who was a potential brother, with

generous solicitude ...

. . . THE POTENTIALLY ATTUNED . .

. BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE started showing up at

Kesey's in La Honda, and no one was turned away.

They could stay there, live there, if they ...seemed

attuned. Mountain Girl was waiting out front of Kesey's

house when the bus came around the last bend on Route

84 and into the redwood gorge. Mountain Girl was a

big brunette with a black motorcycle, wearing a T-shirt

and dungarees. She was only 18 but big, about five-

foot-nine, and heavy; and loud and sloppy, as far as

that went. But it was funny ... she had beautiful teeth

and a smile that lit up one's gizzard ... Her name was

Carolyn Adams, but she became Mountain Girl right

away. As far as I know, nobody ever called her

anything else after that, until the police got technical

about it nine months later with her and eleven other

Pranksters...

Cassady had turned Mountain Girl on to Kesey's

place. She had been working as a technician in a

biological laboratory in Palo Alto. She had a boyfriend

who—well, he probably thought of himself as a

"beatnik" in his square hip way. Only he never did

anything, this boyfriend of hers. They never went

anywhere. They never went out. So she went out by

herself. She ended up one night in St. Michael's Alley,

one of Palo Alto's little boho rookeries, at a birthday

party for Cassady. Cassady said over the mountain and

down under the redwoods was where it was at.

Mountain Girl was a big hit with the Pranksters

from the very start. She seemed always completely out

front, without the slightest prompting. She was one big

loud charge of vitality. Here comes Mountain Girl—and

it was a thing that made you pick up, as soon as you

saw her mouth broaden into a grin and her big brown

eyes open, open, open, open until they practically ex-

ploded like sunspots in front of your eyes and you

knew that wonderful countryfied voice was going to

sing out something like:

"Hey! Guess what we're gonna do! We were just

up to Baw's"—the general store—"and we're gonna git

some seeds and plant some grass in Baw's window box!

Can't you see it! The whole town's gonna git turned on

in six months!"—and so on.

But underneath all the gits and gonnas, she

turned out to be probably the brightest girl around

there, with the possible exception of Faye. Faye said

very little, so it was a moot point. Mountain Girl turned

out to be from a highly respectable upper-middle-class

background in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., a family of

Unitarians. In any case, she caught on to everything

right away. She was decisive and had all the nerve in

the world. Also she was getting more beautiful every

day. All it took was a few weeks of the rice and stew

and irregular eating around Kesey's, the old involuntary

macrobiotic diet, so to speak, and she started thinning

out and getting beautiful. None of this was lost on

Kesey. He was the Mountain Man and she was the

Mountain Girl. She was just right for him ...

Mountain Girl moved into a tent up on a little

plateau on the hill behind the house, under the

redwoods. Page Browning had a tent up there, too. So

did Babbs and Gretch. Mike Hagen had his Screw

Shack. The Screw Shack was a very stellar—Mal

Function!—Hagen production. None of the boards lay

true and none of the nails ever quite made it all the way

in. The boards seemed to be huddled together in a

tentative agreement. One day Kesey took a hammer and

hit a single nail on the peak of the shack and the whole

shack fell down.

"Nothing lasts, Hagen!" yelled Mountain Girl,

and her laugh boomed through the redwoods.

And the Hermit's Cave... One day Faye looked

out the kitchen window and there was a little creature

at the foot of the hill behind the house, peering out

from the edge of the woods like a starved animal. He

was a small, thin kid, barely five feet tall, but he had a

huge black beard, like some Ozark g-nome in Barney

Google. He just stood there with these big starveling

eyes bugging out of his wild black shag, looking at the

house. Faye brought him out a plate of tuna fish. He

took it without saying anything and ate it; and never

left. The Hermit!

The Hermit hardly ever said anything, but he

turned out to be perfectly literate, and he would talk to

people he trusted, like Kesey. He was only 18. He had

lived with his mother somewhere around La Honda. He

had had a lot of trouble in school. He had had a lot of

trouble everywhere. He was the Oddball. Finally he

took off for the woods and lived up there barefoot, just

wearing a shirt and Levi's, killing animals and spearing

fish for food. People caught glimpses of him now and

again and high-school kids used to try to hunt him

down and demolish his lean-tos and otherwise torment

him. His wandering had brought him up to the woods

up behind Kesey's house, a wild stretch that had been

designated "Sam McDonald Park" but never cleared.

The Hermit built himself a Hermit's Cave down

in a pit in a dark green moldy mossy gully that dropped

off the path up into the woods. He filled it with objects

that winked and blinked and cooed. He was also keeper

of the communal acid stash down there in the cave. And

he had other secrets, such as his diaries... the Hermit

Memoirs, in which real life and his Hermit fantasy ran

together in wriggling rivers of little boys and lost

hunters whom only the Hermit could rescue ... Nobody

ever knew his real name at all until a few months later

when, as I say, the police would get technical about

it...

Then Babbs discovered Day-Glo, Day-Glo paint,

and started painting it up the very trunks of the

redwoods, great zappers of green, orange, yellow. Hell,

he even painted the leaves, and Kesey's place began to

glow at night. And resound. More and more people

were showing up for long or short stays. Cassady

brought in a Scandinavian-style blonde who was always

talking about hangups. Everybody had hangups. She

became June the Goon. Then a girl who wore huge

floppy red hats and granny glasses, the first anybody

had ever seen. She became Marge the Barge. Then a

sculptor named Ron Boise, a thin guy from New En-

gland with a nasal accent like Titus Moody, only a

Titus Moody who spoke the language of Hip: "Man,

like, I mean, you know," and so on. Boise brought in a

sculpture of a hanged man, so they ran it up a tree limb

with a hangman's noose. He also built a great

Thunderbird, a great Thor-and-Wotan beaked monster

with an amber dome on its back and you could get

inside of it. Inside were some mighty wire strings,

which you could pull, which they did, and the

Thunderbird twanged out across the gorge like the

mightiest vibrating bass beast in the history of the

world. Then he brought in a Kama Sutra sculpture, a

huge sheetmetal man with his face in the sheetmetal

groin of a big sheetmetal babe. She had her left leg

sticking up in the air. It was hollow and Babbs ran a

hose up it and turned the water on and it spurted out, so

they left it running, eternally spurting. It looked like

she was having an eternal orgasm out of her left foot.

And ... Sssss—ssss—ssss—Bradley. Bradley,

Bradley Hodgeman, had been a college tennis star. He

was short but very muscular. He turned up—or came

on, Bradley was always coming on—acting so weird,

people would stand there and look at him, even at

Kesey's. He talked in clots of words, "Fell down by the

wino station—insoluble flying objects, nitrate—creasey

greens by the back porch—Ray Bradbury interlining of

the lone chrome nostril, you understand"—sidling

through the room with a nonspecific grin on and his

hair combed down over his face like a surfer, his back

hunched over, and then going into a stopped-up laugh,

Sssss—ssss—ssss—ssss—until somebody would try to

break up his sequence by asking him how was the

tennis playing going these days and he would widen his

grin and open his eyes to a horizon of vast significance

and say, "One day I hit the ball up in the air ... and it

never came down ... Sssss—ssss—-ssss-—ssss..."

ACTUALLY, THERE WERE A LOT OF

KIDS IN THE EARLY 1960S who were ... yes;

attuned. I used to think of them as the Beautiful People

because of the Beautiful People letters they used to

write their parents. They were chiefly in Los Angeles,

San Francisco, and New York City, these kids. They

had a regular circuit they were on, and there was a lot

of traffic from city to city. Most of them were from

middle-class backgrounds, but not upper bourgeois,

more petit bourgeois, if that old garbanzo can stand

being written down again—homes with Culture but no

money or money but no Culture. At least that was the

way it struck me, judging by the Beautiful People I

knew. Culture, Truth, and Beauty were important to

them . .. "Art is a creed, not a craft," as somebody said

... Young! Immune! Christ, somehow there was enough

money floating around in the air so that one could do

this thing, live together with other kids—Our own

thing!—from our own status sphere, without having to

work at a job, and live on our own terms—Us! and

people our age!—it was... beautiful, it was a... whole

feeling, and the straight world never understood it, this

thing of one's status sphere and how one was only nine-

teen, twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two or so and not

starting out helpless at the bottom of the ladder, at all,

because the hell with the ladder itself—one was already

up on a ... level that the straight world was freaking

baffled by! Straight people were always trying to figure

out what is wrong here—never having had this feeling

themselves. Straight people called them beatniks. I

suppose the Beautiful People identified with the Beat

Generation excitement of the late 1950s, but in fact

there was a whole new motif in their particular

bohemian status sphere: namely, psychedelic drugs.

El... Es... Dee ... se-cret-ly ... Timothy Leary,

Alpert, and a few chemists like Al Hubbard and the

incognito "Dr. Spaulding" had been pumping LSD out

into the hip circuit with a truly messianic conviction.

LSD, peyote, mescaline, morning-glory seeds were

becoming the secret new thing in the hip life. A lot of

kids who were into it were already piled into amputated

apartments, as I called them. The seats, the tables, the

beds—none of them ever had legs. Communal living on

the floor, you might say, although nobody used terms

like "communal living" or "tribes" or any of that. They

had no particular philosophy, just a little leftover

Buddhism and Hinduism from the beat period, plus

Huxley's theory of opening doors in the mind, no

distinct life style, except for the Legless look ... They

were ... well, Beautiful People!—not "students,"

"clerks," "salesgirls," "executive trainees"—Christ,

don't give me your occupation-game labels! we are

Beautiful People, ascendent from your robot junkyard

:::::: and at this point they used to sit down and write

home the Beautiful People letter. Usually the girls

wrote these letters to their mothers. Mothers all over

California, all over America, I guess, got to know the

Beautiful People letter by heart. It went:

"Dear Mother,

"I meant to write to you before this and I hope

you haven't been worried. I am in [San Francisco, Los

Angeles, New York, Arizona, a Hopi Indian

Reservation!!!! New York, Ajijic, San Miguel de

Allende, Mazatlán, Mexico! ! ! !] and it is really

beautiful here. It is a beautiful scene. We've been here

a week. I won't bore you with the whole thing, how it

happened, but I really tried, because I knew you wanted

me to, but it just didn't work out with [school, college,

my job, me and Danny] and so I have come here and it

a really beautiful scene. I don't want you to worry

about me. I have met some BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE and ..."

... and in the heart of even the most unhip

mamma in all the U.S. of A. instinctively goes up the

adrenal shriek: beatniks, bums, spades—dope.

AT KESEY'S THE DAYS BEGAN — WHEN? THERE

WERE NO clocks around and nobody had a watch. The

lime light would be sparkling down through the

redwoods when you woke up. The first sounds, usually,

would be Faye calling the children—"Jed! Shannon!"—

or a cabinet door slamming in the kitchen or a pan

being put down on the drainboard. Faye the eternal—

Then maybe a car coming over the wooden bridge and

parking in the dirt area out front of the house.

Sometimes it would be one of the regulars, like Hagen,

coming back. He was always going off somewhere.

Sometimes it would be the everlasting visitors, from

god knows where, friends of friends of friends,

curiosity seekers, some of them, dope seekers, some of

them, kids from Berkeley, you could never tell. People

around the house would just start to be getting up.

Kesey emerges in his undershorts, walks out front to

the creek and dives in that mothering cold water, by

way of shocking himself awake. George Walker is

sitting on the porch with just a pair of Levi's on, going

over his muscles, his arms, shoulders and torso and all

the muscles, with his hands, looking for flaws, picking

off hickies, sort of like the ministrations of a cat. There

would be a great burst of activity in the late afternoon,

people working on various projects, the most

complicated of which, endless, it seemed like, was The

Movie.

The Pranksters spent much of the fall of 1964,

and the winter, and the early spring of 1965, working

on ... The Movie. They had about forty-five hours of

color film from the bus trip, and once they got to going

over it, it was a monster. Kesey had high hopes for the

film, on every level. It was the world's first acid film,

taken under conditions of total spontaneity barreling

through the heartlands of America, recording all now,

in the moment. The current fantasy was... a total

breakthrough in terms of expression ... but also

something that would amaze and delight many

multitudes, a movie that could be shown commercially

as well as in the esoteric world of the heads. But The

Movie was a monster, as I say. The sheer labor and

tedium in editing forty-five hours of film was

unbelievable. And besides... much of the film was out

of focus. Hagen, like everybody else, had been soaring

half the time, and the bouncing of the bus hadn't helped

especially—but that was the trip! Still... Also, there

were very few establishing shots, shots showing where

the bus was when this or that took place. But who

needs that old Hollywood thing of long shot, medium

shot, closeup, and the careful cuts and wipes and pans

and dolly in and dolly out, the old bullshit. Still...

plunging in on those miles of bouncing, ricocheting,

blazing film with a splicer was like entering a jungle

where the greeny vines grew faster than you could chop

them down in front of you.

The film had already cost a staggering sum,

about $70,000, mostly for color processing. Kesey had

put everything he had gotten from his two novels plus

the play adaptation of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's

Nest into Intrepid Trips, Inc. His brother, Chuck, who

had a good creamery business in Springfield, Oregon,

invested to some extent. George Walker's father had set

up a trust fund for him, with strings on it, but he

contributed when he could. By the end of 1965,

according to Faye's bookkeeping, Intrepid Trips, Inc.,

had spent $103,000 on the various Prankster

enterprises. Living expenses for the whole group ran to

about $20,000 for the year, a low figure considering

that there were seldom fewer than ten people around to

be taken care of and usually two or three vehicles.

Food and lodging were all taken care of by Kesey.

A pot of money at the front door—There was a

curious little library building up on the shelves in the

living room, books of science fiction and other

mysterious things, and you could pick up almost any of

these books and find truly strange vibrations. The

whole thing here is so much like... this book on Kesey's

shelf, Robert Heinlein's novel, Stranger in a Strange

Land. It is bewildering. It is as if Heinlein and the

Pranksters were bound together by some inexplicable

acausal connecting bond. This is a novel about a

Martian who comes to earth, a true Superhero, in fact,

born of an Earth mother and father after a space flight

from Earth to Mars, but raised by infinitely superior

beings, the Martians. Beings on other planets are

always infinitely superior in science-fiction novels.

Anyway, around him gathers a mystic brotherhood,

based on a mysterious ceremony known as water-

sharing. They live in—La Honda! At Kesey's! Their

place is called the Nest. Their life transcends all the

usual earthly games of status, sex, and money. No one

who once shares water and partakes of life in the Nest

ever cares about such banal competitions again. There

is a pot of money inside the front door, provided by the

Superhero ... Everything is totally out front in the

Nest—no secrets, no guilt, no jealousies, no putting

anyone down for anything: "... a plural marriage—a

group theogamy ... Therefore whatever took place—or

was about to take place ... was not public but private.

'Ain't nobody here but us gods'—so how could anyone

be offended? Bacchanalia, unashamed swapping,

communal living . .. everything."

Kesey by now had not only the bus but the very

woods wired for sound. There were wires running up

the hillside into the redwoods and microphones up

there that could pick up random sounds. Up in the

redwoods atop the cliff on the other side of the

highway from the house were huge speakers, theater

horns, that could flood the entire gorge with sound.

Roland Kirk and his half a dozen horns funking away in

the old sphenoid saxophone sinus cavities of the

redwoods.

Dusk! Huge stripes of Day-Glo green and orange

ran up the soaring redwoods and gleamed out at dusk as

if Nature had said at last, Aw freak it, and had freaked

out. Up the gully back of the house, up past the

Hermit's Cave, were Day-Glo face masks and boxes and

machines and things that glowed, winked, hummed,

whistled, bellowed, and microphones that could pick up

animals, hermits, anything, and broadcast them from

the treetops, like the crazy gibbering rhesus

background noises from the old Jungle Jim radio

shows. Dusk! At dusk a man could put on something

like a World War I aviator's helmet, only painted in

screaming Day-Glo, and with his face painted in Day-

Glo constellations, the bear, the goat, a great walking

Day-Glo hero in the dusky rusky forests, and he could

orate in the deep of the forest, up the hill, only in

spectral tones, like the Shadow, any old message,

something like: "This is control tower, this is control

tower, clear Runway One, the cougar microbes

approach, bleeding antique lint from every pore and

begging for high octane, beware, be aware, all ye who

sleep in barracks on the main strip, the lumps in your

mattress are carnivore spores, venereal butterflies sent

by the Combine to mothproof your brain, a pro-kit in

every light socket—Plug up the light sockets! The

cougar microbes are marching in like army ants.. . "—

happy to know that someone, somebody, might answer

from the house, or some place, 6ver another

microphone, booming over the La Honda hills: "May

day, May day, collapse the poles at every joint, hide

inside your folding rules, calibrate your brains for the

head count..." And Bob Dylan raunched and rheumed

away in the sphenoids or some damned place—

By nightfall the Pranksters are in the house and a

few joints are circulating, saliva-liva-liva-liva-liva, and

the whole thing is getting deeper into the moment, as it

were, and people are working on tapes, tapes being

played back, stopped, rewound, played again, a click on

the plastic lever, stopped again ... and a little speed

making the rounds—such a lordly surge under the red-

woods!—tablets of Benzedrine and Dexedrine, mainly,

and you take off for a burst of work and rapping into

the night. .. experiments of all sorts favored here, like

putting contact microphones up against the bare belly

and listening to the enzymes gurgling. Most Prankster

bellies go gurgle-galumph-blub and so on, but

Cassady's goes ping!—dingaping!—ting! as if he were

wired at 78 rpm and everyone else is at 33 rpm, which

seems about right. And then they play a tape against a

television show. That is, they turn on the picture on the

TV, the Ed Sullivan Show, say, but they turn off the

sound and play a tape of, say, Babbs and somebody

rapping off each other's words. The picture of the Ed

Sullivan Show and the words on the tape suddenly force

your mind to reach for connections between two vastly

different orders of experience. On the TV screen, Ed

Sullivan is holding Ella Fitzgerald's hands with his

hands sopped over her hands as if her hands were the

first robins of spring, and his lips are moving, probably

saying, "Ella, that was wonderful! Really wonderful!

Ladies and gentlemen, another hand for a great, great

lady!" But the voice that comes out is saying to Ella

Fitzgerald—in perfect synch—"The lumps in your

mattress are carnivore spores, venereal butterflies sent

by the Combine to mothproof your brain, a pro-kit in

every light socket—Ladies and gentlemen, Plug up the

light sockets! Plug up the light sockets! The cougar

microbes are marching in ... "

Perfect! The true message!—

—although this kind of weird synchronization

usually struck outsiders as mere coincidence or just

whimsical, meaningless in any case. They couldn't

understand why the Pranksters grooved on it so. The

inevitable confusion of the unattuned—like most of the

Pranksters' unique practices, it derived from the LSD

experience and was incomprehensible without it. Under

LSD, if it really went right, Ego and Non-Ego started to

merge. Countless things that seemed separate started to

merge, too: a sound became ... a color! blue ... colors

became smells, walls began to breathe like the

underside of a leaf, with one's own breath. A curtain

became a column of concrete and yet it began rippling,

this incredible concrete mass rippling in harmonic

waves like the Puget Sound bridge before the crash and

you can feel it, the entire harmonics of the universe

from the most massive to the smallest and most

personal—presque vu!—all flowing together in this

very moment...

This side of the LSD experience—the feeling!—

tied in with Jung's theory of synchronicity. Jung tried

to explain the meaningful coincidences that occur in

life and cannot be explained by cause-and-effect

reasoning, such as ESP phenomena. He put forth the

hypothesis that the unconscious perceives certain

archetypical patterns that elude the conscious mind.

These patterns, he suggested, are what unite subjective

or psychic events with objective phenomena, the Ego

with the Non-Ego, as in psychosomatic medicine or in

the microphysical events of modern physics in which

the eye of the beholder becomes an integral part of the

experiment. Countless philosophers, prophets, early

scientists, not to mention alchemists and occultists, had

tried to present the same idea in the past, Plotinus,

Lao-tse, Pico della Mirandola, Agrippa, Kepler,

Leibniz. Every phenomenon, and every person, is a

microcosm of the whole pattern of the universe,

according to this idea. It is as if each man were an atom

in a molecule in a fingernail of a giant being. Most men

spend their lives trying to understand the workings of

the molecule they're born into and all they know for

sure are the cause-and-effect workings of the atoms in

it. A few brilliant men grasp the structure of the entire

fingernail. A few geniuses, like Einstein, may even see

that they're all part of a finger of some ¡sort—So space

equals time, hmmmmmm ... All the while, however,

many men get an occasional glimpse of another

fingernail from another finger flashing by or even a

whole finger or even the surface of the giant being's

face and they realize instinctively that this is a part of

a pattern they're all involved in, although they are

totally powerless to explain it by cause and effect. And

then—some visionary, through some accident—

—accident, Mahavira?—

—through some quirk of metabolism, through

some drug perhaps, has his doors of perception opened

for an instant and he almost sees—presque vu!—the

entire being and he knows for the first time that there

is a whole . . . other pattern here .. . Each moment in

his life is only minutely related to the cause-and-effect

chain within his little molecular world. Each moment,

if he could only analyze it, reveals the entire pattern of

the motion of the giant being, and his life is minutely

synched in with it—

— AND WHEN THE CHEVRON TANKER FOLLOWS

THE BUS INTO ... NOWHERE . . . ONE GETS A GLIMPSE OF

THE PATTERN, A NEW LEVEL . . . MANY LEVELS HERE . . .

The Pranksters never talked about synchronicity

by name, but they were more and more attuned to the

principle. Obviously, according to this principle, man

does not have free will. There is no use in his indulging

in a lifelong competition to change the structure of the

little environment he seems to be trapped in. But one

could see the larger pattern and move with it—Go with

the flow!—and accept it and rise above one's immediate

environment and even alter it by accepting the larger

pattern and grooving with it—Put your good where it

will do the most!

Gradually the Prankster attitude began to involve

the main things religious mystics have always felt,

things common to Hindus, Buddhists, Christians, and

for that matter Theosophists and even flying-saucer

cultists. Namely, the experiencing of an Other World, a

higher level of reality. And a perception of the cosmic

unity of this higher level. And a feeling of

timelessness, the feeling that what we know as time is

only the result of a naïve faith in causality—the notion

that A in the past caused B in the present, which will

cause C in the future, when actually A, B, and C are all

part of a pattern that can be truly understood only by

opening the doors of perception and experiencing it...

in this moment .. . this supreme moment. . . this

kairos—

For a long time I couldn't understand the one

Oriental practice the Pranksters liked, the throwing of

the I Ching coins. The I Ching is an ancient Chinese

text. The Book of Changes, it is called. It contains 64

oracular readings, all highly metaphorical. You ask the

I Ching a question and throw three coins three times

and come up with a hexagram and a number that points

to one of the passages. It "answers" your question. ..

yes; but the I Ching didn't seem very Pranksterlike. I

couldn't fit it in with the Pranksters' wired-up,

American-flag-flying, Day-Glo electro-pastel surge

down the great American superhighway. Yet—of

course! The I Ching was supremely the book of Now, of

the moment. For, as Jung said, the way the coins fall is

inevitably tied up with the quality of the entire moment

in which they fall, the entire pattern, and "form a part

of it—a part that is insignificant to us, yet most

meaningful to Chinese minds" ... these things

THAT ONLY LUCKY DOGS AND MERRY

PRANKSTERS HEAR—and SO many mysteries of the

synch from that time on .. . There is another book in the

shelf in Kesey's living room that everybody seems to

look at, a little book called The Journey to the East, by

Hermann Hesse. Hesse wrote it in 1932 and yet... the

synch!... it is a book about.. . exactly ... the

Pranksters! and the great bus trip of 1964! "It was my

destiny to join in a great experience," the book began.

"Having had the good fortune to belong to the League,

I was permitted to be a participant in a unique

journey." It goes on to tell about a weird, circuitous

journey across Europe, toward the East, that the

members of this League took. It began, supposedly, as

just a journey, to get from here to there, but gradually

it took on a profound though unclassifiable meaning:

"My happiness did indeed arise from the same secret as

the happiness in dreams; it arose from the freedom to

experience everything imaginable simultaneously, to

exchange outward and inward easily, to move Time and

Space about like scenes in a theater. And as we League

brothers traveled throughout the world without motor-

cars or ships, as we conquered the war-shattered world

by our faith and transformed it into Paradise, we cre-

atively brought the past, the future and the fictitious

into the present moment." The present moment! Now!

The kairos! It was like the man had been on acid

himself and was on the bus.

EVERY FRIDAY NIGHT THEY HELD A

BRIEFING. BRIEFING WAS Babbs's term, from his

military days in Vietnam. Faye fixes some supper of

rice and beans and meat, kind of a stew, and they all go

into the kitchen and dig into the pots and put some on a

plate and eat. A few joints are circulating around,

saliva-liva-liva-liva-liva. Then they all go up to one of

the tents on the plateau, Page's, and they all crowd in

there, sitting this way and that with their legs pulled up

under their chins and they start throwing out this and

that subject for discussions. Curiously, this is like

summer camp, on one level, the Honor Council meeting

out in the woods after supper, everything smelling of

charred firewood and canvas damp with dew, and

crickets and cicadas sounding off and people slapping

their ankles from mosquitoes and bugs and shit. On the

other hand, the smell of new-mown grass burning and

... the many levels... aren't particularly summer camp.

They usually wait for Kesey to start off. He usually

starts off with something specific, something he's seen,

something he's been doing . .. and builds up to what

he's been thinking.

He starts talking about the lag systems he is

trying to work out with tape recorders. Out in the

backhouse he has variable lag systems in which a

microphone broadcasts over a speaker, and in front of

the speaker is a second microphone. This microphone

picks up what you just broadcast, but an instant later. If

you wear earphones from the second speaker, you can

play off against the sound of what you've just said, as

in an echo. Or you can do the things with tapes,

running the tape over the sound heads of two machines

before it's wound on the takeup reel, or you can use

three microphones and three speakers, four tape

recorders and four sound heads, and on and on, until

you get a total sense of the lag...

A person has all sorts of lags built into him,

Kesey is saying. One, the most basic, is the sensory

lag, the lag between the time your senses receive

something and you are able to react. One-thirtieth of a

second is the time it takes, if you're the most alert

person alive, and most people are a lot slower than

that. Now, Cassady is right up against that 1/30th of a

second barrier. He is going as fast as a human can go,

but even he can't overcome it. He is a living example of

how close you can come, but it can't be done. You can't

go any faster than that. You can't through sheer speed

overcome the lag. We are all of us doomed to spend our

lives watching a movie of our lives—we are always

acting on what has just finished happening. It happened

at least 1/30th of a second ago. We think we're in the

present, but we aren't. The present we know is only a

movie of the past, and we will really never be able to

control the present through ordinary means. That lag

has to be overcome some other way, through some kind

of total breakthrough. And there are all sorts of other

lags, besides, that go along with it. There are historical

and social lags, where people are living by what their

ancestors or somebody else perceived, and they may be

twenty-five or fifty years or centuries behind, and

nobody can be creative without overcoming all those

lags first of all. A person can overcome that much

through intellect or theory or study of history and so

forth and get pretty much into the present that way, but

he's still going to be up against one of the worst lags of

all, the psychological. Your emotions remain behind

because of training, education, the way you were

brought up, blocks, hangups and stuff like that, and as

a result your mind wants to go one way but your

emotions don't—

Cassady speaks up: "Blue noses, red eyes, and

that's all there is to say about that." And, for once, he

stops right there.

But of course!—the whole emotional lag—and

Cassady, voluble King Vulcan himself, has suddenly

put it all into one immediate image, like a Zen poem or

an early Pound poem—hot little animal red eyes bottled

up by cold little blue nose hangups—

Cassady's disciple, Bradley, says: "God is red"—

and even he stops right there. The sonofabitch is on for

once—it is all compacted into those three words, even

shorter than Cassady's line, like Bradley didn't even

have to think it out, it just came out, a play on the

phrase God is dead, only saying, for those of us on to

the analogical thing, God is not dead, God is red, God

is the bottled-up red animal inside all of us, whole, all-

feeling, complete, out front, only it is made dead by all

the lags—

Kesey giggles slightly and says, "I think maybe

we're really synched up tonight"—

Somebody starts talking about some kid they

know who has been busted for possession, of grass, and

the cops said something to him and he said something

back and the cops started beating on him. Everybody

commiserates with the poor incarcerated bastard and

they comment on the unfortunate tendency cops have of

beating up on people, and Babbs says,

"Yeah! Yeah! Right! Right! Right!—but that's in

his movie."

In his movie—right right right—and they all grok

over that. Grok—and then it's clear, without anybody

having to say it. Everybody, everybody everywhere, has

his own movie going, his own scenario, and everybody

is acting his movie out like mad, only most people

don't know that is what they're trapped by, their little

script. Everybody looks around inside the tent and no-

body says it out loud, because nobody has to. Yet

everybody knows at once ::::: somehow this ties in,

synchs, directly with what Kesey has just said about the

movie screen of our perceptions that closes us out from

our own reality ::::: and somehow synchs directly, at

the same time, in this very moment, with the actual,

physical movie, The Movie, that they have been slaving

over, the great morass of a movie, with miles and miles

of spiraling spliced-over film and hot splices billowing

around them like so many intertwined, synched, but

still chaotic and struggling human lives, theirs, the

whole fucking world's—in this very moment—Cassady

in his movie, called Speed Limit, he is both a head

whose thing is speed, meaning amphetamines, and a

unique being whose quest is Speed, faster, goddamn it,

spiraling, jerking, kicking, fibrillating tight up against

the V30 of a second movie-screen barrier of our senses,

trying to get into... Now—

—Mountain Girl's movie is called Big Girl, and

her scenario stars a girl who grew up being the big

surging powerful girl in genteel surroundings, oh, fin

de siècle Poughkeepsie, N.Y., oh Vassar scholars, and

who didn't fit into whatever they had in mind for

delicate girls in striped seersucker jumpers in faint

ratcheting watersprinkler sun jewels on the water drops

on the green grass Poughkeepsie, a big girl who's got to

break out and she gets good and loud and brassy to

come on stronger in this unequal contest—and later in

the plot finds out she is bigger in quite another way,

and bright, and beautiful.. .

... One looks around, and one sees the Hermit,

huddled up here inside the tent, Hermit whom all love

but he gets on nerves—why?—and they say Fuck off,

Hermit, after which they regret it, and his movie is

called Everybody's Bad Trip. He is everybody's bad

trip, he takes it upon himself, he takes your bad trip for

you, the worst way you thought it could happen—

And Page, with his black jacket with the Iron

Cross on it, his movie is called—of course!—Zea-lot. It

is as if everyone in here, smelling the burning grass,

suddenly remembers a dream Page told them he had

while he was sleeping on a cot in a jail in Arizona for,

er, turning the citizens on to Dimensional Kreemo, yes,

well—in this dream a young man named Zea-lot came

to town, dressed in black, and he inflamed the citizens

into doing all the secret fiend things they most dreaded

letting themselves do, like staving in the windows of

the Fat Jewelry Co., Inc., and sco-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-ping it

up, like jumping little high-assed mulatto wenches,

doing all the forbidden things, led on, encouraged,

onward, upward, by the burning shiny black horseman,

Zealot—after which, in the freaking cold blue morning

after, they all look at each each—who did this?—who

did all this dope-taking and looting and shafting?—

what in the name of God came over us?—what came

over this town?—well-—shit!—it wasn't us, it was him,

he infected and inflamed our brains, that damned snake,

Zea-lot—and they charge down the street alternately

beating their breasts and their bald heads, yelling for

the hide of Zealot, crying out his name as the ultimate

infamy—while Zea-lot just rides off nonchalantly into

the black noon, and they just have to watch his black

back and the black ass of his horse receding over the

next hill, taking the crusade on to .... turn on ... the

next town ...

. . . yes . . .

"Yeah, we're really synched up tonight."

—and, of course, everyone in this tent looks at

Kesey and wonders. What is his movie? Well, you

might call it Randle McMur-phy, for a start.

McMurphy, goading, coaxing, leading everybody on to

give themselves a little bigger movie, a little action,

moving the plot from out of deadass snug harbor.

There's a hell of a scene going for you, bub, out here in

Edge City. But don't even stop there—

—and all those things are keeping us out of the

present, Kesey is saying, out of our own world, our

own reality, and until we can get into our own world,

we can't control it. If you ever make that breakthrough,

you'll know it. It'll be like you had a player piano, and

it is playing a mile a minute, with all the keys sinking

in front of you in fantastic chords, and you never heard

of the song before, but you are so far into the thing,

your hands start going along with it exactly. When you

make that breakthrough, then you'll start controlling

the piano—

—-and extend the message to all people—

chapter

XII

The Bust

WHEREAS La Honda's Wilde Weste lode

Seems to be owed to the gunslinging

Younger Brothers;

and

WHEREAS They holed up in town

And dad-blamed but they found a neighborly way

To pay for their stay; and

WHEREAS They built a whole modern store, those

notorious mothers;

But them was the Younger Brothers,

Mere gunslingers; and

WHEREAS Now this Kesey

And his Merry Humdingers down the road—

God-damn Wild West ob-scene

Crazies and dope fiends

And putrescent beatniks

Paint the treetrunks phosphorescent; and

WHEREAS They beat on tin drums with sticks

And roots while a tin man

With a tin tenderloin

Buries his smile in the tin groin

Of a tin bitch ejaculating through a bunion; and

WHEREAS The crazies go cooing, keening, itchy-

gooning

Ululating and yahooing

Worse than gunslingers; and

WHEREAS We know what the ninnies are doing—

You ARE HEREBY EMPOWERED ::::::::::::

By now the Pranksters had built up so much

momentum they begin to feel immune even to a very

obvious danger, namely, the cops.

The citizens of La Honda were becoming more

and more exercised about Kesey and the Pranksters,

and so were the San Mateo County sheriff and federal

narcotics officials. Not knowing what the hell

accounted for the crazy life at Kesey's place, they

apparently assumed there was some hard drug use going

on—heroin, cocaine, morphine. Late in 1964 they put

Kesey's place under surveillance. The Pranksters knew

about it and used to play games with the cops. The

main federal narcotics agent in the area was a San

Francisco Chinese, Agent William Wong. The

Pranksters made a huge sign and put it up on the house:

WE'RE CLEAN, WILLIE!

It was fun, the cop game. The cops would be out

in the woods at night, along the creek, and one of them

would step into the creek and get his feet wet and say

something. The Pranksters would pick all this up on the

remote mikes in the woods, whereupon the voice of

Mountain Girl, broadcasting from inside the cabin,

would jeer out over an amplifier up in the redwoods:

"Hey! Why don't you come in the house and dry off

your feet, you cops! Quit playing the cop game and

come in and git some nice hot coffee!"

The cops were just playing their eternal cop

game. That's all it seemed like to the Pranksters.

About April 21, 1965, the Pranksters got a tip

that a warrant had been drawn up and the cops were

going to raid. Delightful! The cops were really going to

play their game right up to their BB gun eyeballs. The

Pranksters put up a great sign at the front gate

No ADMITTANCE. FIVE-DAY COUNTDOWN IN

PROGRESS

as if they were embarked upon the damnedest,

most awfulest dope orgy brain blowout in the history of

the world. In fact, they set about making the premises

clean. On the third day of the countdown, April 23,

1965, 10:50 P.M., the raid came. Oh God, there was

never a better game played by any cops. Here they

were, the absolute perfect cop-game cops, the sheriff,

seventeen deputies, Federal Agent Wong, eight police

dogs, cars, wagons, guns, posses, ropes, walkie-talkies,

bullhorns—Cosmo! the whole freaking raid scene—and

right up to the end the Pranksters played it as they saw

it: namely, as a high farce, an opéra bouffe. The cops

claimed they caught Kesey trying to flush a batch of

marijuana down the toilet. Kesey claimed he was only

in there painting flowers on the toilet bowl. The

bathroom was already a madhouse collage of photos,

clippings, murals, mandalas, every weird thing in the

world, like an indoor version of the bus, and the cops

crashed in and Agent Wong grabbed Kesey from

behind. Kesey was later booked on a charge of resisting

arrest, among other charges, to which he said that he

had been in the bathroom and some unidentified male

came up and embraced him from behind, and so

naturally he slugged him. It was a laugh and a half.

Kesey's resistance, he said, upended Wong and hurtled

him into the bathtub on top of Page Browning, who was

taking a bath. Browning was arrested for resisting

arrest, too. It was too much.

Even after the raiders had everybody in there,

thirteen people, lined up against the walls, and were

searching them for drugs, it was just the most wacked-

out cop game anybody had ever seen any cops play.

One of the raiders reached into Mike Hagen's pocket,

and when he drew his hand out, it held a vial of some

clear liquid, whereupon all the Pranksters started

shouting: "Hey! Play fair! Play fair! Be fair cops! Play

hard but play fair"—and so on. The vial, whatever it

was or was supposed to be, was never heard of again.

In a tool box outside, the raiders found a hypodermic

syringe full of some kind of liquid—which turned out

to be Three-in-One Oil for oiling the tape-recorder

mechanisms—and Kesey and twelve others, including

Babbs, Gretch, Hagen, Walker, Mountain Girl, Page,

Cassady, and the Hermit, were booked on many

charges, including possession of marijuana and

narcotics paraphernalia (the syringe), resisting arrest

and impairing the morals of minors (Mountain Girl and

the Hermit). Even then, the whole thing became not

much more than the cop-and-jailhouse-and-judge-and-

lawyer game, with such high moments as when they all

got bailed out and emerged from the jail in San Mateo

and the Hermit's mother appeared. Hermit, they

discovered from the police blotter, was named Anthony

Dean Wells. Nobody had ever asked him what his name

was. Anyway, his mother slapped Kesey across the face

with a paperback edition of One Flew Over the

Cuckoo's Nest and screamed, "Go back to your cuckoo

pad! You should have stayed in the nest instead of

flying over it, you big cuckoo!"

Well, the whole thing was too much. When the

cops booked them, Babbs gave his occupation as

"movie producer," and Mountain Girl said she was a

"movie technician." So Babbs solemnly appeared in the

local newspapers as the big movie producer caught in

the raid along with the big novelist, Kesey. It was

something. The San Francisco newspapers took a very

lively interest in the case and sent people out to

interview Kesey within the Dope Den, and word of the

Prankster life style was made public, however

obliquely, for the first time.

The publicity couldn't have been better, at least

in terms of the hip-intellectual circles where the

Pranksters might hope to have some immediate

influence. Accusing somebody of possession of

marijuana was like saying "I saw him take a drink."

Kesey was referred to as a kind of "hipster Christ," "a

modern mystic," after the model of Jack Kerouac and

William Burroughs. As all could plainly read in the

press, Kesey had gone even further. He had stopped

writing. He was now working on a vast experimental

movie entitled—the newspapers solemnly reported—

Intrepid Traveler and His Merry Pranksters Leave in

Search of a Cool Place. "Writers," he told a reporter,

"are trapped by artificial rules. We are trapped in

syntax. We are ruled by an imaginary teacher with a red

ball-point pen who will brand us with an A-minus for

the slightest infraction of the rules. Even Cuckoo seems

like an elaborate commercial."

LSD was never mentioned in all this. Kesey came

off chiefly as a visionary who had forsaken his riches

and his career as a novelist in order to explore new

forms of expression. In the California press he

graduated from mere literary fame to celebrity. If the

purpose of the raid was to stamp out dopeniks—the cop

game couldn't have backfired more completely.

After Kesey and the Pranksters got out on bail,

the legal wrangling went on interminably—but they all

stayed free. Kesey had a team of aggressive, bright

young lawyers working on the case, Zonker's brother-

in-law Paul Robertson in San Jose, and Pat Hallinan

and Brian Rohan from San Francisco. Hallinan was the

son of Vincent Hallinan, the lawyer, a famous

champion of the underdog. By and by the charges were

dropped against everybody but Kesey and Page

Browning, and even they ended up with only one

charge lodged against them, possession of marijuana.

They trooped down to Redwood City, the San Mateo

County Seat, fifteen times during the last eight months

of 1965, by Rohan's count. It was interminable, but

they all stayed free . ..

Yes! And heads, kids, kooks, intellectual tourists

of all sorts, started heading for Kesey's in La Honda.

Even Sandy Lehmann-Haupt returned. About a

year had gone by and he was O.K. again and he flew

into San Francisco. Kesey and four or five other

Pranksters drove to the San Francisco Airport to meet

him. As they drove back to La Honda, Sandy cheerfully

gave a brief account of what had happened to him in

Big Sur before he split like he did.

"—then I started having dream wars... with

somebody," said Sandy. He didn't want to say who.

"Yeah, I know," said Kesey. "With me."

He knew!

And the mysto fogs began to roll in again off the

bay ...

NORMAN HARTWEG AND HIS FRIEND

EVAN ENGBER DROVE UP to La Honda from Los

Angeles with the idea of doing the Tibetan thing for a

few weeks and seeing what it was all about. That was

pretty funny, the idea of doing the Tibetan thing at Ke-

sey's. Nevertheless, that was Norman's idea. Norman

was a 17-year-old playwright from Ann Arbor,

Michigan. He was a thin guy, five feet seven, with a

thin face and sharp features and a beard. But his nose

tilted up slightly, which gave him a boyish look. He

was eking out a living by writing a column for the Los

Angeles Free Press, a weekly, the L.A. counterpart of

the Village Voice, and working on avant-garde films,

and living in a room underneath the dance floor of a

discotheque on the Sunset Strip. He had run into

Kesey's friend Susan Brustman and then into Kesey

himself, and Kesey had invited him up to La Honda to

edit The Movie and ... partake of the life ... Somehow

Norman got the idea the people at Kesey's were like,

you know, monks, novitiates; a lot of meditating with

your legs crossed, chanting, eating rice, feeling

vibrations, walking softly over the forest floor and

thinking big. Why else would they be out in the woods

in the middle of nowhere?

So Norman drove up from L.A. with Evan

Engber, who was a theater director, occasionally, and,

later, a member of Dr. West's Jug Band, and, as a

matter of fact, the husband of Yvette Mimieux the

movie actress. They drove up the coastal route, Cal-

ifornia Route 1, then cut over Route 84 at San Gregorio

and on up into the redwood forests; around a bend, and

they're at Kesey's. But jesus, somehow it doesn't look

very Tibetan. It isn't the hanged man in the tree so

much, or the statue of a guy eating it. Hell, there are no

flies on the Tibetans. It is more the odd detail here and

there. Kesey's mailbox, for example, which is red,

white, and blue, the Stars and Stripes. And a big

framed sign on top of the house: WE WUZ FRAMED. And

the front gate, across the wooden bridge. The gate is

made of huge woodcutter's saw blades and has a death

mask on it—and a big sign, about 15 feet long, that

reads: THE MERRY PRANKSTERS WELCOME THE HELL'S

ANGELS. Music is blasting out of some speakers on top

of the house, a Beatles record—Help, I ne-e-e-ed

somebody—

At that moment, that very moment, Engber gets a

stabbing pain in his left shoulder.

"I don't know what it is, Norman," he says, "but

it's killing me. "

They drive on in across the bridge and get out

and go into the house looking for Kesey. Brown dogs

belly through the flea clouds outside the house,

coughing fruit flies. Engber clutches his shoulder.

Inside, bright green-and-gold light streams in through

the French doors onto the damnedest clutter. There are

big pipes hanging down from the rafters in the main

room, a whole row of them, like some enormous

vertical xylophone. Also dolls, dolls hanging from the

rafters, re-assembled dolls, dolls with the heads

sticking out of a hip joint, a leg out of the neck joint,

arm out of other leg joint, leg out of shoulder joint, and

so on, and a Day-Glo navel. Also balloons, also Chianti

bottles stuck on the rafters at weird angles somehow, as

if they had been in the very process of falling to the

floor and suddenly they froze there. And on the floor,

on the chairs, on tables, on the couch, toys, and tape

recorders, and pieces of tape recorders, and pieces of

pieces of tape recorders, and movie equipment, and

pieces of pieces of pieces of movie equipment, and

tapes and film running all over the place, plaited in

among wires and sockets, all of it in great spiral

tangles, great celluloid billows, and a big piece of a

newspaper headline cut out and stuck up on the wall:

HAIL TO ALL EDGES ... In the midst of all this, sitting

toward the side, is a gangling girl, looks very

Scandinavian, idling over a guitar, which she can't

play, and she looks up at Norman and says:

"We've all got hangups.. . and we've got to get

rid of them." Yeah ... yeah ... I guess that's right. There

... on the other side here is a little figure with an

enormous black beard. The little g-nome looks up at

Norman. His eyes narrow and he breaks into a vast

inexplicable grin, looking straight at Norman and then

Engber, and then he goes scuttling out the door,

snuffling and giggling to himself. Yeah .. . yeah ... I

guess that's right, too. "I don't know what the hell has

happened to me," says Engber, clutching his shoulder,

"but it's getting worse."

Norman keeps walking back through the house

until he hits a bathroom. Only it is a madhouse of a

bathroom. The walls, the ceilings, everything, one vast

collage, lurid splashes of red and orange, lurid ads and

lurid color photos from out of magazines, pieces of

plastic, cloth, paper, streaks of Day-Glo paint, and

from the ceiling and down one wall a wild diagonal

romp of rhinoceroses, like a thousand tiny rhinoceroses

chasing each other through Crazy Lurid Land. Over the

top part of the mirror over the sink is a small death

mask painted in Day-Glo. The mask hangs from a

hinge. Norman lifts it up and underneath the mask is a

typewritten message pasted on the mirror: "Now that

I've got your attention ..."

Norman and Engber go out back and head up the

path that leads into the woods, to look for Kesey. Up

past screaming Day-Glo tree trunks and tents here and

there and some kind of weird cave down in a gully with

Day-Glo objects glowing in the mouth of it and then

into deep green glades under the redwoods with the

lime light filtering through—and they keep coming

upon weird objects. Suddenly, a whole bed, an old-

fashioned iron bedstead, a mattress, a cover, but all

glowing with mad stripes and swirls of orange, red,

green yellow Day-Glo. Then a crazed toy horse in a

tree trunk. Then a telephone—a telephone—sitting up

on a tree stump, glowing in the greeny deeps with

beautiful glowing cords of many colors coming out of

it. Then a TV set, only with mad Day-Glo designs

painted on the screen. Then into a clearing, a flash of

sunlight, and down the slope, here comes Kesey. He

looks twice as big as the time Norman saw him in L.A.

He has on white Levi's and a white T-shirt. He walks

very erect and his huge muscled arms swing loose. The

redwoods soar all around.

Norman says, "Hello—"

But Kesey just nods slightly and smiles very

faintly as if to say, You said you'd be here and here

you are. Kesey looks around and then down the slope

toward the tent plateaus and the house and the highway

and says:

"We're working on many levels here." -

Engber clutches his shoulder and says:

"I don't know what this thing is, Norman, but it's

killing me. I've got to go back to L.A."

"Well, O.K., Evan—"

"I'll come back up when I get over it."

Norman kind of knew he wouldn't, and he didn't,

but Norman wanted to stick around.

ALL RIGHT, FILM EDITOR, ARTICLE

WRITER, PARTICIPANT-Observer, you're here. On

with your ... editing writing observing. But somehow

Norman doesn't start cutting film or writing his

column. Almost immediately the strange atmosphere of

the place starts rolling over him. There is an

atmosphere of—how can one describe it?—we are all

on to something here, or into something, but no one is

going to put it into words for you. Put it into words—

one trouble right away is that he finds it very hard to

get into the conversations here in the house in the

woods. Everyone is very friendly and most of them are

outgoing. But they are all talking about—how can one

describe it?—about. . . life, things that are happening

around there, things they are doing—or about things of

such an abstract and metaphorical nature that he can't

fasten them, either. Then he realizes that what it really

is is that they are interested in none of the common

intellectual currency that makes up the conversations of

intellectuals in Hip L.A., the standard topics, books,

movies, new political movements—For years he and all

his friends have been talking about nothing but

intellectual products, ideas, concoctions, brain candy,

shadows of life, as a substitute for living; yes. They

don't even use the usual intellectual words here—

mostly it is just thing.

Cassady's thing is—christalmighty, Cassady—

and it is with Cassady that he gets the first sense of the

daily allegory at Kesey's, allegorical living, every

action a demonstration of a lesson of life—like

Cassady's Gestalt Driving—but that is your term ...

Whenever there is any driving to be done, Cassady does

it. That is Cassady's thing, or his thing on one level.

They drive up the mountain, up to Skylonda, atop

Cahill Ridge, for something. Coming back, down the

mountain, Norman is in the back seat, two or three

others are sitting front and back, and Cassady is

driving. They start hauling down the mountain, faster

and faster, the trees snapping by like in some kind of

amusement park ride, only Cassady isn't looking at the

road. Or holding onto the wheel. His right hand is

flipping the dial on the radio. One rock 'n' roll number

blips out here—I'm nurding ut noonh erlation—then

another one here on the dial—vronnnh ba-bee suckpo

pon-pon—all the time Cassady is whamming out the

beat on the steering wheel with the heel of his left hand

and the whole car seems to be shuddering with it—and

his head is turned completely around looking Norman

squarely in the eye and grinning as if he is having the

most congenial delightful conversation with him, only

Cassady is doing all the talking, an incredible oral fib-

rillation of words, nutty nostalgia—"a '46 Plymouth,

you understand, gear shift like a Dairy Queen pulled up

side a '47 Chrysler jumpy little marshmallow fellow in

there had a kickdown gear was gonna ossify the world,

you understand"—all to Norman with the happiest

smile in the world—

You crazy fool—the truck—

—at the last possible moment somehow Cassady

fishtails the car back onto the inside of the curve and

the truck shoots by clean black shot like a great 10-ton

highballing tear drop of tar—Cassady still talking,

hanging on the steering wheel, pounding and rapping

away. Norman terrified; Norman looks at the others to

see if—but they're all sitting there throughout the

whole maniacal ride as if nothing out of the ordinary

has happened at all.

And maybe that's it—the first onset of Ahor

paranoia hits—maybe that's it, maybe he has been

sucked into some incredible trap by a bunch of dope-

taking crazies who are going to toy with him, for what

reason I do not—

Back at the house he decides to get into his role

of Journalist Reporter Observer. At least he will be

doing something and be outside, sane, detached. He

starts asking about this and that, about Cassady, about

Babbs, about the ineffable things, about why—

Mountain Girl explodes suddenly.

"Why! Why! Why! Why! Why! Why! Why!" she

says, throwing up her hands and shaking her head, with

such an air of authority and conviction that he is

crushed.

Later Kesey comes in and happens to say in the

course of something—"Cassady doesn't have to think

any more"—then he walks away. It is as if for some

reason he is furnishing Norman with part of the puzzle.

Kesey keeps doing this kind of thing. As if by

radar, Kesey materializes at the critical moment, in the

cabin, out front, in the backhouse, up in the woods. The

crisis may be somebody's personal thing or some group

thing—suddenly Kesey pops up like Captain Shotover

in Shaw's play Heartbreak House, delivers a line—

usually something cryptic, allegorical, or merely

descriptive, never a pronouncement or a judgment. Half

the time he quotes the wisdom of some local sage—

Page says, Cassady says, Babbs says—Babbs says, if

you don't /(now what the next thing is, all you have

to—and just as suddenly he's gone.

For example—well, it always seems like there's

no dissension around here, no arguments, no conflict,

in spite of all these different and in some cases weird

personalities ricocheting around and rapping and

carrying on. Yet that is only an illusion. It is just that

they don't have it out with one another. Instead, they

take it to Kesey, all of them forever waiting for Kesey,

circling around him.

One kid, known as Pancho Pillow, was a ball-

breaker freak. He has to break your balls by coming on

obnoxious in any way he could dream up, after which

you were supposed to reject him, after which he could

feel hurt and blame you for... all. That was his movie.

One night Pancho is in the house with a book about

Oriental rugs, full of beautiful color plates, and he is

rapping on and on about the beautiful rugs—

"—like, man, I mean, these cats were turned on

ten centuries ago, the whole thing, they had mandalas

you never dreamed of—right?—look here, man, I want

to blow your mind for you, just one time—"

—and he sticks the book under some Prankster's

nose—here's a beautiful color picture of an Isfahan rug,

glowing reds and oranges and golds and starlike

vibrating lines all radiating out from a medallion at the

center—

"No thanks, Pancho, I already had some."

"Come on, man! I mean, like, I gotta share this

thing, I gotta make you see it, I can't keep this whole

thing to myself! Like, you know, I mean, I want to

share it with you—you dig?—now you look at this

one—"

And so on, shoving the goddamn book at

everybody, waiting for somebody to tell him to go fuck

himself, at which point he can stalk out, fulfilled.

Feed the hungry bee—but christ, this ball breaker

is too much. So now all the Pranksters endure, waiting

for one thing, waiting for Kesey to turn up. By and by

the door opens and it's Kesey.

"Hey man!" Pancho says and rushes up to him.

"You gotta look at these things I found! I gotta turn

you on to this, man! I mean, I really got to, because it

will fucking blow your mind!" and he sticks the book in

Kesey's face.

Kesey just looks down at the picture of the

Isfahan or the Shiraz or the Bakhtiari or whatever it is,

as if he is studying it. And then he says, softly, in the

Oregon drawl,

"Why should I take your bad trip?"

—without looking up, as if what he is saying has

something to do with this diamond medallion here or

this border of turtles and palms—

"Bad trip!" Pancho screams. "What do you mean,

bad trip!" and he throws the book to the floor, but

Kesey is already off into the back of the house. And

Pancho knows his whole thing is, in fact, not sharing

beauty rugs at all, but simply his bad trip, and they all

know that's what it's all about, and he \knows they

know it, and the whole game is over and so long,

Pancho Pillow.

AND YET IT BEGAN TO SEEM TO

NORMAN THAT EVEN PANCHO was further into

the group thing than he was. He felt useless. He never

got to edit the movie. Kesey and Babbs would just say

do some cutting. But he wanted to see the whole film

first, a whole run-through, so he could see where it was

going. It was the same with the group. He wanted to

run the whole group back through his personal editing

machine and see what the whole picture looked like and

what the goal was. All the while it seemed like they

were probing him, probing him, probing him for weak-

nesses. Bradley, of all people, blew up at him one

morning, started calling him everything he could think

of, apparently trying to stir him up. Norman was

reading a Sanskrit textbook at the time, trying to learn

the alphabet. He figured he might as well do that, since

he wasn't doing anything else. He was also smoking a

cigarette. Bradley starts in.

"Every time you read a book or smoke a

cigarette," he yells, "you're hitting me. Look at Pancho.

Pancho's working. Pancho is writing poetry all the

time, and every day he brings me a poem—"

—which is ridiculous, Pancho's poems are so

bad. In fact, it is so ridiculous Bradley breaks into a

smile over it. Nevertheless, the point has been made.

Which is that Norman is lazy, "personal." Reading is

something that just gives pleasure to the reader. It is

not for the group. Also smoking—a thing that begets

nothing but itself. So he is telling Norman that he is

lazy and not contributing. Which is true. He is right.

But he wants to start a fight over it or something. This

amuses Norman and he laughs at Bradley—Bradley—

and yet even though it is only Bradley, it seems like an

indication of how the rest feel. Otherwise Bradley

probably never would have said anything. Norman

becomes quieter and quieter, like a clam. And it seemed

as if they laughed at him—

"Not at you—with you," Kesey kept telling him,

trying to josh him out of all his hangups and

inferiorities.

But the only thing that really helped was having

Paul Foster turn up.

Foster was a tall, curly-headed guy in his late

twenties with a terrible stutter. He was a mathematician

and had been working in Palo Alto as a computer

programmer, making a lot of money, apparently. Then

he started hanging out with some musicians and they

turned him on to a few ... mind-expanders, and now

Foster's life seemed to alternate between stretches of

good straight computer programming, during which he

wore a necktie and an iridescent teal-green suit of

Zirconpolyesterethylene and was a formidable fellow in

the straight world, and stretches of life with ... Speed,

the Great God Rotor, during which he wore his

Importancy Coat. This was a jacket he had turned into a

collage. It had layers and layers of ribbons and slogan

buttons and reflectors and Cracker Jack favors all over

it, piled up and flapping in the breeze until it looked

like a lunatic billowsleeve coat from out of the court of

Louis XV. He moved into the tree. Sandy had built a

house in the tree, a platform with a tent on it. Paul

built one under it; O.K., a duplex tree house. Paul

Foster came in with just an enormous amount of stuff,

all this stuff. He brought it all in and he set up

housekeeping in the tree. He put a window up in the

tree, and a gate, and bookshelves. He had strange

books. An encyclopedia, only it was an 1893

encyclopedia, and books on the strangest languages,

Tagalog, Urdu, and apparently he knew something

about all these languages ... and more and more stuff.

He had a huge sack of googaws that he would carry

around, of the weirdest stuff, bits of glittering glass

and tin and transistor-radio shells, just the shells, and

nails and screws and tops and tubes, and inside his sack

of weird junk was a little sack that was a miniature of

the big sack and contained tiny weird junk ... and you

got the idea that somehow, somewhere in there was a

very tiny little sack that contained very tiny weird junk,

and that it went on that way into infinity ... He also had

a lot of pens, some of them felt-nib pens with colors,

and he sat up in the tree house while the old restless

Roto-rooter, the good god Speed, scoured puns, puns,

puns, puns, puns from out of the walls of his skull and

he fashioned signs like one he put at the entrance of the

place, where the driveway turned in to the bridge from

Route 84, a sign reading: "No Left Turn Unstoned."

Then people would come and he'd entertain them up in

his tree house, and at night you would see it lit up like

some mad thing, gleaming with Dali-Day-Glo swoops,

and he would be up there drawing, drawing, drawing,

drawing, or working on a huge mad scrapbook he had

...

Norman and Paul Foster had a lot in common.

They were both fairly good artists, they both had a

certain fund of erudition erudition erudition. Foster,

with his terrible stutter, valued privacy in the midst of

it all, just as Norman did. Of course, Foster was

proving himself a Prankster far faster than Norman

was. It was a strange thing about that. There were no

rules. There was no official period of probation, and no

vote on is he or isn't he one of us, no blackballing, no

tap on the shoulders. And yet there was a period of

proving yourself, and everyone knew it was going on

and no one ever said a word about it. In any case,

Norman could talk to Foster, and that made all the

difference. He didn't feel so desperately lonely any

more. Also he suddenly saw that it wasn't just him—the

Pranksters probed everybody, to make them bring their

hangups out front to the point where they could act

totally out front, live in the moment, spontaneously,

and if needling was what it took to bring you that far—

Foster is coming on, in the house, with these

wild logical conundrums he had, only stuttering

something awful:

—Sup-puh-puh-puh-pose that that everything you

per-per-per-perceive is only a . . ."—some long

involved thing, and Mountain Girl breaks in:

—B-b-b-b-b-but, P-P-P-P-P-P-Paul, I don't git

the p-p-p-p-p-point about all this per-per-per-per-per-

per-ception. I try to git it, b-b-b-b-b-b-b-but all I git is

the w-w-w-w-w-w-words. How 'bout goin' over it ag-

gih-gih-gih-gih-gih-gih-gih-gih-gih-gih-gih-gih-gih -

gih-gihn!"

Foster can't believe this performance. He stands

there frozen with his eyes bugging out, bugging out,

bugging out, bugging out bigger and bigger until he

explodes:

"Is that supposed to be funny! You've got a

worse hangup than stuttering, Mountain Girl ! You've

got a fat mouth and you don't know what to use it for!

Ugly—that's your trip, the ugly trip! Well, all I know

is—"

"Yuh see!" Mountain Girl says. She is grinning,

triumphant practically laughing and clapping her hands,

she is so pleased with the results. "When you git mad,

you don't stutter!"

Foster freezes again. He stares at her. Then he

wheels around and walks out the door without saying

another word.

The funny part is, she's right

WHAT WAS IT? ... IT WAS LIKE . . .

WELL, YES! GROUP THERAPY, like a marathon

encounter in group therapy, in which everybody is

together for days, probing everybody's weaknesses,

bringing everything out front. Only this was group

therapy not for the middle-aged and fucked-up but for

the Young! and Immune!—as if they were not patching

up wrecks but tooling up the living for some incredible

breakthrough, beyond catastrophe. Since time was, the

serious concerns of man have always been fights

against catastrophe, against sickness, war, poverty,

enslavement, always the horsemen of the Apocalypse

riding. But what to do in that scary void beyond

catastrophe, where all, supposedly, will be possible—

and Norman happens upon another of those strange,

prophetic books on Kesey's shelf, Arthur Clarke's

Childhood's End, in which . .. the Total Breakthrough

generation is born on Earth and as mere infants they

show powers of mind far beyond their parents' and they

go off into a colony by themselves, not as individuals,

however, but as one great colonial being, in the

biological sense of the colonial animal, until, at last,

the Earth, its mission complete, convulses, starts

coming apart, and they, the children: "Something's

starting to happen. The stars are becoming dimmer. It's

as if a great cloud is coming up, very swiftly, all over

over all the sky. But it isn't really a cloud. It seems to

have some sort of structure—I can glimpse a hazy

network of lines and bands that keep changing their

position. It's almost as if the stars are tangled in a

ghostly spider's web. The whole network is beginning

to glow, to pulse with light, exactly as if it were alive .

. . There's a great burning column, like a tree of fire,

reaching above the western horizon. It's a long way off

right around the world. I know where it springs from:

they're on their way at last, to become part of the

Overmind. Their probation is ended: they're leaving the

last remnants of matter behind ... The whole landscape

is lit up—it's brighter than day—reds and golds and

greens are chasing each other across the sky—oh, it's

beyond words, it doesn't seem fair that I'm the only one

to see it—I never thought such colors—"

In short, zonked out of their ever-loving gourds,

man, and heading out toward... Edge City, absolutely,

and we're truly synched tonight.

—but no water spouts of Académie Française

cherubim and water babies here, and no reverent toga-

linen-flapping Gautama Buddha Orientals breathing out

the spent Roquefort breath of spiritual detachment.

Instead, somehow they're going to try it right down the

main highway, eight lanes wide, heron-neck arc lamps

rising up as far as the eye can see, and they will

broadcast on all frequencies, waving American flags,

turning up the Day-Glo and the neon of 1960s electro-

pastel America, wired up and amplified, 327,000

horsepower, a fantasy bus in a science-fiction movie,

welcoming all on board, no matter how unbelievably

Truck Stop Low Rent or raunchy—

chapter

XIII

The Hell's Angels

I DOUBT IF ANY OF THE PRANKSTERS

TRULY UNDERSTOOD Mountain Girl, except for

Kesey. Most of the time she was so 100 percent out

front, coming on loud and clear and candid as a Mack

truck, it never occurred to anybody that a whole side of

her was hidden. Except for Kesey, as I say. Sometimes

Kesey and Mountain Girl would disappear into the

backhouse and lie on mattresses and just talk, Kesey

rapping on about how he felt about all sorts of things,

life, fate, Now—while Mountain Girl—one thought of

hers making sorties through the soft word flow coming

from Kesey on the mattress there—yes, well, and she

told Kesey as frankly as she could about the last four or

five years of her life. Kesey didn't understand

completely. Namely, she was sometimes lonely as hell.

Lonely? Why, for chrissake, Mountain Girl came

swinging into every situation like on a vine, like

Sheena, Queen of the Jungle. She was high in the

Prankster hierarchy already. Nobody was closer to

Kesey than Mountain Girl, not even Faye, it often

seemed. But there it was: Kesey .. . Kesey was essential

to Mountain Girl's whole life with the Pranksters.

Without him, and Hassler, a weird loneliness could take

over ... Hassler was the only other person she could

talk to. Without Hassler— But it can be tense

underneath in a commune, beautiful on one level, but

you have to be willing to force it a little to keep it that

way.

It is really funny. This afternoon the sprinklers

are ratcheting away all sprinkly and starchy on the

lawns of Poughkeepsie. In August the sun causes such

brown spots where the trees don't shade it, you

understand. Well, freak that. The solution, Doctor,

happens to be named Kesey. This sound now, Doctor,

rising above the ratcheting, would probably throw your

poor little thready heart into fibrillation. It's like a

locomotive coming through the redwood trees around

the bends down Route 84 from Skylonda. The Hell's

Angels in running formation, to be exact, scores of the

monsters, on Harley-Davidson 74s. Miss Carolyn

Adams of Poughkeepsie, N.Y., is about to look this

primordial menace in the face and bark bullshit

commands at the Hell's Angels, which they obey, since

the sunspots exploding in their eyes bedazzle the

monsters. The energy flows from Kesey, Doctor, and

there is not one goddamn thing to git your little heart

scared of.

KESEY MET THE HELL'S ANGELS

ONE AFTERNOON IN SAN Francisco through

Hunter Thompson, who was writing a book about them.

It turned out to be a remarkable book, as a matter of

fact, called Hell's Angels, a Strange and Terrible Saga.

Anyway, Kesey and Thompson were having a few beers

and Thompson said he had to go over to a garage called

the Box Shop to see a few of the Angels, and Kesey

went along. A Hell's Angel named Frenchy and four or

five others were over there working on their

motorcycles and they took to Kesey right away. Kesey

was a stud who was just as tough as they were. He had

just been busted for marijuana, which certified him as

Good People in the Angels' eyes. They told him you

can't trust a man who hasn't done time, and Kesey was

on the way to doing time, in any case. Kesey said later

that the marijuana bust impressed them but they

couldn't have cared less that he was a novelist. But

they knew about that, too, and here was a big name who

was friendly and interested in them, even though he

wasn't a queer or a reporter or any of those other creep

suck-ups who were coming around that summer.

And a great many were coming around in the

summer of 1965. The summer of 1965 had made the

Hell's Angels infamous celebrities in California. Their

reputation was at its absolutely most notorious all-time

highest. A series of incidents—followed by an amazing

series of newspaper and magazine articles, Life and the

Saturday Evening Post among them—had the people of

the Far West looking to each weekend in the Angels'

life as an invasion by baby-raping Huns. Intellectuals

around San Francisco, particularly at Berkeley, at the

University of California, were beginning to romanticize

about the Angels in terms of "alienation" and "a

generation in revolt," that kind of thing. People were

beginning to get in touch with Thompson to see if he

couldn't arrange for them to meet the Angels—not the

whole bunch, Hunter, maybe one or two at a time. Well,

Kesey didn't need any one or two at a time. He and the

boys took a few tokes on a joint, and the Hell's Angels

were on the bus.

The next thing the citizens of La Honda knew,

there was a huge sign at the Kesey place—15 feet long,

three feet high, in red white and blue.

THE MERRY PRANKSTERS

WELCOME THE HELL'S ANGELS

Saturday, August 7, 1965, was a bright clear

radiant limelit summer day amid God's handiwork in La

Honda, California. The citizens were getting ready for

the day by nailing shut their doors. The cops were

getting ready by revving up a squad of ten patrol cars

with flashing lights and ammunition. The Pranksters

were getting ready by getting bombed. They were down

there in the greeny gorge, in the cabin and around it,

under the redwoods, getting bombed out of their

gourds. They had some good heavy surges of God-given

adrenaline going for them, too. Nobody ever came right

out front and said it, but this happened to be the real-

life Hell's Angels coming, about forty of them, on a

full-fledged Angels' "run," the sort of outing on which

the Angels did their thing, their whole freaking thing,

en mangy raunchy head-breaking fire-pissing rough-

goddamn-housing masse. The Pranksters had a lot of

company for the occasion. It was practically like an

audience, all waiting for the stars to appear. A lot of

the old Perry Lane crowd was there, Vic Lovell, Ed

McClanahan, and the others. Allen Ginsberg was there

and so was Richard Alpert and a lot of San Francisco

and Berkeley intellectuals. Tachycardia, you all—but

Kesey was calm and even laughing a little, looking

strong as an ox in his buckskin shirt, the Mountain

Man, and he made it all seem right and inevitable, an

inevitable part of the flow and right now in this

moment. Hell, if the straight world of San Mateo

County, California, had decided to declare them all

outlaws over an innocuous thing like marijuana, then

they could freaking well go with the flow and show

them what the saga called Outlaw was really like. The

Angels brought a lot of things into synch. Outlaws, by

definition, were people who had moved off of dead

center and were out in some kind of Edge City. The

beauty of it was, the Angels had done it like the

Pranksters, by choice. They had become outlaws first—

to explore, muvva—and then got busted for it. The

Angels' trip was the motorcycle and the Pranksters' was

LSD, but both were in an incredible entry into an

orgasmic moment, now, and within forty-eight hours

the Angels would be taking acid on board, too. The

Pranksters would be taking on . .. Ahor, the ancient

horror, the middle-class boy fear of Hell's Angels.

Hell's Angels, in the dirty flesh, and if they could bring

that dark deep-down thing into their orbit—

Kesey ! What in the freaking—tachycardia, you

all...

Bob Dylan's voice is raunching and rheuming in

the old jack-legged chants in huge volume from out the

speakers up in the redwood tops up on the dirt cliff

across the highway—He-e-e-ey Mis-ter Tam-bou-rine

Man—as part of Sandy Lehmann-Haupt's Non-Station

KLSD program, the indomitable disco-freak-jockey

Lord Byron Styrofoam himself, Sandy, broadcasting

over a microphone in a cabin and spinning them for

you—Cassady revved up so tight it's like mechanical

speed man sprocket—Mountain Girl ready—Hey,

Kesey!—Hermit grin— Page ablaze—men, women,

children, painted and in costume— ricochet around the

limelit dell—Argggggghhhhh—about 3 P.M. they started

hearing it.

It was like a locomotive about ten miles away. It

was the Hell's Angels in "running formation" coming

over the mountain on Harley-Davidson 74s. The Angels

were up there somewhere weaving down the curves on

Route 84, gearing down— thragggggggggh—and

winding up, and the locomotive sound got louder and

louder until you couldn't hear yourself talk any more or

Bob Dylan rheumy and—thraaaaaaaggggghhh—here

they came around the last curve, the Hell's Angels, with

the bikes, the beards, the long hair, the sleeveless

denim jackets with the death's head insignia and all the

rest, looking their most royal rotten, and then one by

one they came barreling in over the wooden bridge up

to the front of the house, skidding to a stop in

explosions of dust, and it was like a movie or

something—each one of the outlaws bouncing and

gunning across the bridge with his arms spread out in a

tough curve to the handlebars and then skidding to a

stop, one after another after another.

The Angels, for their part, didn't know what to

expect. Nobody had ever invited them anywhere before,

at least not as a gang. They weren't on many people's

invitation lists. They figured they would see what was

there and what it was all about, and they would

probably get in a hell of a fight before it was all over,

and heads would break, but that was about par for the

course anyway. The Angels always came into alien

situations black and wary, sniffing out the adversary,

but that didn't even register at this place. So many

people were already so high, on something, it

practically dissolved you on the spot. The Pranksters

had what looked like about a million doses of the

Angels' favorite drug—beer—and LSD for all who

wanted to try it. The beer made the Angels very happy

and the LSD made them strangely peaceful and

sometimes catatonic, in contrast to the Pranksters and

other intellectuals around, who soared on the stuff.

June the Goon gave a Hell's Angel named

Freewheeling Frank some LSD, which he thought was

some kind of souped-up speed or something—and he

had the most wondrous experience of his life. By

nightfall he had climbed a redwood and was nestled up

against a loudspeaker in a tree grooving off the sounds

and vibrations of Bob Dylan singing "The Subterranean

Homesick Blues."

Pete, the drag racer, from the San Francisco

Hell's Angels, grinned and rummaged through a beer

tub and said, "Man, this is nothing but a goddamn

wonderful scene. We didn't know what to expect when

we came, but it turned out just fine. This time it's all

ha-ha, not thump-thump." Soon the gorge was booming

with the Angels' distinctive good-time lots-a-beer belly

laugh, which goes: Haw!—Haw!—Haw!—Haw!—

Haw!— Haw!

Sandy Lehmann-Haupt, Lord Byron Styrofoam,

had hold of the microphone and his disco-freak-jockey

rapping blared out of the redwoods and back across the

highway: "This is Non-Station KLSD, 800 micrograms

in your head, the station designed to blow your mind

and undo your bind, from up here atop the redwoods on

Venus!" Then he went into a long talking blues song

about the Hell's Angels, about fifty stanzas worth,

some of it obscure acid talk, some of it wild legends,

about squashing turtles on the highway, nutty stuff like

that, and every stanza ending with the refrain:

Oh, but it's great to be an Angel,

And be dirty all the time!

What the hell—here was some wild-looking kid

with the temerity to broadcast out over the highways of

California that Angels | were dirty all the time—but

how the hell could you resist, it was too freaking madly

manic—and pretty soon the Angels and everybody else

were joining in the chorus:

Oh, but it's great to be an Angel,

And be dirty all the time!

Then Allen Ginsberg was in front of the

microphone with finger cymbals on each hand, dancing

around with a beard down to his belly and chanting

Hindu chants into the microphone booming out over

California, U.S.A., Hare Krishna hare Krishna hare

Krishna hare krishna—what the mollyfock is hairy

krishna—who is this hairy freak—but you can't help

yourself, you got to groove with this cat in spite of

yourself. Ginsberg really bowled the Angels over. He

was a lot of things the Angels hated, a Jew, an intellec-

tual, a New Yorker, but he was too much, the greatest

straightest unstraight guy they ever met.

And be dirty all the time!

The filthy kooks—by nightfall the cops were

lined up along the highway, car after car, just across

the creek, outside the gate, wondering what the fock.

The scene was really getting weird. The Pranksters had

everything in their electronic arsenal going, rock 'n'

roll blazing through the treetops, light projections

streaming through the gorge, Station KLSD blazing and

screaming over the cops' heads, people in Day-Glo

regalia blazing and lurching in the gloom, the Angels

going Haw—Haw—Haw— Haw, Cassady down to just

his hell of a build, nothing else, just his hell of a build,

jerking his arms out and sprocketing around under a

spotlight on the porch of the log manse, flailing a beer

bottle around in one hand and shaking his other one at

the cops:

"You sneaky motherfuckers! What the fuck's

wrong with you! Come on over here and see what you

get... goddamn your shit-filled souls anyway!"—

laughing and jerking and sprocketing—"Don't fuck with

me, you sons of shit-lovers. Come on over. You'll get

every fucking thing you deserve."

The hell of it, men, is here is a huge obscene clot

of degradation, depradation and derogation proceeding

loose and crazed on the hoof before our very eyes,

complete with the very Hell's Angels, and there is

nothing we can do but contain it. Technically, they

might have been able to move in on the grounds of

Cassady's exposing himself or something of the sort,

but no real laws were being broken, except every law of

God and man—but sheer containment was looking like

the best policy. Moving in on those crazies even with

ten carloads of armed cops for a misdemeanor like lewd

display—the explosion was too grotesque to think of.

And the cops' turret lights revolved and splashed

against the dirt cliff in a red strobe light effect and

their car-to-headquarters radios were wide open and

cracking out with sulphurous 220-volt electric thorn

baritones and staticky sibilants—He-e-e-ey Mis-ter

Tam-bou-rine Man—just to render the La Honda gorge

totally delirious.

Meanwhile, the Angels were discovering the

goddamnedest thing. Usually, most places they headed

into on their runs, they tested people's cool. What are

you looking at, mother. As soon as the shock or naked

terror registered, they would be happy. Or if there was

no shock and terror but instead somebody tried some

brave little shove back, then it was time to break heads

and tear everybody a new asshole. But these

mollyfocking Pranksters were test-proof. The Angels

didn't know what permissive was until they got to

Kesey's. Go with the flow! The biggest baddest

toughest most awfulest-looking Hell's Angel of them

all was a big monster named Tiny. The second biggest

baddest toughest most-awfulest-looking Hell's Angel

was a big raw-boned guy named Buzzard, dark-looking,

with all this dark hair and a beard, all shaggy and

matted and his nose came out like a beak and his

Adam's apple hung down about a foot, and he was just

like an enormous buzzard. Tiny and Buzzard had a

thing of coming up to each other when they were

around non-Angels and sticking out their tongues and

then licking each other's tongues, a big sloppy lap it

up, just to shake up the squares, it really jolted them—

so they came up right in front of this tall broad of

Kesey's, Mountain Girl, and la-a-a-a-a-ap—and they

couldn't believe it. She just looked right at them and

grinned and exploded sunballs out of her eyes and

started laughing at them, Haw—Haw—Haw, as if to say

in plain language: What a bullshit thing. It was freak-

ing incredible. Then some of them passed a joint

around and they passed it to Mountain Girl and she

boomed out:

"Hell, no! What the hell you doing putting your

dirty mouth on this clean joint for! This is a clean joint

and you're putting your dirty mouths on it!" Nobody in

living memory had ever refused a toke from a joint

passed by Angels, at least not on grounds of sanitation,

except this crazy girl who was just bullshitting them

blind, and they loved it.

It even got to the point where Mountain Girl saw

Tiny heading into the mad bathroom with a couple of

beer cans like he is going to hole up in there and drink

a couple of cans in peace, but this is the bathroom all

the girls around here are using, and Mountain Girl yells

out to Sonny Barger, the maximum leader of the Hell's

Angels, "Hey, Sonny! Tell this big piece of trash to

stay out of our clean bathroom!"—in a bullshit tone, of

course—and Sonny picks it up, "Yeah, you big piece of

trash! Stay out of the clean bathroom! They don't want

you in there!"—and Tiny slinks out the door, outside,

in a bullshit slink, but he does it—

And that's it! It's happening. The Hell's Angels

are in our movie, we've got 'em in. Mountain Girl and a

lot of the Pranksters had hit on the perfect combination

with the Angels. They were friendly toward them,

maybe friendlier than anybody had been in their lives,

but they weren't craven about it, and they took no shit.

It was the perfect combination, but the Pranksters

didn't even have to think of it as a combination. They

just did their thing and that was the way it worked out.

All these principles they had been working on and

talking about in the isolation of La Honda—they

freaking well worked.

Go with the flow—and what a flow—these cats,

these Pranksters—at big routs like this the Angels often

had a second feature going entitled Who Gets

Fucked?—and it hadn't even gotten to that before some

blonde from out of town, one of the guests from way

out there, just one nice soft honey hormone squash, she

made it clear to three Angels that she was ready to go,

so they all trooped out to the backhouse and they had a

happy round out there. Pretty soon all the Angels knew

about the "new mamma" out in the backhouse and a lot

of them piled in there, hooking down beers, laughing,

taking their turns, making various critiques. The girl

had her red and white dress pushed up around her chest,

and two or three would be on her at once, between her

legs, sitting on her face in the sick ochre light of the

shack with much lapping and leering and bubbling and

gulping through furzes of pubic hair while sweat and

semen glistened on the highlights of her belly and

thighs and she twitched and moaned, not in protest,

however, in a kind of drunken bout of God knew what

and men with no pants on were standing around,

cheering, chiding, waiting for their turn, or their

second turn, or the third until she had been fenestrated

in various places at least fifty times. Some of the

Angels went out and got her ex-husband. He was

weaving and veering around, bombed, they led him in

there under glare and leer and lust musk suffocate the

rut hut they told him to go to it. All silent—shit, this is

going too far—but the girl rises up in a blear and asks

him to kiss her, which he does, glistening secretions,

then he lurches and mounts her and slides it in, and the

Angels cheer Haw Haw—

—but that is her movie, it truly is, and we have

gone with the flow.

So much beer—which is like an exotic binge for

the Pranksters, beer. Mountain Girl and Kesey are up in

the limelit bower and the full moon comes down

through the treetop silhouettes. They are just rapping in

the moonlight, and then Sandy wanders on up there and

sits with them, high on acid, and he looks down and the

floor of the forest is rippling with moonlight, the

ground shimmers and rolls like a stream in the magic

bower and they just sit there—a buzzard! Buzzard is

wandering up the slope toward them and there in the

moonlight in the dark in the magic bower he... is a

buzzard, the biggest ever made, the beak, the deathly

black, the dopply glottal neck, the shelled back and

dangling wings, stringy nodule legs—

Kaaawwwwwww!—and Kesey jumps up and starts

throwing his arms up at him, like the way you would

scare away a buzzard, and says,

"Aaaaagh! a buzzard! Hey! Get away, you're a

buzzard! Get this buzzard out of here!"

It's a bullshit gesture, of course—and Buzzard

laughs—Haw! Haw! Haw!—it is not real, but it is...

real, real buzzard, you can see the whole thing with

two minds—Kaw Kaw Kaaawwwww—and Buzzard

jumps and flaps his arms—and the whole ... connection,

the synch, between the name, the man, the bird, flows

together right there, and it doesn't matter whether he is

buzzard or man because it has all come together, and

they all see it...

They all see so much. Buzzard goes, and Sandy

goes, and Kesey and Mountain Girl are in the

moonlight ripply bower. By and by—where?—Kesey

and Mountain Girl—and so much flows together from

the lights and the delirium and the staticky sibilants

down below, so much is clear, so much flows in

Tightness, that night, under the full moon, up above the

flails and bellows down below—

* * *

THE HELL'S ANGELS PARTY WENT ON

FOR TWO DAYS AND THE cops never moved in.

Everybody, Angels and Pranksters, had a righteous time

and no heads were broken. There had been one gang-

bang, but the girl was a volunteer. It was her movie. In

fact, for the next six or seven weeks, it was one long

party with the Angels. The news spread around

intellectual-hip circles in the San Francisco-Berkeley

area like a legend. In these circles, anyway, it once and

for all put Kesey and the Pranksters up above the

category of just another weirdo intellectual group. They

had broken through the worst hangup that intellectuals

know—the real-life hangup. Intellectuals were always

hung up with the feeling that they weren't coming to

grips with real life. Real life belonged to all those

funky spades and prize fighters and bullfighters and

dock workers and grape pickers and wetbacks. Nos-

talgie de la boue. Well, the Hell's Angels were real

life. It didn't get any realer than that, and Kesey had

pulled it off. People from San Francisco and Berkeley

started coming by La Honda more than ever. It was

practically like an intellectual tourist attraction. Kesey

would talk about the Angels.

"I asked Sonny Barger how he picks new

members, new Angels, and he told me, 'We don't pick

'em. We recognize 'em.' "

And everybody grokked over that.

Likely as not, people would find Hell's Angels on

the place. The Angels were adding LSD to the already

elaborate list of highs and lows they liked, beer, wine,

marijuana, benzedrine, Seconal, Amytal, Nembutal,

Tuinal. Some of them had terrible bummers—bummer

was the Angels' term for a bad trip on a motorcycle and

very quickly it became the hip world's term for a bad

trip on LSD. The only bad moment at Kesey's came one

day when an Angel went berserk during the first rush of

the drug and tried to strangle his old lady on Kesey's

front steps. But he was too wasted at that point to

really do much.

So it was wonderful and marvelous, an unholy

alliance, the Merry Pranksters and the Hell's Angels,

and all hours of the day or night you could hear the

Hell's Angels gearing and winding down Route 84 to

Kesey's, and the people of La Honda felt like the

plague had come, and wasn't there anything that could

be done. More than one of the Pranksters had his

reservations, too. The Angels were like a time bomb.

So far, so good—one day the Angels even swept and

cleaned up the place—but they were capable of busting

loose into carnage at any moment. It brought the

adrenaline into your throat. The potential was there,

too, because if the truth were known, there were just a

few of the Pranksters who could really talk to the

Angels—chiefly Kesey and Mountain Girl. Mainly it

was Kesey. Kesey was the magnet and the strength, the

man in both worlds. The Angels respected him and they

weren't about to screw him around. He was one of the

coolest guys they had ever come across. One day,

finally, Kesey's cool came to the test with the Angels

and it was a strange moment.

Kesey and the Pranksters and the Angels had

taken to going out to the backhouse and sitting in a big

circle and doing the Prankster thing, a lot of rapping

back and forth and singing, high on grass, and you

never knew where it was going to go. Usually it went

great. The Angels took to the Prankster thing right

away. They seemed to have an immediate intuitive

grasp of where it was going, and one time Kesey started

playing a regular guitar and Babbs started playing a

four-string amplified guitar and Kesey got into a song,

off the top of his head, about "the vibrations," a bluesy

song, and the Angels joined in, and it got downright

religious in there for a while, with everybody singing,

"Oh, the vi-bra-tions ... Oh, the vi-bra-tions .. ."

And then Kesey and a few of the Pranksters and a

lot of the Angels, including Sonny Barger of the

Oakland Chapter, the maximum leader of all the

Angels, were sitting around in the backhouse passing

around joints and rapping. The subject was "people who

are bullshit."

There are certain people who are bullshit and you

can always recognize them, Kesey was saying, and the

Angels were nodding yeah, that certainly is right.

"Now you take—," said Kesey, mentioning one of

the Angels who was not present. "He's a bullshit

person."

A bullshit person—and man—

"Listen, Kesey," says Barger, 100 percent Hell's

Angel, "—is an Angel, and nobody—nobody—calls an

Angel a bullshit person."

—the freaking gauntlet is down. It's like forever

and every eye in the place pins on Kesey's face and you

can hear the blood squirt in your veins. But Kesey

doesn't even blink and his voice doesn't even change

one halftone, just the old Oregon drawl:

"But I know him, Sonny. If I didn't know him, I

wouldn't call him a bullshit person."

Yeah—we-e-e-elll—everybody, Angels and

Pranksters— well—Kesey knows him—there is nothing

to do but grok over this statement, and everybody sits

there, still, trying to grok over it, and after a second,

the moment where heads get broken and fire gets pissed

is over—We-e-ell, ye-ah—

Two or three days later it occurs to some of the

Pranksters that they still don't know what the hell

Kesey meant when he said that. He knows the guy. It

doesn't make any sense. It's a concept with no bottom

to it—but so what! At the moment he said it, it was the

one perfect thing he could have said. Kesey was so

totally into the moment, he could come up with it, he

could break up that old historic push me, shove you,

yeah-sez-who sequence and in an instant the moment,

that badass moment, was over.

THE PRANKSTERS GOT PRETTY CLOSE

TO SEVERAL OF THE Angels as individuals.

Particularly Gut and Freewheeling Frank and Terry the

Tramp. Every now and then somebody would take one

or another of the Angels up into the tree house and give

them a real initiation into psychedelics. They had a

huge supply of DMT. As somebody once put it, LSD is

a long strange journey; DMT is like being shot out of a

cannon. There in the tree house, amid the winking

googaws, they would give the Angels DMT, and

Mountain Girl saw some of them, like Freewheeling

Frank, after they came down. They would walk around

in no particular direction, listing slightly, the eyes

bugged wide open, glazed.

"They were as naked as an Angel is ever gonna

git," she told Kesey.

chapter

XIV

A Miracle in

Seven Days

Oh, the vi-bra-tions...

Oh, the Unitarians ...

Apostate seminarians.. .

Grok the groovy

Pranksters and Hell's Angels...

Whose Angels?—

Why the consternation?

Arise ye antediluvians,

Groove on

The Pranksters and Hell's Angels ...

Noah's destination

Is where it's at:

Now showing at the Mount Ararat,

Apis the Bull in Après le déluge,

Groovy movie with a thousand castoffs:

Whose Angels?—

Hell's Angels...

Dear Lord, prepare to blast off

Into the Angel blue.

Oh, the vi-bra-tions ...

Among those who began to wonder about the

mysteries of La Honda

Were some Unitarian ministers known as the

Young Turks;

Bob Kimball, Dick Weston and Paul Sawyer said

freak our cerebral cloisters and

Emerge! See how the alleged grass-smoking

Kesey's magic works.

The Young Turks saw Unitarians becoming

ghostly seminarians,

Desiccated Kantians cut off from Early

Christianity.

Oh, a century ago we were the vangard, routing

the redneck blackguards

Of Fundamentalism—and today?—the Youth

yawn at our inanity.

Oh, the vi-bra-tions...

Oh, the Unitarians...

Apostate seminarians...

Grok the groovy

Pranksters and Hell's Angels...

Whose Angels?—

Sawyer found our Day-Glo heroes on the beach at

Pescadero

One sunny afternoon with Allen Ginsberg in his

finest bearded form.

The scene was charged with energy, yet there

was a weird serenity

Even when the Hell's Angels pulled in, ran\ but

most righteously warm.

Now, Sawyer had his teenage daughter along and

she feared something might... go wrong.

When Kesey said, On the bus! she said, "Daddy,

I... don't want to go."

So his daughter stayed behind, but Sawyer was

determined to find

The secret of this vibrant communion: Angel

Black & Prankster Day-Glo.

Oh, the vi-bra-tions. ..

Oh, the Unitarians...

Apostate seminarians ...

Grok the groovy

Pranksters and Hell's Angels ...

Whose Angels?—

Onto the bus! and it was so fine, with Angels

hooking down great jugs of wine

And grooving on the sunlit ocean like euphoric

Nature freaks,

Passing joints and Haw!—Haw!—Hawing! but

coursing through their raucous bawling—

A precognitive Early Churchly Gnostic note:

Ecstatic Peace!

Kesey knows precisely what he's about! No

motorcycle beatnik rout

But a trip more vital than all the Kantian prattle

in the world.

He has reached the unreachable! Taught and

learned from the unteachable!

The Young Turks owed it to the Church to give

the Prankster trip a whirl.

Oh, the vi-bra-tions...

Oh, the Unitarians ...

Apostate seminarians...

Grok the groovy

Pranksters and Hell's Angels...

Whose Angels?—

Why the consternation?

Arise ye antediluvians,

Groove on

The Pranksters and Hell's Angels ...

Noah's destination

Is where it's at:

Now showing at the Mount Ararat,

Apis the Bull in Après le déluge,

Groovy movie with a thousand castoffs:

Whose Angels?—

Hell's Angels ...

Dear Lord, prepare to blast off

Into the Angel blue.

Oh, the vi-bra-tions...

So Kesey was invited to come take part in the

annual California Unitarian Church conference at

Asilomar, beautiful state park by the sea in Monterey.

The theme this year was: "Shaking the Foundations."

The fact that Kesey had lately been arrested on a

narcotics charge couldn't have mattered less to the

Unitarians assembled on the greeny glades of Asilomar

by the sea, not even the older ones. The Unitarians had

a long tradition of liberalism in such matters and, in

fact, were in the vanguard of the civil-rights movement

in California. There was a good deal of civil disobedi-

ence and scrapes with the police in that fight; yes, sir.

But this ...

... this... The Unitarians were assembled there in

Intellectual Sport Shirt multitudes—intellectuals

Roughing-it, you understand, in short-sleeved sport

shirts and casual Stretcheez trousers with roomy

bottoms and waists up about the rib cage, drawing,

casually, on pipes. And here came Kesey. But not

alone, it so happened. He arrived on the bus, in a blur

of Day-Glo swirls, with Pranksters in costume flapping

out of every portal. Among the middle-aged Unitarians,

ministers and laymen, tamping down their pipes for a

nice relaxed Sport Shirt week, there was consternation

written on practically every face as they watched the

bizarre vehicle pitching and rolling into the camp

grounds. Things were ... up tight from the moment they

got there.

I guess this is kind of rubbing their noses in it,

thought Kesey. The Unitarians are people who stand up

for the right to dissent and nonconformity and a lot of

other good things, and we're rubbing their noses in it—

a bunch of dope fiends, a couple of ex-convicts, one ho-

mosexual, men and women living on a bus .. .

But the Unitarian ... Youth, the teenagers weren't

up tight at all. They flocked around the bus as soon as

it got there. Which only wound their parents up tighter,

of course. By nightfall the Unitarian Church in

California was divided into two camps: on the bus and

off the bus.

Kesey's very first appearance on the rostrum got

three-fourths of the Sport Shirts so up tight, the

conference was ready to fly apart. The main programs

were held in a rustic summer-theater-type building on

the camp grounds. Kesey appeared at the rostrum in a

glowing Yin-Yang jacket. It was an iridescent jacket

with a huge Yin-Yang symbol painted on the back in

red, white, and blue.

"We're going to be here seven days," said Kesey,

"so we're going to try to work a miracle in seven

days—"

—and not by talking about it, bub, but by doing

it, all of us together, and not by me talking at you,

either, but by all of us doing our thing out front and

wailing with it.

Many of the women at the conference began to

look, rapt, at this rugged, virile man of action who now

manned the pulpit. The Sports Shirts did not fail to take

note of that rapt gleam on their chops, either.

Paul Sawyer, in the front row, was aware of the

tension building up; but so far, all to the good. "Shake

the Foundations" was the name of the conference, and

so let it be. Sawyer was sitting next to Mountain Girl.

What an amazing creature!—sitting next to him here in

a vast purple robe. By a remarkable coincidence—

coincidence?—she had been brought up as a Unitarian

herself and had been a member of the real hope of the

church, the LRY, the Liberal Religious Youth. And

now—but had she really strayed far from what the LRY

ought to be? It was debatable ...

Onstage, Kesey, not talking in any formal way,

more like performing, working magic—telling of the

kind of symbols we use and the games we're in, and

how you can't really know what an emotion is until

you've experienced both sides of it, whereupon he

seizes the big American flag up on the stage and steps

on it, grinds it into the floor—

—huge gasp from the crowd, many of whom are

teenagers—

Sawyer is already into the thing, and he sees

what Kesey is trying to do—don't just describe an

emotion, but arouse it, make them experience it, by

manipulating the symbol of the emotion, and sometimes

we have to come into awareness through the back door.

Sawyer hears sobs, wheels around in his seat, sees a

group of teenagers behind him, from Salt Lake City,

looks into their faces, reads the horror that fills them—

The Flag!—then feels the manic energy from the crazed

thing that has been packed into these children even at

this age like a time warp vibration from the Salem

witch hysteria, the primordial cry of Die, Infidel—and

yet he can't leave them with that. So he rises up and

faces the crowd and says,

—Now wait a minute. That flag is a symbol we

attach our emotions to, but it isn't the emotion itself

and it isn't the thing we really care about. Sometimes

we don't even realize what we really care about,

because we get so distracted by the symbols. I re-

member when I was at school, we used to sing America

the Beautiful and somebody would walk down the aisle

carrying the flag. I always wanted to be the one who

carried the flag down the aisle but I never was. Now,

what was I really feeling? Patriotism? Or was it—

But he doesn't get to finish. A voice cries: "Do

it!"

—what?

"Do it!" It's Mountain Girl, beaming at him from

her folds of purple, quite delighted with the turn of

events.

Before he knows it, he is leading them all in the

singing of America the Beautiful, and O beau-ti-ful for

spa-cious skies rings out in the hall—as he holds the

flag staunchly in his hands and marches up the aisle

and then down the aisle, signifying—what? Ne'mind!

But exactly! Don't explain it. Do it!

LIKE MOST CONFERENCES, THIS ONE

HAD A CAREFULLY prepared and printed

schedule of meals, talks, seminars, group activities.

The Pranksters made a good quick hash of that. They

had no schedule and intimated nobody else should,

either. The Sport Shirts would have a big seminar

planned to capture the imagination of the Youth—

something on the order of Student Rebellion in an Age

of Mediocrity: Challenge and Responsibility—only at

the appointed hour the Youth, the student rebels in an

age of mediocrity, would be down by the beach, down

around the damnable bus, where the Pranksters had

their own program, and no schedule, friends and

neighbors, everything happens at the hour of Now and

all can join in the game of Power:::::

Somebody wins the Power and orders a game of

football to be played on the beach, only with the

Hermit as the football. Presently a whole group,

Pranksters, ministers, conferees, are picking up the

giggling Hermit and handing him off like a quarterback

would and scrambling for him like a loose football, and

so on. But soon the grief of it—allegory!—begins to

sink in, this making of a human being a counter in the

power game, always the weakest... Ahhh! One of the

young ministers, one of the Young Turks, now has the

power, and he orders that all go into the surf of the

Pacific and wash one another's feet. Ritual of humility,

allegory of life, but not a word of explanation need be

spoken, and they all just sit down in the surf and wash

one another's feet, and the Hermit's most meticulously,

and the Pranksters really groove with this. They think

this is great. And the kids now look at the Young Turk

whose inspiration it was in a new light. He has made it.

The Pranksters approve of him!

The Young Turks spent more and more time with

the Pranksters, late into the night, while the music

played on the bus, and the Pranksters brought huge

strands of kelp out of the ocean and flailed it about and

beat the sides of the bus with it, like a huge drum, and

played the Power game and took the Now Trip and

played the non-games of life, and kept rapping away,

but more than rapping, being, being alive—the Young

Turks were truly on the bus. From the lack of sleep and

the pace and weird shaking of the foundations, they

began to feel the mysto thing most profoundly.

Paul Sawyer was walking back to go to bed about

7 A.M. one morning after an all-night stand with the

Pranksters when he was met by a delegation of

conference officials. They wanted to have it out. They

wanted to ask Kesey and the Pranksters to leave. Kesey

might be sincere, they said, and he might not. But in

any case he was disrupting the conference and causing

a schism in the conferees, and setting an atrocious

example for the Youth. It seemed that Dr. —, one of

the Church's greatest liberals and a leader in the civil-

rights movement, had already left the conference in

protest and taken a couple of other ministers with him.

—Wait a minute, says Sawyer. We called this

conference to shake the foundations. And, well, now

they are beginning to shake, and it's time to see

whether we have the courage of our convictions.

—Well, yes, Paul, but there are these things they

are doing, and the park officials are quite upset. First

of all, there is a very strong suspicion that they are

indulging in marijuana. There is a very peculiar smell

around that bus. But let us leave that aside. In any case,

the bus is a very definite health nuisance, all those

people living together on that bus by the side of the

water. It isn't sanitary. But let us leave that aside, too.

There is also the incident of the shower room. Park

personnel caught two of these. . . Pranksters taking a

shower together, a man and a woman, in the men's

shower room. Now we might overlook that sort of

thing, but what kind of an example is that for the young

people? And this one they call Mountain Girl. Every

time she sees Dr. George Washington Henry, who is

after all one of our most distinguished Negro ministers

and thinkers, she yells out, "Watermelon Henry!"

—Watermelon Henry?

—Yes, it seems she saw him eating a watermelon

the other day, and "enjoying it," as she insists on

saying, and so now, every time she sees him, she sings

out, "Watermelon Henry!" And you know the kind of

voice she has. I suppose that's "bringing it all out

front," or whatever they call it—but really—

Watermelon Henry—

The upshot is, they want to throw the whole

bunch out. But Sawyer holds his ground and says that if

Kesey and the Pranksters are expelled, he is leaving

too. This posed the possibility of a walkout of the

Young Turks, which might create an even worse

schism. So the elders agreed to ride it out.

—We think you're making a mistake, Paul, Kesey

is manipulating this conference.

KESEY WAS, IN FACT, NOW

TREMENDOUSLY INTERESTED IN THE whole

phenomenon of. . . Control. He had discovered that the

Pranksters had been able to control the flow of the

conference, not by any Machiavellian planning, but

simply by drawing the conference into their movie. The

conference was on a schedule, but the Pranksters

always arrived .. . Now, and in no time at all everyone

had become a player in their movie. Kesey began to

hold daily briefings for the Pranksters.

—From now on, he's saying, we've got to stick to

the same costume every day. Every Prankster's got to

have a clear identity to everybody here, so that

everywhere you go and they see you, you're on, it turns

them on to your thing, the thing you're doing.

Kesey has on the Yin-Yang jacket. Mountain Girl

has on the purple robe. Babbs has on an incredible pair

of pants of many-colored stripes, made by Gretch. And

so forth.

Mountain Girl objects.

—I think we ought to forgit our own identity and

the costumes and just do our thing and keep it open.

—That's right, but that won't do any good if they

don't have a clear idea of what our thing is.

So they stuck to the costumes and it worked.

Hour by hour it became clear that the Pranksters were

on to a secret of... Control, in each and every situation.

Kesey's sense of timing was perfect. By Friday,

Kesey had done a lot of talking, on stage, off stage,

down by the bus, and things had gotten to the point

where people might start saying, well, for a guy who

says talking won't get the job done, he has done an aw-

ful lot of talking. Kesey emerged from the bus that

afternoon with a huge swath of adhesive tape plastered

across his mouth. He went around the whole day like

that, silent, plastered over, as if to say, I'm through

talking.

All the kids at Asilomar thought this was great,

too. More and more of them were hanging around the

bus, while the Pranksters flung kelp about and played

like very children themselves. Nighttime and one girl

really feels into the thing, and she wants nothing more

in this world than to go on an acid trip with the

Pranksters. She has never taken acid before. So they

give her some and a group of them take acid, down by

the bus, by the ocean, and christ, she starts freaking

out. She starts wailing away. That's all they need. This

one thing could wreck everything they've done. So

Kesey quick says give her total Attention. So they

gather around her, all the Pranksters, and bathe her in

love and Attention and she breaks through the freakout,

comes through the other side and starts grooving on it,

and it's beautiful. It's like all the Pranksters' theories

and professed beliefs have been put to a test in the

outside world, away from La Honda, and they're

working now, and they have ... Control.

ON THE LAST DAY, SUNDAY, THE KIDS AT

THE CONFERENCE PUT on a show, apparently a

tradition at the conference. But this show is all about

the Pranksters. They have a kid impersonating prac-

tically every Prankster. The best one they did was the

Hermit, scuttling and sniggling and giggling around.

But they also did Kesey and Babbs and some others.

The grand finale of the show was a musical number,

"Kelp I Need Somebody!", sung to the tune of the

Beatles' song "Help!"

The Sports Shirts looked and endured. They had

ridden it out and at least they had avoided a schism. Or

had they? Hmmm-mmm....

Paul Sawyer looked at Kesey ... and he saw a

prophetic figure. He had not taught or preached.

Rather, he had created ... an experience, an awareness

that flashed deeper than cerebration. Somehow he was

in the tradition of the great prophets. The modern world

knows prophets only in the stiff, reverent language of

the texts and scholarly limnings of various religions.

Somehow Kesey had created the prophetic aura itself,

and through the Pranksters many people at the

conference had not observed but experienced mystic

brotherhood, albeit ever so bizarre ... a miracle in

seven days.

THE FOLLOWING YEAR THERE WERE TWO

CONFERENCES OF THE Unitarian Church. One, as

always, was at Asilomar. And the Sport Shirts were

there, as always. The other was in the High Sierras.

The Young Turks held their own conference, in the

High Sierras, up in the thin air. Somehow it wasn't

quite what they expected, however. A certain psychic

decibel level was lacking. Nevertheless, the age of

bullshit was over. They were on the bus for good. The

next year Sawyer spent a month living in Haight-

Ashbury, to explore the possibilities of a new kind of

ministry for the young people; on the bus, as it were.

OH, THE VI-BRA-TIONS . . .

IT SO HAPPENED THAT ONE OF THE

FEMALE DELEGATES TO THE Unitarian conference

at Asilomar had her own little résumé of the conference

printed up, and she mailed it out. The Pranksters read it

out loud in the living room at Kesey's:

"So the Prophet Kesey came before us"—and did

such and such.

"And the Prophet Kesey said"—this and that.

"And the Prophet Kesey made a sign"—

signifying Christ knows what.

"And it was good, for as the Prophet Kesey

says"—

—repeating this phrase, the Prophet Kesey, and

adorning it with all the biblical rhetoric—only she was

serious! straight! rapt! a true believer! and probably

thought the Prophet Kesey would beam when he saw it.

So the Pranksters all look at Kesey. He has his

head down and he says in a melancholy way:

"We're not on the Christ Trip. That's been done,

and it doesn't work. You prove your point, and then you

have 2,000 years of war. We know where that trip

goes."

All the same, it was a sensitive moment. The old

girl had tried to put it all into so many words—Kesey's

role and the whole direction the Pranksters were taking.

All the Pranksters—we're on some kind of trip, Christ

knows. They all had religion, all right. It was ... like

the whole Prankster thing was now building up some

kind of conclusion, some ... ascension, and no one

could give it a right name and still be called sane. A

great burning column, reaching about the western

horizon, perhaps .. .

Kesey himself was like someone possessed. The

goddamn scene here is enough to drive anybody off the

freaking platter. It's getting like a circus, every freak in

California now showing up, heads, bums, students,

raggy little girls come looking for excitement, looking

to get spaced out on LSD or for Christ knows what

reason. Even spades turning up, like Heavy, who rises

up in the woods in the middle of the night among the

tents croaking like a bullfrog: Have no worry, have no

fear, hash-smokin' Heavy's here. ..

It's even gotten to Babbs, this motley collection.

"This is a zoo!" he's saying to Kesey. "This is where

the love stuff gets you!

But Kesey says, "When you've got something like

we've got, you can't just sit on it. You've got to move

off of it. You can't just sit on it and possess it, you've

got to move off of it and give it to other people. It only

works if you bring other people into it."

So everybody who wanted could stay, Prankster

or not, and the more—who gives a shit. Kesey also had

his court appearances to contend with and more lying,

finking, framing, politicking by the constables than a

body could believe—he looked like he had aged ten

years in three months. He was now some indeterminate

age between thirty and forty. He was taking a lot of

speed and smoking a lot of grass. He looked haggard,

and when he looked haggard, his face seemed lopsided.

One day he came stumbling out of the backhouse and

Sandy saw him and one eye seemed to be aimed one

way and one the other, as if there had been a horrible

wrench . .. although the grim shit was beginning to hit

Sandy again, too ...

No turning back, man! We're on the space ship

now, fly by ... Control... and Attention . .. going with

the flow and we can't duck the weird shit, no matter

how weird it is. Kesey was doing some acid rapping,

taking 500, 1,000, 1,500 micrograms instead of the

normal 100 to 250. He had always been against that.

Acid rappers, freaks who made a competition out of

who could take the most acid—they all seemed to end

up loose in the head, that breed. But now it was as if no

experiment could be left undone.

One night Kesey took about 1,500 micrograms

and several other Pranksters took lesser doses and they

got down on the floor and started the Humanoid Radio.

They started babbling, going into echolalia, ululation,

all manner of nonverbal expression, talking in Tongues,

as it were. The idea was to try to hit that beam and that

mode that would enable you to communicate with

beings on other planets, other galaxies ... They were all

high as hell, of course, but one thought shot through

the manic dendrite raps like a subliminal legend: What

if—and you'll never know until you do it if you have the

POWER! THEY'RE SITTING AROUND A BIG ROUND

TABLE IN Kesey's living room. It is a big wooden table,

now covered with the carved initials and inscriptions of

Hell's Angels, "Ralph of Oakland," and so on, playing

the game of Power. Page Browning wins and he orders:

Now we all take DMT and hold hands, seated in a circle

around the table.

And rrrrrrrrrrush those fantastic neon bubbles

rushing up out of the heart square into the human

squash and bursting into—skull mirrors! out of

Nipponese kaleidoscope got it down Grant through a

door of tesselated straw over the carvings of the Hell's

Angels on the table here brought into The Movie

because now, Hondo, on the space craft you can deal

with anyone just imagine them into The Movie, get so

totally into the moment that whichever way you move

the entire moment moves with you, not causing, bub,

just flowing—Go with the flow—Go

OUTSIDE

Kesey hears a voice and it tells him to get up

from the table, and he does, and there are Page and

other Pranksters spaced out of their gourds and holding

hands and ... keening, with their eyes closed because

like with DMT opening your eyes doesn't change a

thing—those eyelid movies just keep on pouring out

into the living room and Kesey goes outside in the dark

in the cool of the redwood dell and now it—

I am the Ace and Faye is the Red Queen

WHUMP?

in a flash the water heater out back of the

house in the dark—meaning—if he gestures it will

BLOW UP

and he gestures and it is blown up, the heater,

demolished, a hell of a blast—the voice says

Go OUT UPON THE MAIN ROAD

and he goes out over the wooden bridge, out onto

Route 84 in the dark with only the smallest

blowwwwwwnnn glow from the house to be seen, and a

wind comes up. Weird shit, Major—the wind never

comes up in this gorge with all these hills and trees

around and strange the wind lifts under the thoracic

box and every convex leaf and the balloon canopy

cathedral bowers and now; he; is;

GOD

It is crazy and delirious and zonked out and real,

with half of the mesencephalon saying

You ARE HIGH

and the other half saying, Nevertheless

YOU ARE GOD

Car coming down the hill from La Honda around

the last bend on Route 84, the lights swooping over the

redwoods

THE ENEMY

heading straight for him at 50 miles an hour as he

balances tamping the earth with his feet on the very

center line. No undue cause for alarm and concern,

however. He has but to

GESTURE

the car slows down and creeps around him,

shuddering in the weird wind, trying to hold itself

together in the face of

This surge and he knows with absolute certainty

he has... all the Power in the world can do what he

wants with the Enemy in whatever form—he flings out

his arm

GESTURES

the car stops. The enemy peers out. At this point

he can do all

DESTROY

CREATE

GALVANIZE

CALL BACK

SEND FORTH

—has only to decide, with power too great to use

and too formidable to squander. He walks back over the

bridge to the house as the wind dies down. The skull

mirrors... ring—

Afterwards he knows it was the drug. And yet—

Walker had been driving up near Skylonda in that

selfsame moment and had suddenly felt a wind rise and

said, How very strange! Too much!

Oh yes, Major, it was the drug, you understand—

and yet—he was fully into the bare Halusion Gulp of

the moment out there and there ::::: was the Power and

the Call and this movie is big enough to include the

world, a cast of millions, the castoff billions .. .

Control Tower to Orbiter One

CONTROL

chapter

Cloud

A HULKING GREAT SIGN ON THE GATE OUT FRONT

THE MERRY PRANKSTERS WELCOME THE BEATLES

The Beatles were going to be at the Cow Palace

outside of San Francisco on the evening of September

2. The papers, the radio, the TV could talk of nothing

else. Kesey's idea, the current fantasy, is that after the

show the Beatles will come to La Honda for a good

freaking rout with the Merry Pranksters. Now as to how

this is to all come about...

But one has to admit the sign creates an effect.

THE MERRY PRANKSTERS WELCOME THE BEATLES

Out on Route 84, Mom&Dad&Buddy&Sis in their

Ocelot Rabies 400 hardtop sedans, they slow down and

stop and stare. The last sign, the one reading THE

MERRY PRANKSTERS WELCOME THE HELL'S ANGELS, for

that one they mainly just slowed down. After all, it

didn't say when. It might be 30 seconds from now—

hundreds of the beasts, coming 'round the mountain in a

shower of spirochetes and crab lice, spitting out bone

marrow from the last cannibal rape job up the road.

Well, it worked with the Hell's Angels. They put

up the sign THE MERRY PRANKSTERS WELCOME THE

HELL'S ANGELS, and sure enough the Angels came,

these unbelievable bogeymen for the middle class, in

the flesh, and they became part of the Prankster movie,

in the rich ripe cheesy Angel flesh. So they put up the

sign THE MERRY PRANKSTERS WELCOME THE BEATLES

and maybe the Beatles will come. There is this one

small difference of course. Kesey knew the Hell's

Angels. He invited them, face to face. Ah, but comes a

time to put a few professed beliefs to the test. Control,

Attention, Imagine the little freaks into the movie ...

Kesey raps on to Mountain Girl out in the

backhouse. They lie there on the mattresses, with

Kesey rapping on and on and Mountain Girl trying to

absorb it. Ever since Asilomar, Kesey has been deep

into the religion thing. Miracles—Control—Now— The

Movie—on and on he talks to Mountain Girl out in the

backhouse and very deep and far-out stuff it is, too.

Mountain Girl tries to concentrate, but the words swim

like great waves of. .. The words swim by and she hears

the sound but it is like her cerebral cortex is tuned out

to the content of it. Her mind keeps rolling and

spinning over another set of data, always the same.

Like—the eternal desperate calculation. In short,

Mountain Girl is pregnant.

And yet with all this desperation rolling and

spinning going on, something he says will catch hold.

They are that bizarre, but that plausible, Kesey's

dreams are. It's a matter of imagining them into the

movie. The Beatles. It is like an experiment in

everything the Pranksters have learned up to now. We

can't make the Beatles come out here to our place. We

can't cause them to do it in the usual sense. But we can

imagine them into the movie and work them into the

great flow of acausal connection and then it will

happen of its own accord. This sign starts the movie

going, THE MERRY PRANKSTERS WELCOME THE

BEATLES, and our movie becomes their movie, Mom's

and Dad's and Buddy's and Sis's and all the Berkeley

kids' and all the heads' and proto-heads' of the San

Francisco peninsula, until our fantasy becomes the

Beatles' fantasy ... Wonder when they will first feel

it... Despite the rolling and spinning and all, Mountain

Girl can't hardly help but marvel at the current fantasy

because there has already been so much ... weird shit...

that worked. Bringing the Angels in, like Kesey did,

the most feared demons in America . . . and finding

Good People like Buzzard and Sonny and Tiny and

Frank and Terry the Tramp, who Done Well, and

Beautiful People like Gut... And the poor tortured

intellectual angels at Asilomar, from Watermelon

Henry to freaking Rachel—for a week Kesey had

mystified, like mystified, and taken over the whole

Unitarian Church of California. They would never be

the same again, which was just as well. A true Miracle,

in fact, since they had been the same for so goddamn

long. Control :::: and it was so plausible, the way it

sounded in Kesey's certain Oregon drawl. So few

humans have the hubris to exert their wills upon the

flow, maybe not more than forty on the whole planet at

any given time. The world is flat, it is supported by

forty, or maybe four, men, one at each corner, like the

cosmic turtles and elephants in the mythology books,

because no one else dares. Mountain Girl is 18 and she

is pregnant, but this is Kesey ...

And Miracles? You haven't seen miracles yet,

Job, until you see the Pranksters draw the Beatles into

their movie.

SEPTEMBER 2. FAYE'S SEWING

MACHINE IS THE FIRST THING everyone hears

as they wake up. Faye and Gretch pull out the big

costume chest, full of all sorts of ungainly theatrical

shit, swash-buckle swords and plumed hats and Errol

Flynn dueling shirts and Robin Hood boots and quivers

and quail masks and Day-Glo roadworker vests and

sashes and medals and saris and sarongs and shades and

beaks and bells and steelworker hard hats and World

War I aviator helmets and Dr. Strange capes and

cutlasses and codpieces and jumpsuits and football

jerseys and aprons and ascots and wigs and warlock

rattles and Jungle Jim jodhpurs and Captain Easy

epaulets and Fearless Four tights—and Merry Prankster

Page Browning special face paints. The Merry

Pranksters are getting ready to head bombed out into

the mightiest crazed throng in San Francisco history,

come to see the Beatles at the Cow Palace.

One of the Pranksters' outer circle, so to speak, a

fellow called C——, from Palo Alto—C——had worked

out some kind of a deal and gotten thirty tickets to the

Beatles concert for the Pranksters, even though tickets

were supposed to be impossible to get. C—was one of

the Pranksters' acid sources. Another was an old guy

known as the Mad Chemist, an amateur chemistry

genius who was also a gun freak. Anyway, this C——

worked out some kind of a deal and he also got enough

acid for everybody for the trip. Just before the

Pranksters, inner and outer circle, and kids, climbed on

the bus, Kesey grinned and passed out the acid. It was

in capsules, but it was such high concentration it just

coated part of the inside of the capsules, so it looked

like there was nothing in there. The Pranksters called it

acid gas. So they all took acid gas and got on the bus.

Cassady was off somewhere, so Babbs drove. Kesey

was up on top of the bus, directing the movie. Well, it

was colorful enough, this movie. The bus was super-

rigged, all the sound equipment, two big speakers up

top, records and tapes, plus the whole Prankster band

up top of the bus, George Walker's drums, and basses

and guitars and trombones and plumes spilling out the

windows and flashes of Day-Glo and flapping epaulets,

freaking flashing epaulets, and the Beatles album from

the movie Help! screaming out the speakers, and up on

top, Kesey and Sandy, Mountain Girl, Walker, Zonker,

and a new Prankster, a little girl called Mary

Microgram, and guitars and drums—He-e-e-elp I ne-e-

e-e-ed somebody—the whole flapping yahooing

carnival of a bus bouncing and jouncing and grinding

up over Skylonda, Cahill Ridge, and down through Palo

Alto and out onto the Harbor Freeway heading toward

San Francisco, a goddamn rolling circus once again.

Everybody was getting kind of high on acid, wasted, in

fact, and starting, one by one, Mountain Girl and Sandy

and Norman, who was inside the bus, to have that thing

where the motion and the roar of the bus and the beat

of the music and the sound of it are all one thing

rolling together, and like Babbs is driving to the exact

tempo and speed of the Beatles music, since they are

all one thing together, growing high as baboons down

through the freaking motels and electric signs and gull

lights in Burlingame, near the airport, the Hyatt House

super-America motel spires aloft—pitching and rolling

and gunning along in exact time to the Beatles music,

that being the soundtrack of this movie, you

understand—and then off the expressway at the Cow

Palace exit and down the swerving—ne-e-e-ed some-

body—ramp, down an incline, down a hill, toward

dusk, with the fever millions of cars streaming south on

the freeway and the sun a low bomb over the hills,

zonked, in fact. And grinding down to the stop light,

thunk, and the brakes sound like a cast-iron flute A

below high C—and at that very moment, that very

moment of bus stop—the Beatles song Help! ends, in

that very moment, and weird music starts, from the part

of the movie Help! where the Arab is sneaking up

behind Ringo, and in that weird moment the wind rises

over the freeway and to the right there is an abandoned

factory, all brick and glass, mostly glass, great 1920s

factory glass panes and all of them bending weird in

the wind and flashing sheets of that huge afternoon sun

like a huge thousand-eyed thing pulsing explosions of

sunlight in exact time to the weird Arab music— and in

that very moment Kesey, Mountain Girl, Sandy,

Zonker, all of them—no one even has to look at another

because they not only know that everyone else is seeing

it at once, they feel, they feel it flowing through one

brain, Atman and Brahman, all one on the bus and all

one with the writhing mass sun reflector ripple sun

bomb prisms, the bricks, the glass, the whole hulk of it,

Pranksters and Beatles and sun bombs flashing Arab

music— and then in that very moment, they all, the all

in one, the one brain flow, see the mouldering sign

silhoutted against the sky above the building:

CLOUD

Suddenly it seemed like the Pranksters could

draw the whole universe into ... the movie ...

AND THEN, CURIOUSLY, BEING AS IT IS, SO

FREAKING HIGH OUT here—Mountain Girl thinks

what the fuck is this. It looks like a slaughterhouse. In

fact, it is the Cow Palace. She can't even focus on the

big hulking building itself for the miles and endless

rings of slaughterhouse fences around it, fences and

barbed wire and a million cars jamming in and being

jammed in in the cold fag end of the dusk. Curiously, it

isn't terrifying to Mountain Girl, however. It is just a

slaughterhouse, that's all.

But to other Pranksters—a concentration camp.

We're going to jail, for the rest of our lives only.

Everybody scrambling down off the bus, all still in

motion with the ground and the concentration-camp

fences flailing in the gruesome gloaming while billions

of teeny freaks rush by them, screaming and freaking.

They have their tickets in their hand like it is the last

corner of salvation extant but they can't even read the

mothers. They are wasted. The letters on the ticket

curdle and freak off into the teeny freak flow. Thirty

Pranksters in full flapping epaulets and plumes

desperately staring at the minute disappearing tickets in

their hands in the barby ante-pens of the concentration

camp. They are going to arrest us and lock us away for

the rest of our lives. That seems very certain, almost

like well, that's why we came. Thirty acid heads, with

innocent children in tow, in full Prankster regalia,

bombed out of their gourds on the dread LSD, veering,

careening in delirium sun pulse. In public, stoned out

of their skulls on LSD, not only in public but in this

momentous heaving Beatles throng amid 2,000 red dog

forensic cops, in full go-to-hell costume—exterminate

the monsters—

... but... no one lays a hand on them or says the

first word, thousands of cops and not even one hassle

... because we're too obvious. Suddenly it couldn't be

clearer to Norman. We're too obvious and we've blown

their brains. They can't focus on us— or—we've sucked

them into the movie and dissolved the bastids—

Inside the Cow Palace it is very roaring hell.

Somehow Kesey and Babbs lead the Day-Glo crazies up

to their seats. The Pranksters are sitting in a great

clump, a wacky perch up high in precipitous pitch high

up pitching down to the stage and millions of the

screaming teeny freaks. The teeny freaks, tens of thou-

sands of little girls, have gone raving mad already,

even though the Beatles have not come on. Other

groups, preliminaries, keep trooping on, And now—

Martha and the Vandellas and the electrified throb and

brang vibrates up your aorta and picks your bones like

a sonic cleaner, and the teeny freaks scream—great

sheets of scream like sheets of rain in a squall—and

kheew, Xheew, pow, pow, pow—how very marvelous,

how very clever, figures Norman. From up out of the

Cow Palace horde of sheet scream teeny freaks comes

this very marvelous clever light display, hundreds of

exploding lights throughout the high intensity lights,

ricocheting off everything, what a marvelous clever

thing they've rigged up here for our ...

—Mountain Girl smiles... the incredible

exploding lights explode out in front of her, a great sea

of them, and then they explode on her retina in great

sunburst retinal sulphur rockets, images and after-

images that she will never forget as long as she lives,

in truth—

... for our entertainment, and it is twenty or

thirty minutes before Norman, stoned, realizes that they

are flashbulbs, hundreds, thousands of teeny freaks

with flashbulb cameras, aimed at the stage or just shot

off in optic orgasm. Sheets of screams, rock 'n' roll,

blam blam, a sea of flashbulbs—perfect madness, of

course.

—Mountain Girl grins and takes it all in—

Other Pranksters, stoned, are slowly getting up

tight, however, including Kesey and Babbs. The

vibrations are very bad, a poison madness in the air—

Each group of musicians that goes off the stage—

the horde thinks now the Beatles, but the Beatles don't

come, some other group appears, and the sea of girls

gets more and more intense and impatient and the

screaming gets higher, and the thought slips into

Norman's flailing flash-frayed brain stem ::: the human

lung cannot go beyond this :::: and yet when the voice

says And now—the Beatles—what else could he say?—

and out they come on stage—them—John and George

and Ringo and uh the other one—it might as well have

been four imported vinyl dolls for all it was going to

matter—that sound he thinks cannot get higher, it

doubles, his eardrums ring like stamped metal with it

and suddenly Ghhhhhhwooooooooowwwwww, it is like

the whole thing has snapped, and the whole front

section of the arena becomes a writhing, seething ¡mass

of little girls waving their arms in the air, this mass of

pink arms, it is all you can see, it is like a single colo-

nial animal with a thousand waving pink tentacles—it

is a single colonial animal with a thousand waving pink

tentacles,

—vibrating poison madness and filling the

universe with the teeny agony torn out of them. It

dawns on Kesey: it is one being. They have all been

transformed into one being.

—Mountain Girl grins and urges them on—its

scream does not subside for a moment, during after or

between numbers, the Beatles could be miming it for

all it matters. But something else ... does. .. matter ...

and Kesey sees it. One of the Beatles, John, George,

Paul, dips his long electric guitar handle in one

direction and the whole teeny horde ripples precisely

along the line of energy he set off—and then in the

other direction, precisely along that line. It causes them

to grin, John and Paul and George and Ringo, rippling

the poor huge freaked teeny beast this way and that—

Control—it is perfectly obvious—they have

brought this whole mass of human beings to the point

where they are one, out of their skulls, one psyche, and

they have utter control over them—but they don't know

what in the hell to do with it, they haven't the first

idea, and they will lose it. In Kesey the vibration is an

awful anticipation of the snap—

Ghhhhhwooooooooowwwww, thousands of teeny

bodies hurtling toward the stage and a fence there and a

solid line of cops, fighting to hurl the assault back,

while the Beatles keep moving their chops and

switching their hips around sunk like a dumb show

under the universal scream. In that surge, just when

you would have thought not another sound in the

universe could break through, it starts—thwaaaac\—

thwaaaac\—the sound of the folding chairs on the arena

floor collapsing and smashing down on the floor, and

the remains are down there amid the pink tentacles,

crushed to a pulp, little bits and splinters that used to

be folding chairs, debris being passed out from hand to

hand traveling over the pink tentacles from one to the

other like some hideously diseased lurching monster

cockroaches. And then the girls start fainting, like

suffocation, and getting tromped on, and they start

handing out their bodies, cockroach chair debris and

the bodies of little teeny freaks being shuttled out over

the pitched sea like squashed lice picked off the beast,

screaming and fainting and Ghhhhhwooooowwwwww

again up against the cop fence while the Beatles cheese

and mince at them in the dumb show, utterly helpless to

ripple them or anything else now, with no control left—

CANCER—Kesey has only to look and it is

perfectly obvious—all of them, the teeny freaks and the

Beatles, are one creature, caught in a state of sheer

poison mad cancer. The Beatles are the creature's head.

The teeny freaks are the body. But the head has lost

control of the body and the body rebels and goes amok

and that is what cancer is. The vibrations of it hit the

Pranksters, in a clump, stoned out of their gourds, in

sickening waves. Kesey—Babbs—they all feel it at

once, and Norman.

—Mountain Girl looks very surprised. She wants

to see the rest of it. But Kesey and Babbs have decided

they should all leave—before the Monster Snap occurs,

the big cancer wrap-up of the whole process.

—Wait a minute, says Mountain Girl.

But the Pranksters get up in a clump and a rustle

of plumes and epaulets and Day-Glo, zonked out of

their heads on acid, and all sorts of people start getting

up—but like, concrete. The more headway they make

toward the exits, the more it becomes a claustrophobia

of pens, an endless series of pens. They head down

long corridors, all concrete, and already hundreds are

jammed in the corridors, all looking kind of raggy—

because— They get the total vibration from them—

everybody has the one same feeling: suppose this thing

snaps now and there is panic and everybody makes a

rush for it, the exit, but there is no exit, only concrete

walls and concrete ceilings weighing down like a thou-

sand tons and ramps—toward nothing—leading down—

then up in a great clump of hump—and then down,

outside, there is the sky, but it is black, it is nighttime

by now and sick ochre floodlights, but they have

merely made it to another pen, more Cyclone fences

and barbed wire with frantic raggy people—all

fleeing—milling around in it like rats, trying to get to

the exit, which is a turnstile, an upright turnstile with

bars, like an iron maiden, and you have to get inside of

it, totally, one person at a time, with a frantic crush on

both sides, and even then you have only made it to

another pen, a parking lot, with more Cyclone fence

and barbed wire and now teeny freaks and cars crushed

in here, all trying to get out, seven and eight cars at a

whack trying to nose through an opening big enough

for one. Cages, cages, cages and no end to it. Even out

there, beyond, where cars have escaped and they are in

a line with their lights on—trapped by the hills, which

are another great pen trapping the whole place in ... in

... The Pranksters all silent and numb with the appre-

hension of the Great Cancer Snap to come—

—Except that Mountain Girl says Wait a

minute—

—and Zonker, with his huge euphoric Zonker

grin on, fraternizing madly with all teeny freaks as they

stream out, saying to all who listen: "The Beatles are

going to Kesey's when they leave here . . . the Beatles

are going to Kesey's . . ." and the word spreads among

the crowd in the most delirious way—

Kesey plunges back in for survivors. See if there

are any Pranksters trapped inside. He tells the rest to

go to the bus and stay there, and he plunges in. The

Pranksters touch the bus and their morale revives a bit.

They rev up the amplifiers and the speakers and climb

up on top in their crazy costumes and start idling over

the drums and the electric guitars. The thousands of

little raggy girls keep pouring out into the parking lot,

still wound up like a motorcycle and no release and of

course they see the bus and these strange Day-Glo

people. One group of kids is protesting that the music

business is rigged and they're carrying placards and

screaming and they figure the Pranksters support

them—the Pranksters grin and wave back—everybody

figures the strange Day-Glo people are for whatever

they're for. They start piling around the bus, these little

teeny freaks, and start pelting it with jelly beans, the

hard kind, the kind they brought to throw at the

Beatles. The Pranksters sit on top of the bus with the

jelly beans clattering off the side and the flaming little

teeny freaks pressed around screaming—So this is what

the Beatles feel, this mindless amok energy surging at

them for—what?

At last Kesey returns with the last to be rescued,

Mary Microgram, looking like a countryside after a

long and fierce war, and Kesey says let's haul ass out

of here. Babbs starts the bus up and they pull out,

bulling their way slowly out toward freedom.

Cancer! We saw it. It was there. Bad vibrations,

say all. Endless cages. They all rock and sway, stoned

on acid.

"Hell," thinks Mountain Girl. "I have to come

here with a bunch of old men who never saw a rock 'n'

roll show before."

ON THE WAY BACK THEY PUT THE

BEATLES TAPE ON AGAIN, from Help! but it

was no use. They were all too dispirited. Except for

Mountain Girl and Zonker. Mountain Girl said she'd

wanted to stay and see the rest of the show. Well—what

the hell. Zonker was smiling about the Beatles coming.

Well—that was what he had told the whole world

anyway. And where the hell else would they go from

there? In fact, the current fantasy—the imminent

arrival of the Beatles—had hardly crossed anybody's

mind for the last hour, not even Kesey's. Get the hell

out of there, that was the main thing. Where were the

Beatles? Who the hell knew. The little vinyl dolls had

probably cheesed and minced off into a time warp. ...

In any case, it wasn't very hulking likely they were

coming to La Honda.

Finally the bus comes grinding around the last

curve round the mountain, up to Kesey's place, and the

bus noses across the bridge and the headlights hit the

yard—and the sight is gruesome and comical at the

same time. It is like a super version of the nightmare of

the man who just wants to go home and go to bed. The

Pranksters have guests. In fact, they have three or four

hundred guests. They are all jammed into the big yard

between the main house and the backhouse, with big

bitter lollipop eyes. It's like every head, freak, boho,

and weirdo in the West has assembled in one spot, the

first freakout, with a couple of hundred teeny freaks

thrown in for good measure. Half of them are hunkered

down with their big lollipop eyes turned up like

somebody spit them up against the house and they slid

down to the ground like slugs. Naturally they all came

for the big beano with the Beatles. The party. Zonker

did his work in the highest Prankster tradition. The

sign still hangs on the gate:

THE MERRY PRANKSTERS WELCOME THE BEATLES

Kesey is not in the mood for a goddamned thing

and heads into the house. The whole head-freak-boho-

slug mob stares at him, all these lollipop eyes, as if he

is going to produce the Beatles from out of a sleeve.

Then they start grumbling, like a bunch of prisoners

who haven't been fed but don't know whether this is the

time for the slave revolt or not. It is a debacle, except

that it is so damned comical. The look on their faces.

That, and the appearance of Owsley.

A COCKY LITTLE GUY, SHORT, WITH DARK

HAIR, DRESSED LIKE an acid head, the usual boho

gear, but with a strange wound-up nasal voice, like a

head with the instincts of a roller-skating rink

promoter—this little character materializes in front of

Kesey from out of the boho-slub multitudes and

announces:

"I'm Owsley."

Kesey doesn't say Hi, I'm Kesey. He just looks at

him, as if to say, all right, you're Owsley and you're

here—and then what?

Owsley looks stunned—I'm Owsley. In fact,

Kesey never heard of him. It was like, if Owsley

suddenly found himself in a place where nobody ever

heard of him, he didn't know what to do. He and Kesey

are just standing there trading eyeballs until finally

Owsley produces a little bag he has and opens it and it

is full of capsules of acid. He's Owsley, the greatest

LSD manufacturer in the world, which turns out to be

just about right, the Sandoz Chemical Corporation

included.

Mountain Girl looks and just smiles. Everything

gets funnier and funnier on the Beatles patrol ! He's got

his little bag of acid. Mountain Girl figures him for a

wiseacre right away. Kesey looks at the bagful of acid.

One thing the little wiseacre's got is acid.

The world's greatest acid manufacturer, bar none,

standing out in the dark in the middle of nowhere amid

the boho-slug multitudes under the shadowy redwoods.

By and by they had most of the boho-slubs off

the place and sliding up the highway in the dark

looking for christ knows what, seeing as how the

Beatles never made it. Kesey and Owsley and the

Pranksters sat down around a fire out by the big stump.

And who the hell shows up but the Mad Chemist. He

and Owsley start sniffing and eyeing each other. It's

like the slick sharp young neurological doctor genius

from out of the Mayo Clinic face to face with the old

blowsy homey country doctor—on the most puzzling

and difficult case in the history of medicine. Owsley

and the Mad Chemist start arguing over drugs. It's like

a debate. All of the Pranksters, even Kesey, keep out of

it and the two of them start hammering away. Let the

little wiseacre have it, Mad Chemist, Mountain Girl

keeps thinking and most of the Pranksters feel the same

way. But Owsley, the little wiseacre, is tearing him up.

Owsley is young and sharp and quick and the Mad

Chemist—the Mad Chemist is an old man and he has

taken too much dope. He's loose in the head. He tries to

argue and his brains all run together like goo. Owsley,

the Pranksters figure—well, maybe he never even took

acid himself. Or maybe he took it once. It is just

something they sense. And the poor old Mad Chemist,

he has taken so much dope—caressing his guns and

hooking down dope—he is loose in the head, and

Owsley just tears him up. The Mad Chemist is getting

crushed. The Mad Chemist never came around again but

once or twice, it was all so humiliating. So the

Pranksters had this little wiseacre Owsley on their

hands whether they liked it or not. But he did make

righteous acid and he had money. Between the two of

them, Owsley and the Pranksters, they were about to

put LSD all over the face of the globe.

Little by little, Owsley's history seeped out. He

was 30 years old, although he looked younger, and he

had a huge sonorous name: Augustus Owsley Stanley

III. His grandfather was a United States Senator from

Kentucky. Owsley apparently had had a somewhat

hungup time as a boy, going from prep school to prep

school and then to a public high school, dropping out

of that, but getting into the University of Virginia

School of Engineering, apparently because of his flair

for sciences, then dropping out of that. He finally

wound up enrolling in the University of California, in

Berkley, where he hooked up with a hip, good-looking

chemistry major named Melissa. They dropped out of

the University and Owsley set up his first acid factory

at 1647 Virginia Street, Berkeley. He was doing a huge

business when he got raided on February 21, 1965. He

got off, however, because there was no law against

making, taking, or having LSD in California until

October 1966. He moved his operation to Los Angeles,

2205 Lafler Road, called himself the Baer Research

Group, and paid out $20,000 in $100 bills to the Cycle

Chemical Corporation for 500 grams of lysergic acid

monohydrate, the basic material in LSD, which he

could convert into 1.5 million doses of LSD at from $1

to $2 apiece wholesale. He bought another 300 grams

from International Chemical and Nuclear Corporation.

His first big shipment arrived March 30, 1965.

He had a flair, this Owsley. By and by he had

turned out several million doses of LSD, in capsules

and tablets. They had various whimsical emblems on

them, to indicate the strength. The most famous, among

the heads, were the "Owsley blues"—with a picture of

Batman on them, 500 micrograms worth of Superhero

inside your skull. The heads rapped over Owsley blues

like old juice heads drawling over that famous onetime

brand from Owsley's Virginia home territory, Fairfax

County Bourbon, bottled in bond. Owsley makes

righteous acid, said the heads. Personally he wasn't

winning any popularity contests with the heads or the

cops, either. He is, like, arrogant; he is a wiseacre; but

the arrogant little wiseacre makes righteous acid.

In fact, Owsley's acid was famous

internationally. When the acid scene spread to England

in late 1966 and 1967, the hippest intelligence one

could pass around was that one was in possession of

"Owsley acid." In the acid world, this was bottled-in-

bond; certified; guaranteed; and high status. It was in

this head world that the ... Beatles first took LSD.

Now, just to get ahead of the story a bit—after Owsley

hooked up with Kesey and the Pranksters, he began a

musical group called the Grateful Dead. Through the

Dead's experience with the Pranksters was born the

sound known as "acid rock." And it was that sound that

the Beatles picked up on, after they started taking acid,

to do a famous series of acid-rock record albums,

Revolver, Rubber Soul, and Sergeant Pepper's Lonely

Hearts' Club Band. Early in 1967 the Beatles got a

fabulous idea. They got hold of a huge school bus and

piled into it with thirty-nine friends and drove and

wove across the British countryside, zonked out of

their gourds. They were going to ... make a movie. Not

an ordinary movie, but a totally spontaneous movie,

using hand-held cameras, shooting the experience as it

happened—off the top of the head!—cavorting, rapping

on, soaring in the moment, visionary chaos—a

daydream! a black art! a chaos! They finished up with

miles and miles of film, a monster, a veritable morass

of it, all shaky and out of focus—blissful Zonk!—

which they saw as a total breakthrough in terms of

expression but also as a commercial display—shown on

British TV it was—that might be appreciated even

outside the esoteric world of the heads—

THE MOVIE

—called Magical Mystery Tour. And . . . the

great banner rippled on the Prankster gate in the

nighttime in ripples and intergalactic billows of great

howling owsley electro-mad-chemical synchronicity...

THE MERRY PRANKSTERS

WELCOME THE BEATLES

chapter

XVI

The Frozen Jug Band

SYNCHRONICITY SPOKEN HERE!

—and the Pranksters sit around Kesey's living

room at night, grooving on many strange events. Like

the day of the great Blackout in New York City, the

great power failure that knocked out subways,

elevators, lights, air conditioners, TVs, clocks,

buildings and the rest of the hulks in the great cancer

capital of the East. The Pranksters grooved over the

cataclysm and grokked it. Such consternation in the

cancer capital! A huge surge of electricity had

suddenly rolled through the wires and freaking blown

everything. The utility companies didn't know what had

caused this surge, but bygod they had experts working

on it and they would figure it out and such a surge

would never occur again.

A surge, Mahavira?—

Meanwhile, there was one story in the

newspapers that the Pranksters grooved on most truly.

It seems that some kid had been playing hooky from

school in New York that day and had

gone off to the movies finally and come out of

the movie house about 5:15 P.M. and started walking

home, feeling guilty already, and he picked up a stick

out of the gutter and he started whacking parking

meters with it. When he got to the corner, he whacked

the big utility pole there and

IN THAT VERY MOMENT

all the lights in New York went out

NOW

and the kid ran home in the dark, crying,

confessing all to his mother— I did it, I did it, but I

didn't mean to—

And Kesey and the Pranksters did groove on that.

The kid was right, that was the funny part. Or at least

as right as the utility companies. For no doubt there

was a great surge, friends, and it came through that kid

just like it came through everything and every being

that existed in that moment. Just as Severn Darden

blew out the candles on his birthday cake in that very

moment—and they poked through every Con Ed

transformer in the system and they never did find the

cause.

COSMO!

—and once you find out about Cosmo, you know

he's running the show. . . It's like we're strands of wire

intertwined in a great cable that runs through a slot, the

Pranksters, the Beatles, the Vietnam Day Committee—

the Vietnam Day Committee?—running through a slot,

and all the wires are vibrated by Cosmo. Most people

lead two-dimensional lives. All they can see is the face

of the slot, a cross section, so that the wires look like a

mass of separate little circles looking bigger or smaller

according to how close you are. They don't—they can't

see that these "circles" are just cross sections of wires

that run backward and forward infinitely and that there

is a great surge through the whole cable and that

anybody who is truly into the full bare essence of the

thing...

There is food in the thing.

My comrades are envious.

But they cannot harm me.

Good fortune.

—the I Ching

... tends to react against political disorder

because he is concerned with the deep basic religious

experience, the deepest sources of life; transient

politics are insignificant to him.

—Joachim Wach

It was against this backdrop, namely, the

ultimate and the infinite, that an organization known as

the Vietnam Day Committee invited Kesey to come

speak at a huge antiwar rally in Berkeley, on the

University of California campus. I couldn't tell you

what bright fellow thought of that, inviting Kesey.

Afterwards, they didn't know, either. Or at least none

of them would own up, despite a lot of interrogations

and recriminations and general thrashing about. "Who

the hell invited this bastard!" was the exact wording. A

regular little rhubarb they had for themselves. The

main trouble with the Vietnam Day Committee was that

they couldn't see beyond the marvelous political

whoopee they had cooked up. Why should they? From

where they were looking in the fall of 1965, they were

about to sweep the country. Berkeley, the New Left, the

Free Speech Movement, Mario Savio, the Rebel

Generation, the Student Revolution, in which students

were going to take over the universities, like in Latin

America, and drive some fire up the clammy rectum of

American life—you could read about it in all the

magazines. And if you don't believe it, come here and

watch us, Mr. Jones—and so forth.

They never looked beyond that, as I say, but it

might have been no use, in any case. Maybe there was

no way in the world anybody could have made the

Vietnam Day Committee realize how their whole beano

looked to Kesey and the Pranksters. Come rally against

the war in Vietnam—from the cosmic vantage point the

Pranksters had reached, there were so many reasons

this little charade was pathetic, they didn't know where

to begin . . .

Nevertheless, Kesey was invited, and that was

how the fun started. Marchers were pouring into

Berkeley from seventy-one cities and twenty-eight

states, for whatever such sums are worth—at any rate,

thousands of students and professors from all over.

There were to be teach-ins all day and also an all-day

rally starting in the morning, with thirty or forty

speakers to whip things up, and then at 7:30 in the

evening, when the fever pitch was reached, they would

all rise up off the Berkeley campus and march over into

Oakland, fifteen or twenty thousand souls in a massive

line, marching on the Oakland Army Terminal. The

Oakland Army Terminal was where men and supplies

were shipped out to Vietnam. Just to spice things up a

bit—a large supply of gelignite had been stolen, and

everybody had visions of Oakland, Berkeley, San

Francisco, the whole clump, blowing up in a gelignite

earthquake of cops, peaceniks, Birchers, and probably

spades and innocent women and children. Nobody had

any idea which side had stolen the gelignite, but that

only made it better.

The gelignite scare seemed to give Kesey the

inspiration for this prank. Kesey's saving grace was

that he never got serious where he could say it just as

well with a cosmic joke. Kesey's fantasy for the

occasion was to come upon the huge anti-war rally as a

freaking military invasion. It was a true inspiration,

this fantasy. They were going to rig up the bus as a

rolling fortress with guns sticking out and all the

Pranksters would dress military. Then they would get

cars and rig them up the same way, and at the head of

the whole convoy, there would be—the Hell's Angels,

in running formation, absolutely adangle with

swastikas. Swastikas. If would freaking blow their

minds, or at least give their cool a test like it never had

before.

First they painted the whole bus a dull red color,

the color of dried blood, in fact. Right on over the

greatest riot of Day-Glo design in history went this

bloody muck. But who gave a damn. Art is not eternal.

Then they started painting military symbols on the

dried blood, swastikas, American eagles, Iron Crosses,

Viking crosses, Red Crosses, hammers & sickles, skulls

& bones, anything as long as it looked rank. That very

night, naturally, the seasonal rains started, and like the

Chief said, art is not eternal. All the paint started

running until it was the most dismal mess imaginable.

Somehow that was appropriate. The next day, Gut and

his girlfriend, Little People, showed up. Gut was in a

kind of transition period, between the Angels and the

Pranksters. He had his old Hell's Angels sleeveless

denim jacket on, but he had taken the insignia off, the

lettering and the emblem of a skull with a helmet on,

but you could see where it had all been, because the

denim was lighter underneath. It was what you might

call a goodbye-but-not-forgotten Hell's Angels' jacket.

Anyway, Gut amazed the Pranksters by painting a big

beautiful American Eagle on the bus, a little primitive,

but strong. The big hulking jesus angel had talent. The

Pranksters were all pleased as hell. They felt they had

brought it out of him, somehow. Gut got everybody

revved up. They built a gun turret on the bus and rigged

up two big gray cannons that you could maneuver. Nor-

man made a machine gun out of wood and cardboard

and painted it olive drab. Other people were knocking

together wooden guns of various ridiculous

descriptions. Faye's sewing machine was going.

Pranksters, inner circle and outer circle, were driving

in from all over. Lee Quarnstrom, of the outer circle,

showed up with a huge supply of Army insignia,

shoulder patches, arm patches, hashmarks, bars, stars,

epaulets. Kesey was rigging up the bus with tapes and

microphones and amplifiers and earphones and electric

guitars. Hagen was rigging up his 16-millimeter camera

and films. Bob Dylan and the Beatles and Joan Baez

and Roland Kirk and Mississippi John Hunt were

droning and clattering over the big speakers from over

the way atop the dirt cliff. Then Allen Ginsberg turned

up from Big Sur, with his companion Peter Orlovsky

and an entourage of pale Chester A. Arthur High

School hindus. Ginsberg sang mantras all night and

jingled bells and finger cymbals. Cassady hooked down

speed and worked himself up from a standing start,

jerking, kicking, dancing—he seemed to be moving in

time to the sewing machine on a long seam. Ginsberg

seemed to be chanting in time to a Jainist's whisk

broom. Cassady began fibrillating the vocal cords, go-

ing faster and faster until by dawn if he had gone any

faster, he would have vibrated off, as old Charles Fort

said, and gone instantly into the positive absolute. It

was a nice weird party.

The next morning, October 16, the big day—the

Pranksters blew the morning, naturally, all stroked out

in various attitudes from the night before, and they

were late getting off to Berkeley. Art is not eternal,

friends. The plan was to meet the Hell's Angels in Palo

Alto and go roaring down the freeway in formation.

They put on Prankster tapes and Cassady got in the

driver's seat. Everybody climbed on in their crazed

military costumes, Hassler, Hagen, Babbs, Gretch,

Zonker, June the Goon, Roy Seburn, Dale Kesey and all

sorts of people, even the Mad Chemist—he showed up

for this one—and Mary Microgram at the last minute.

And then Kesey got on. Kesey was wearing a big

orange coat of the sort highway workers wear so cars

will see them. He had hash-marks on the sleeves and

some kind of floppy epaulets flapping on the shoulders.

He had a big orange Day-Glo World War I helmet on

his head. It was so big and came down so far over his

forehead his eyes were like two little flashlight bulbs

under the lid. Kesey got up in the gun turret and they

were off. Before they got to Palo Alto, in Woodside, in

fact, the cops stopped them and hassled them and

checked them over. The Pranksters did the usual,

leaped out with cameras and shotgun mikes and tape

recorders, filming and taping everything the cops said,

and the cops left, but it ate up time.

"Aha," said the Mad Chemist, "the first

skirmish."

"The Prankster Alert is out," said Babbs.

That was just about right. They kept getting

stopped and hassled and checked over and losing time.

They got to the rendezvous in Palo Alto—and no Hell's

Angels. They waited and waited for the Angels, then

gave up and took off down the expressway, to

Berkeley.

They didn't get to the Berkeley campus until

almost dusk, and their arrival didn't make any very

momentous impression at first. Now, a full phalanx of

Hell's Angels, looking like a cross between the Gestapo

and the Tonton Macoute—that would have been a

different story, no doubt. Good and noisy, too. But as it

was, the bus just pulled into the parking lot by the

Student Union building and the Pranksters cut up as

best they could, ack-acking their wooden guns at birds

and planes. The big rally had been going on all day.

They were out on a big lawn, or plaza, on the campus,

about fifteen thousand of them, the toggle-coat

bohemians, while the PA. loudspeakers boomed and

rabbled and raked across them. There was a big

platform set up for the speakers. There had been about

forty of them, all roaring or fulminating or arguing

cogently, which was always worse. The idea at these

things is to keep building up momentum and tension

and suspense until finally when it is time for action—in

this case, the march—the signal launches them as one

great welded body of believers and they are ready to

march and take billy clubs upside the head and all the

rest of it.

All the shock workers of the tongue were there,

speakers like Paul Jacobs, and M. S. Arnoni, who wore

a prison uniform to the podium because his family had

been wiped out in a German concentration camp during

World War II—and out before them was a great sea of

students and other Youth, the toggle-coat bohemians—

toggle coats, Desert Boots, civil rights, down with the

war in Vietnam—"... could call out to you from their

graves or from the fields and rivers upon which their

ashes were thrown, they would implore this generation

of Americans not to be silent in the face of the

genocidal atrocities committed on the people of

Vietnam ..." and the words rolled in full forensic boom

over the PA. systems.

* * *

THE FIRST PERSON IN THE VIETNAM

DAY COMMITTEE CIRCLE to notice Kesey

approaching the speaker's platform was Paul Krassner,

the editor of The Realist magazine. Most of the

Pranksters were still on the bus, fooling around with

the guns for the befuddlement of the gawkers who

happened by. Kesey, Babbs, Gretchen Fetchin and

George Walker came on over the platform, Kesey in his

orange Day-Glo coat and World War I helmet. Krassner

ran his magazine as pretty much a one-man operation

and he knew Kesey subscribed to it. So he wasn't so

surprised that Kesey knew him. What got him was that

Kesey just started talking to him, just like they had

been having a conversation all along and something had

interrupted them and now they were resuming... It is a

weird thing. You feel the guy's charisma, to use that

one, right away, busting out even through the nutty

Day-Glo, or maybe sucking one in, the way someone

once wrote of Gurdjieff: "You could not help being

drawn, almost physically, towards him ... like being

sucked in by a vast, spiritual vacuum cleaner." At the

time, however, Krassner thought of Flash Gordon.

"Look up there," Kesey says, motioning up

toward the platform.

Up there is Paul Jacobs. Jacobs tends toward the

forensic, anyway, and the microphone and loudspeakers

do something to a speaker. You can hear your voice

rolling and thundering, powerful as Wotan, out over

that ocean of big ears and eager faces, and you are

omnipotent and more forensic and orotund and thunder-

ous minute by minute—It is written, but I say unto you

... the jackals of history-ree-ree-ree-ree ... From where

they are standing, off to the side of the platform, they

can hear very little of what Jacobs is actually saying,

but they can hear the sound barking and roaring and

reverberating and they can hear the crowd roaring back

and baying on cue, and they can see Jacobs, hunched

over squat and thick into the microphone, with his

hands stabbing out for emphasis, and there, at sundown,

silhouetted against the florid sky, is his jaw, jutting

out, like a cantaloupe ...

Kesey says to Krassner: "Don't listen to the

words, just the sound, and the gestures... who do you

see?"

And suddenly Krassner wants very badly to be

right. It is the call of the old charisma. He wants to

come up with the right answer.

"Mussolini... ?"

Kesey starts nodding, Right, right, but keeping

his eye on the prognathous jaw.

By this time more of the Pranksters have come up

to the platform. They have found some electrical

outlets and they have run long cords up to the platform,

for the guitars and basses and horns. Kesey is the next

to last speaker. He is to be followed by some final Real

Barnburner of a speaker and then—the final surge and

the march on Oakland.

From the moment Kesey gets up there, it is a

freaking jar. His jacket glows at dusk, and his helmet.

Lined up behind him are more Day-Glo crazies,

wearing aviator helmets and goggles and flight suits

and Army tunics, Babbs, Gretch, Walker, Zonker, Mary

Microgram, and little Day-Glo kids, and half of them

carrying electric guitars and horns, mugging and

moving around in Day-Glo streaks. The next jar is

Kesey's voice, it is so non-forensic. He comes on soft,

in the Oregon drawl, like he's just having a

conversation with 15,000 people:

You know, you're not gonna stop this war with

this rally, by marching... That's what they do... They

hold rallies and they march . .. They've been having

wars for ten thousand years and you're not gonna stop

it this way ... Ten thousand years, and this is the game

they play to do it... holding rallies and having

marches... and that's the same game you're playing...

their game ...

Whereupon he reaches into his great glowing

Day-Glo coat and produces a harmonica and starts

playing it right into the microphone, Home, home on

the range, hawonking away on the goddamn thing—

Home... home ... on the ra-a-a-a-ange ha-wonkawonk...

The crowd stands there in a sudden tender clump,

most of them wondering if they heard right, cocking

their heads and rolling their heads to one another. First

of all, that conversational tone all of a sudden, and then

random notes from the Day-Glo crazies behind him

ripped out offen the electric guitars and the general

babble of the place feeding into the microphone—did

anybody hear right—

—all the while Kesey is still up there hawonking

away on the freaking harmonica. Home, home on the

ra-a-a-a-a-a-a-ange—

—ahhhh, that's it—they figure it's some

calculated piece of stage business, playing Home, home

on the range—building up to something like Yah! We

know about that home! We know about that range! That

rotten U.S. home and that rotten U.S. range!— —but

instead it is the same down-home drawling voice— I

was just looking at the speaker who was up here before

me... and I couldn't hear what he was saying... but I

could hear the sound of it... and I could hear your

sound coming back at him ... and I could see the

gestures—

—and here Kesey starts parodying Paul Jacobs's

stabbing little hands and his hunched-over stance and

his—

—and I could see his jaw sticking out like this...

silhouetted against the sky ... and you know who I saw

... and who I heard?... Mussolini... I saw and I heard

Mussolini here just a few minutes ago... Yep ... you're

playing their game...

Then he starts hawonking away again, hawonking

and hawonking Home, home on the range with that sad

old setter harmonica-around-the-campfire pace—and

the Pranksters back him up on their instruments, Babbs,

Gretch, George, Zonker, weaving up there in a great

Day-Glo freakout

—and what the hell—a few boos, but mainly

confusion—what in the name of God are the ninnies—

—We've all heard all this and seen all this

before, but we keep on doing it... I went to see the

Beatles last month... And I heard 20,000 girls

screaming together at the Beatles. .. and I couldn't hear

what they were screaming, either... But you don't have

to ... They're screaming Me! Me! Me! Me! ... I'm Me!

... That's the cry of the ego, and that's the cry of this

rally!... Me! Me! Me! Me!... And that's why wars get

fought... ego ... because enough people want to scream

Pay attention to Me... Yep, you're playing their game...

—and then more

hawonkawonkawonkawonkawonka— —and the crowd

starts going into a slump. It's as if the rally, the whole

day, has been one long careful inflation of a helium

balloon, preparing to take off—and suddenly somebody

has pulled the plug. It's not what he is saying, either.

It's the sound and the freaking sight and that goddamn

mournful harmonica and that stupid Chinese music by

the freaks standing up behind him. It's the only thing

the martial spirit can't stand—a put-on, a prank, a

shuck, a goose in the anus.

—Vietnam Day Committee seethe together at the

edge of the platform: "Who the hell invited this

bastard!" "You invited him!" "Well, hell, we figured

he's a writer, so he'll be against the war!" "Didn't you

have enough speakers?" says Krassner. "You need all

the big names you can get, to get the crowd out."

"Well, that's what you get for being celebrity fuckers,"

says Krassner. If they had had one of those big hooks

like they had on amateur night in the vaudeville days,

they would have pulled Kesey off the podium right

then. Well, then, why doesn't somebody just go up

there and edge him off! He's ruining the goddamn

thing. But then they see all the Day-Glo crazies, men

and women and children all weaving and electrified,

clawing at guitars, blowing horns, all crazed aglow at

sundown ... And the picture of the greatest anti-war

rally in the history of America ending in a Day-Glo

brawl to the tune of Home, home on the range ...

—suddenly the hawonking on the freaking

harmonica stops. Kesey leans into the microphone—

There's only one thing to do . .. there's only one

thing's gonna do any good at all... And that's everybody

just look at it, look at the war, and turn your backs and

say ... Fuck it...

—hawonkawonkawonkawonka—

—They hear that all right. The sound of the

phrase—Fuck it—sounds so weird, so shocking, even

here in Free Speech citadel, just coming out that way

over a public loudspeaker, rolling over the heads of

15,000 souls—

—Home, home on the range

hawonkawonkawonka, and the Pranksters beginning to

build up most madly on their instruments now, behind

the harmonica, sounding like an insane honky-tonk

version of Juan Carrillo who devised 96 tones on the

back seat of a Willys Jeep, saved pennies all through

the war to buy it, you understand, zinc pennies until the

blue pustules formed under his zither finger nether

there, you understand .. .

—Just look at it and turn away and say ... Fuck it

—say ... Fuck it ...

hawonkawonkawonka blam

—Fuck it—

Hawonkafuckit. . .friends . . .

THERE WAS NO WAY ONE COULD

PROVE KESEY HAD DONE IT. Nevertheless,

something was gone out of the anti-war rally. The Real

Barnburner spoke, and the Vietnam Day Committee

tried to put in one last massive infusion of the old

spirit and then gave the signal and the great march on

Oakland began, through the gloaming. Fifteen thousand

souls ... shoulder to shoulder like in the old strike

posters. At the Oakland-Berkeley line there was an

arrow-shaped phalanx of police and National Guard.

The Vietnam Day Committee marched in frantic clump

at the head, trying to decide whether to force the issue,

have a physical confrontation, heads busted, bayonets—

or turn back when they ordered them to. Nobody

seemed to have any resolve. Somebody would say, We

have no choice, we've got to turn back—and somebody

else would call him a Martin Luther King. That was

about the worst thing you could call anybody on the

New Left at that time. Martin Luther King turned back

at the critical moment on the bridge at Selma. We can't

risk submitting the crania of our devoted people to

fracturization and degradation by those who do not

shrink from a cowardly show of weaponry, he had said,

going on like Social Science Negro in his sepulchral

voice—the big solemn preachery Uncle Tom. Yah! yuh

Tuskegee-headed Uncle Tom, yuh, yuh Booker T

Washington peanut-butter lecture-podium Nobel Prize

medal head, yuh—Uncle Tom—by the time it was all

over, Martin Luther King was a stupid music-hall

Handkerchief Head on the New Left—and here they

were, calling each other Martin Luther Kings and other

incredible things—but nobody had any good smashing

iron zeal to carry the day—O where is our Zea-lot, who

Day-glowed and fucked up our heads—and there was

nothing to do but grouse at the National Guard and turn

back, which they did. What the hell has happened to

us? Who did this? Why, it was the Masked Man—

So the huge march turned around and headed for

Civic Center Park in Berkeley and stood around there

eating hamburgers and listening to music by a jug

band—a group that later became known as Country Joe

and the Fish—and wondering what the hell had

happened. Then somebody started throwing tear gas

from a rooftop and Bob Scheer was bravely telling

everybody to lie down on the grass, because tear gas

rises—but the jug band just stood there, petrified, with

their hands and their instruments frozen in the same

position as when the gas hit. It seems the jug band was

high on something or other, and when the gas hit, the

combination of the gas and whatever they were already

up on—it petrified them and they stood there in stark

stiff medias res as if they were posing for an Iwo Jima

sculpture for the biggest antiwar rally in the history of

the American people. The whole rally now seemed like

a big half ass, with the frozen jug band the picture of

how far they had gotten.

chapter

XVII

Departures

PREPARE FOR MEXICO

And then Kesey posted cryptic words on his log-

house Prankster bulletin board:

Let every thought, our whole direction, prepare

for Mexico.

Every morsel you eat, every book you read, every

high, every

low, every Day-Glo deed ...

But he never said why or when they might expect

to go.

MOUNTAIN GIRL RETURNS TO POUGHKEEPSIE

NOW, Mountain Girl groks fully of the

Pranksters' psychic takeoff

And is the very radiometer of their superpsychic

pace.

No one ever plunged more fully in the

psychedelic risk-all

Or ever blazed more radiant through the splays of

inner space.

Yet not even a very Isis is immune against the

crisis

That stamps a woman's psyche when she is going

to bear a child.

It could never be easy to be three thousand miles

from Kesey

But she had to Stop!

And try to grok

more fully . .. and go back East awhile

SANDY RETURNS TO NEW YORK

The path was soft as velvet, but Sandy heard it

coming—

Ahor! rising, materializing from the mists of his

devotion.

The demon Speed starts wrenching, leaves Sandy

flinching in a bummer,

Dazed again in a half-crazed demonic DMT

implosion

Causing psychosomatic, psychocidic cortical

syndromes,

Even synarthrotic paralysis down the side of his

lean face.

He tries to cure himself, purify the psychic

venom,

But they're no use—all the Prankster arts of this

limelit magic place.

Even I Ching says brain scans, EEGs, the whole

clinical bit,

Which costs money—Kesey! Let me pawn the

Ampex,

Four-hundred-dollar tape machine, for after all I

brought it

Here in the first place—and then—stuck in his

synarthrotic cortex

This thought: Kesey refused him the Ampex,

Prankster salvation machine.

He goes back East for the clinical bit, but that

won't be the end of it, Dream Warrior ...

chapter

XVIII

Cosmo's Tasmanían

Deviltry

"CAN

YOU

PASS THE

ACID TEST?—"

Comes the call

Chiseled on each Prankster eyeball in Lincoln

gothic

As we moan

In this graveyard among moonstone tombstones

with a philosophic

It's your ass—

Can you pass the Acid Test?

Babbs and Kesey swaying

In a California graveyard, baying deep

In the synch

Zonked on LSD on the brink

freaking steep

Of a missionary quest:

Can you pass the Acid Test?

Tombstones!

Vaults, coffins and bald carbon-dated bones

A dream transfusion

From the Community Breast:

Can you pass the Acid Test?

The group mind

Flying high, Major, but not blind

in the moonshine

Was inspired

With the ceremony that would be required

in the moon shot

To extend

The Prankster message to the ends

Of the earth. A mindfest:

a moon ship

The Acid Test...

... and Kesey emerged from the weird night in the

graveyard with the vision of turning on the world,

literally, and a weirdly practical way of doing it,

known as

THE ACID TEST

For, as it has been written:... he develops a

strong urge to extend the message to all people ... he

develops a ritus, often involving music, dance, liturgy,

sacrifice, to achieve an objectified and stereotyped

expression of the original spontaneous religious

experience.

Christ! how many movements before them had

run into this selfsame problem. Every vision, every

insight of the ... original ... circle always came out

of the new experience... the kairos.. . and how to tell

it! How to get it across to the multitudes who have

never had this experience themselves? You couldn't put

it into words. You had to create conditions in which

they would feel an approximation of that feeling, the

sublime pairos. You had to put them into ecstasy...

Buddhist monks immersing themselves in cosmic love

through fasting and contemplation, Hindus zonked out

in Bhakti, which is fervent love in the possession of

God, ecstatics flooding themselves with Krishna

through sexual orgies or plunging into the dinners of

the Bacchanalia, Christians off in Edge City through

gnostic onanism or the Heart of Jesus or the Child

Jesus with its running sore—or—

THE ACID TESTS

And suddenly Kesey sees that they, the

Pranksers, already have the expertise and the

machinery to create a mindblown state such as the

world has never seen, totally wound up, lit up,

amplified and . . . controlled—plus the most efficient

key ever devised to open the doors in the mind of the

world: namely, Owsley's LSD.

For months Kesey has been trying to work out...

the fantasy ... of the Dome. This was going to be a

great geodesic dome on top of a cylindrical shaft. It

would look like a great mushroom. Many levels. People

would climb a stairway up the cylinder—buy a

ticket?—we-e-e-elllll—and the dome would have a

great foam-rubber floor they could lie down on. Sunk

down in the foam rubber, below floor level, would be

movie projectors, video-tape projectors, light

projectors. All over the place, up in the dome,

everywhere, would be speakers, microphones, tape

machines, live, replay, variable lag. People could take

LSD or speed or smoke grass and lie back and

experience what they would, enclosed and submerged

in a planet of lights and sounds such as the universe

never knew. Lights, movies, video tapes, video tapes of

themselves, flashing and swirling over the dome from

the beams of searchlights rising from the floor from be-

tween their bodies. The sounds roiling around in the

globe like a typhoon. Movies and tapes of the past,

tapes and video tapes, broadcasts and pictures of the

present, tapes and humanoid sounds of the future—but

all brought together now—here and now—Kairos—into

the dilated cerebral cortex ...

The geodesic dome, of course, was Buckminster

Fuller's inspiration. The light projections were chiefly

Gerd Stern's, Gerd Stern of the USCO group, although

Roy Seburn had already done a lot with them and Page

Browning showed a talent that surprised everybody.

But the magic dome, the new planet, was Kesey and the

Pranksters. The idea went beyond what would later be

known as mixed-media entertainment, now a standard

practice in "psychedelic discotheques" and so forth.

The Pranksters had the supra-medium, a fourth

dimension—acid— Cosmo—All-one—Control—The—

Movie—

But why a dome? The answer to all the Prankster

fantasies, public and private, the whole solution—they

already found it; namely, the Hell's Angels party. That

two-day rout hadn't been a party but a show. It had

been more than a show even. It had been an incredible

concentration of energy. Not only Pranksters, but

people from all over, heads, non-heads, intellectuals,

curiosity-seekers, even cops, had turned up and gotten

swept up in the incredible energy of the thing. They

had been in the Prankster movie. It was one show that

hadn't been separated into entertainers and customers,

with the customers buying a ticket and saying All right,

now entertain me. At the Angels' party everybody got

high together and everybody did his thing and enter-

tained everybody else, Angels being Angels, Ginsberg

being Ginsberg, Pranksters being Pranksters, and cops

being cops. Even the cops did their thing, splashing

those big lush evil revolving red turret lights off the

dirt cliff and growling and baying and hassling cars.

CAN

YOU

PASS THE

ACID TEST?

Anybody who could take LSD for the first time

and go through all that without freaking out.. . Leary

and Alpert preached "set and setting." Everything in

taking LSD, in having a fruitful, freakout-free LSD

experience, depended on set and setting. You should

take it in some serene and attractive setting, a house or

apartment decorated with objects of the honest sort,

Turkoman tapestries, Greek goatskin rugs, Cost Plus

blue jugs, soft light—not Japanese paper globe light,

however, but untasselated Chinese textile shades—in

short, an Uptown Bohemian country retreat of the

$60,000-a-year sort, ideally, with Mozart's Requiem

issuing with liturgical solemnity from the hi-fi. The

"set" was the set of your mind. You should prepare for

the experience by meditating upon the state of your

being and deciding what you hope to discover or

achieve on this voyage into the self. You should also

have a guide who has taken LSD himself and is familiar

with the various stages of the experience and whom you

know and trust... and Fuck that! That only clamped the

constipation of the past, the eternal lags, on something

that should happen Now. Let the setting be as unserene

and lurid as the Prankster arts can make it and let your

set be only what is on your. . . brain, man, and let your

guide, your trusty hand-holding, head-swaddling guide,

be a bunch of Day-Glo crazies who have as one of their

mottoes: "Never trust a Prankster." The Acid Tests

would be like the Angels' party plus all the ideas that

had gone into the Dome fantasy. Everybody would take

acid, any time they wanted, six hours before the Test

began or the moment they got there, at whatever point

in the trip they wanted to enter the new planet. In any

event, they would be on a new planet.

The mysteries of the synch! Very strange ... the

Acid Tests turned out, in fact, to be an art form

foreseen in that strange book, Childhood's End, a form

called "total identification": "The history of the cinema

gave the clue to their actions. First, sound, then color,

then stereoscopy, then Cinerama, had made the old

moving pictures' more and more like reality itself.

Where was the end of the story? Surely, the final stage

would be reached when the audience forgot it was an

audience, and became part of the action. To achieve

this would involve stimulation of all the senses, and

perhaps hypnosis as well... When the goal was attained,

there would be an enormous enrichment of human expe-

rience. A man could become—for a while, at least,—

any other person, and could take part in any

conceivable adventure, real or imaginary.... And when

the 'program' was over, he would have acquired a

memory as vivid as any experience in his actual life—

indeed, indistinguishable from reality itself."

Too freaking true!

THE FIRST ACID TEST ENDED UP MORE

LIKE ONE OF THE OLD acid parties at La Honda,

which is to say, a private affair, and mostly formless. It

was meant to be public, but the Pranksters were not the

world's greatest at the mechanics of things, like hiring

a hall. The first one was going to be in Santa Cruz. But

they couldn't hire a hall in time. They had to hold it out

at Babbs's house, a place known as the Spread, just

outside of Santa Cruz in a community known as Soquel.

The Spread was like a rundown chicken farm. The wild

vetch and dodder vines were gaining ground every

minute, at least where the ground wasn't burnt off or

beaten down into a clay muck. There were fat brown

dogs and broken vehicles and rusted machines and

rotting troughs and recapped tires and a little old

farmhouse with linoleum floors and the kind of old

greasy easy chairs that upholstery flies hover over in

nappy clouds and move off about three-quarters of an

inch when you wave your hand at them. But there were

also wild Day-Glo creations on the walls and ceilings,

by Babbs, and the place was private and tucked off by

itself. In any case, they were stuck with the Spread.

About all the advertising they could do was

confined to the day of the Test itself. Norman Hartweg

had painted a sign on some cardboard and tacked it

onto some boards Babbs had used

as cue signs in the movie, and put it up in the

Hip Pocket Bookstore. CAN YOU PASS THE ACID TEST?

The Hip Pocket Bookstore was a paperback bookstore

that Hassler and Peter Demma, one of the Prankster

outer circle, were running in Santa Cruz. They left

word in the store that afternoon that it was going to be

at Babbs's. A few local bohos saw it and came out, but

mainly it was the Pranksters and their friends who

showed up at the Spread that night, including a lot of

the Berkeley crowd that had been coming to La Honda.

Plus Allen Ginsberg and his entourage.

It started off as a party, with some of the movie

flashed on the walls, and lights, and tapes, and the

Pranksters providing the music themselves, not to

mention the LSD. The Pranksters' strange atonal

Chinese music broadcast on all frequencies, à la John

Cage. It was mostly just another La Honda party—but

then around 3 A.M. a thing happened ... The non-

involved people, the people just there for the beano, the

people who hadn't seen the Management, like the

Berkeley people, they had all left by 3 A.M. and the

Test was down to some kind of core ... It ended up with

Kesey on one side of Babbs's living room and Ginsberg

on the other, with everybody else arranged around these

two poles like on a magnet, all the Kesey people over

toward him and all the Ginsberg people toward him—

The super-West and the super-East—and the subject got

to be Vietnam. Kesey gives his theory of whole

multitudes of people joining hands in a clump and

walking away from the war. Ginsberg said all these

things, these wars, were the result of

misunderstandings. Nobody who was doing the fighting

ever wanted to be doing it, and if everybody could only

sit around in a friendly way and talk it out, they could

get to the root of their misunderstanding and settle it—

and then from the rear of the Kesey contingent came

the voice of the only man in the room who had been

within a thousand miles of the war, Babbs, saying,

"Yes, it's all so very obvious. "

It's all so very obvious . . .

How magical that comment seemed at that

moment! The magical eighth hour of acid—how clear it

all now was—Ginsberg had said it, and Babbs, the

warrior, had certified it, and it had all built to this, and

suddenly everything was so . . . very . . .clear . . .

The Acid Test at the Spread was just a dry run,

of course. It didn't really . .. reach out into the world ...

But! soon ... the Rolling Stones, England's second

hottest pop group, were coming to San Jose, 40 miles

south of San Francisco, for a show in the Civic

Auditorium on December 4. Kesey can see it all, having

seen it before. He can see all the wound-up wired-up

teeny freaks and assorted multitudes pouring out of the

Cow Palace after the Beatles show that night, the

fragmented pink-tentacled beast, pouring out still

aquiver with ecstasy and jelly beans all cocked and

aimless with no flow to go off in ... It is so very

obvious.

For three or four days the Pranksters searched for

a hall in San Jose and couldn't come up with one—

naturally—it really seemed natural and almost right

that nothing should be definite until the last minute.

All that was certain was that they would find one at the

last minute. The Movie would create that much at least.

And what if the multitudes didn't know where it was

going to be until the last minute? Well, those who were

meant to be there—those who were in the pudding—

they would get there. You were either on the bus or off

the bus, and that went for the whole world, even in San

Jose, California. At the last minute Kesey talked a local

boho figure known as Big Nig into letting them use his

old hulk of a house.

Kesey had hooked up with a rock 'n' roll band,

The Grateful Dead, led by Jerry Garcia, the same dead-

end kid who used to live in the Chateau in Palo Alto

with Page Browning and other seeming no-counts,

lumpenbeatniks, and you had to throw them out when

they came over and tried to crash the parties on Perry

Lane. Garcia remembered—how they came down and

used to get booted out "by Kesey and the wine

drinkers." The wine drinkers—the middle-class

bohemians of Perry Lane. They both, Kesey and Garcia,

had been heading into the pudding, from different

directions, all that time, and now Garcia was a, yes,

beautiful person, quiet, into the pudding, and a great

guitar player. Garcia had first named his group The

Warlocks, meaning sorcerers or wizards, and they had

been eking by playing for the beer drinkers, at jazz

joints and the like around Palo Alto. To the Warlocks,

the beer drinker music, even when called jazz, was just

square hip. They were on to that distinction, too. For

Kesey—they could just play, do their thing.

The Dead had an organist called Pig Pen, who

had a Hammond electric organ, and they move the

electric organ into Big Nig's ancient house, plus all of

the Grateful Dead's electrified guitars and basses and

the Pranksters' electrified guitars and basses and flutes

and horns and the light machines and the movie

projectors and the tapes and mikes and hi-fis, all of

which pile up in insane coils of wires and gleams of

stainless steel and winking amplifier dials before Big

Nig's unbelieving eyes. His house is old and has wiring

that would hardly hold a toaster. The Pranksters are

primed in full Prankster regalia. Paul Foster has on his

Importancy Coat and now has a huge head of curly hair,

a great curly mustache pulling back into great curly

mutton chops roaring off his face. Page Browning is the

king of face painters. He becomes a full-fledged Devil

with a bright orange face and his eyes become the

centers of two great silver stars painted over the orange

and his hair is silver with silver dust and he paints his

lips silver with silver lipstick. This very night the

Pranksters all sit down with oil pastel crayons and

colored pens and at a wild rate start printing handbills

on 8-1/2 X 11 paper saying CAN YOU PASS THE ACID

TEST? and giving Big Nig's address. As the jellybean-

cocked masses start pouring out of the Rolling Stones

concert at the Civic Auditorium, the Pranksters charge

in among them. Orange & silver Devil, wild man in a

coat of buttons—Pranksters. Pranksters!—handing out

the handbills with the challenge, like some sort of

demons, warlocks verily, come to channel the wild

pointless energy built up by the Rolling Stones inside.

They come piling into Big Nig's, and suddenly

acid and the Worldcraze were everywhere, the

electric organ vibrating through every belly in the

place, kids dancing not roc\ dances, not the frug and

the—what?—swim, mother, but dancing ecstasy,

leaping, dervishing, throwing their hands over their

heads like Daddy Grace's own stroked-out inner

courtiers—yes!—Roy Se-burn's lights washing past

every head, Cassady rapping, Paul Foster handing

people weird little things out of his Eccentric Bag, old

whistles, tin crickets, burnt keys, spectral plastic han-

dles. Everybody's eyes turn on like lightbulbs, fuses

blow, blackness—wowwww!—the things that shake and

vibrate and funnel and freak out in this blackness—and

then somebody slaps new fuses in and the old hulk of a

house shudders back, the wiring writhing and

fragmenting like molting snakes, the organs vibro-

massage the belly again, fuses blow, minds scream,

heads explode, neighbors call the cops, 200,300,400

people from out there drawn into The Movie, into the

edge of the pudding at least, a mass closer and higher

than any mass in history, it seems most surely, and

Kesey makes minute adjustment, small toggle switch

here, lubricated with Vaseline No. 634—3 diluted with

carbon tetrachloride, and they ripple, Major, ripple, but

with meaning, 400 of the attuned multitude headed

toward the pudding, the first mass acid experience, the

dawn of the Psychedelic, the Flower Generation and all

the rest of it, and Big Nig wants the rent.

"How you holding?"

How you holding—

"I mean, like, you know," says Big Nig to Garcia.

"I didn't charge Kesey nothing to use this place, like

free?, you know? and the procedure now is that every

cat here contributes, man, to help out with the rent."

With the rent—

"Yeah, I mean, like"—says Big Nig. Big Nig

stares at Garcia with the deepest look of hip spade soul

authority you can imagine, and nice and officious,

too—

Yeah, I mean, life—Garcia, for his part, however,

doesn't know which bursts out first, the music or the

orange laugh. Out the edges of his eyes he can see his

own black hair framing his face—it is so long, to the

shoulders, and springs out like a Sudanese soldier's—

and then big Nig's big earnest black face right in front

of him flapping and washing comically out into the

glistening acid-glee red sea of faces out beyond them

both in the galactic red lakes on the walls—

"Yeah, I mean, like, for the rent, man," says Big

Nig, "you already blown six fuses."

Blown! Six fuses! Garcia sticks his hand into his

electric guitar and the notes come out like a huge

orange laugh all blown fuses electric spark leaps in

colors upon the glistening sea of faces. It's a freaking

laugh and a half. A new star is being born, like a light-

bulb in a womb, and Big Nig wants the rent—a new star

being born, a new planet forming, Ahura Mazda blazing

in the world womb, here before our very eyes—and Big

Nig, the poor pathetic spade, wants his rent.

A freaking odd thought, that one. A big funky

spade looking pathetic and square. For twenty years in

the hip life, Negroes never even looked square. They

were the archetypical soul figures. But what is Soul, or

Funky, or Cool, or Baby—in the new world of the

ecstasy, the All-one .. . the kairos....

IF ONLY THERE WERE THE PERFECT

PLACE, WHICH WOULD BE a place big enough for

the multitudes and isolated enough to avoid the cops,

with their curfews and eternal hassling. Shortly after

that they found the perfect place, by acci—

By accident, Mahavira?

The third Acid Test was scheduled for Stinson

Beach, 15 miles north of San Francisco. Stinson Beach

was already a gathering place for local heads. You

could live all winter in little beach cottages there for

next to nothing. There was a nice solid brick recreation

hall on the beach, all very nice—but at the last minute

that whole deal fell through, and they shifted to Muir

Beach, a few miles south. The handbills were already

out, all over the head sections of San Francisco, CAN

YOU PASS THE ACID TEST, advertising Cassady & Ann

Murphy Vaudeville and celebrities who might be there,

which included anybody who happened to be in town,

or might make it to town, the Fugs, Ginsberg, Roland

Kirk. There were always some nice chiffon

subjunctives and the future conditionals in the

Prankster handbill rhetoric, but who was to deny who

might be drawn into the Movie . ..

Anyway, at the last minute they headed for Muir

Beach instead. The fact that many people wouldn't

know about the change and would go to Stinson Beach

and merely freeze in the darkness and never find the

right place—somehow that didn't even seem

distressing. It was part of some strange analogical or-

der of the universe. Norman Hartweg hooked down his

LSD—it was in the acid gas capsules that night—and

thought of Gurdjieff. Gurdjieff wouldn't announce a

meeting until the last minute. We're gonna get together

tonight. The people that got there, got there; and there

was message in that alone. Which was, of course:

you're either on the bus or off the bus.

Those who were on the bus, even if they weren't

Pranksters, like Marshall Efron, the round Mercury of

Hip California, or the Hell's Angels... all found it. The

cops, however, never did. They were apparently thrown

off by the Stinson Beach handbills.

Muir Beach had a big log-cabin-style lodge for

dances, banquets, and the like. The lodge was stilted up

out in a waste of frigid marsh grass. A big empty

nighttime beach in winter. Some little log tourist cabins

with blue doors on either side, all empty. The lodge had

three big rooms and was about 100 feet long, all logs

and rafters and exposed beams, a tight ship of dark

wood and Roughing It. The Grateful Dead piled in with

their equipment and the Pranksters with theirs, which

now included a Hammond electric organ for Gretch and

a great strobe light.

The strobe! The strobe, or stroboscope, was

originally an instrument for studying motion, like the

way a man's legs move when he is running. In a

darkened chamber, for example, you aim a bright light,

flashing on and off, at the runner's legs as he runs. The

light flashes on and off very rapidly, maybe three times

as fast as a normal heartbeat. Every time the light

flashes on, you see a new stage in the movement of the

runner's legs. The successive images tend to freeze in

your mind, because the light flashes off before the

usual optical blur of the motion can hit you. The strobe

has certain magical properties in the world of the acid

heads. At certain speeds stroboscopic lights are so

synched in with the pattern of brain waves that they can

throw epileptics into a seizure. Heads discovered that

strobes could project them into many of the sensations

of an LSD experience without taking LSD. The strobe!

To people standing under the mighty strobe

everything seemed to fragment. Ecstatic dancers—their

hands flew off their arms, frozen in the air—their

glistening faces came apart—a gleaming ellipse of teeth

here, a pair of buffered highlit cheekbones there—all

flacking and fragmenting into images as in an old

flicker movie—a man in slices!—all of history pinned

up on a butterfly board; the experience, of course. The

strobe, the projectors, the mikes, the tapes, the

amplifiers, the variable lag Ampex—it was all set up in

a coiling gleaming clump in the Lincoln Log lodge, the

communal clump, Babbs working over the dials, talking

into the microphones to test them. Heads beginning to

pour in. Marshall Efron and Norman, Norman already

fairly zonked ... Then in comes Kesey, through the

main door—

Everyone watches. His face is set, his head

cocked slightly. He is going to do something; everyone

watches, because this seems terribly important. Drawn

in right away by the charismatic vacuum cleaner, they

are. Kesey heads for the control center, saying nothing

to anyone, reaches into the galaxy of dials, makes ... a

single minute adjustment... yes! one toggle switch,

double-pole, single-throw, double-break, in the

allegory of Control. . .

Babbs is there, bombed, but setting up the

intricate glistening coils of the tapes and projectors and

the rest of it. Each of the Pranksters, bombed, has some

fairly exacting task to do. Norman is staring at the

dials—and he can't even see the numbers, he is so

bombed, the numbers are wriggling off like huge

luminous parasites under a microscope—but—-function

under acid. Babbs says, "One reason we're doing this is

to learn how to function on acid." Of course! Prepare

for the Day—when multitudes, millions, civilizations

are on acid, seeking satori, it is coming, the wave is

spreading.

The heads are all sitting around on the floor,

about 300 of them. Into the maelstrom! Yes. At Big

Nig's in San Jose, a lot of the kids the Pranksters had

corralled coming out of the Rolling Stones show did

not take LSD that night, although there were enough

heads at Big Nig's stoned on various things to create

that sympathetic vibration known as the "contact high."

But this is different. Practically everybody who has

found the place, after the switch from Stinson Beach, is

far enough into the thing to know what the "acid" in the

Acid Test means. A high percentage took LSD about

four hours ago, rode out the first rush and are ready ...

now to groove ... The two projectors shine forth with

The Movie. The bus and the Pranksters start rolling

over the walls of the lodge, Babbs and Kesey rapping

on about it, the Bus lumping huge and vibrating and

bouncing in great swells of heads and color—Norman,

zonked, sitting on the floor, is half frightened, half

ecstatic, although something in the back of his mind

recognizes this as his Acid Test pattern, to sit back and

watch, holding on through the rush, until 3 or 4 A.M., in

the magic hours, and then dance—but so much of a rush

this time! The Movie and Roy Seburn's light machine

pitching the inter-galactic red science-fiction seas to

all corners of the lodge, oil and water and food

coloring pressed between plates of glass and projected

in vast size so that the very ooze of cellular Creation

seems to ectoplast into the ethers and then the Dead

coming in with their immense submarine vibrato

vibrating, garanging, from the Aleutian rocks to the

baja griffin cliffs of the Gulf of California. The Dead's

weird sound! agony-in-ecstasis! submarine somehow,

turbid half the time, tremendously loud but like sitting

under a waterfall, at the same time full of sort of

ghoul-show vibrato sounds as if each string on their

electric guitars is half a block long and twanging in a

room full of natural gas, not to mention their great

Hammond electric organ, which sounds like a movie

house Wurlitzer, a diathermy machine, a Citizens' Band

radio and an Auto-Grind garbage truck at 4 A.M., all

coming over the same frequency ... Then suddenly

another movie

THE FROGMAN

Babbs and Gretch and Hagen made it down in

Santa Cruz, the story of Babbs the Frogman, arising

from the Pacific in black neopreme Frogman suit from

flippers to insect goggles, the pranking monster, falling

in love with the Princess, Gretch, with floods of frames

from elsewhere—the Bus Movie?—brittering in

stroboscopically Frogman woos her and wins her and

loses her to the Pacific Chohans in submarinal

projection

BABBS! GRETCH!

Norman has never seen a movie while under acid

before and it deepens, deepens, deepens in perspective,

this movie, the most 3-D movie ever made, until they

are standing right before him, their very neopreme fairy

tails and the Pacific is so far in the distance and black

out beyond the marshes around the Muir Beach lodge

until Babbs and Gretch are now in the room in the flesh

in two separate spots, here before me on the beach and

over here in this very room in this very lodge on the

beach, Babbs at the microphone and Gretch nearby at

the new Hammond organ—such synch! that they should

narrate and orchestrate their own lives like this, in

variable lag, layer upon layer of variable lags

HEEEEEEEEE into the whirlpool who should

appear but Owsley. Owsley, done up in his $600 head

costume, has emerged from his subterrain of espionage

and paranoia to come to see the Prankster experiment

for himself, and in the middle of the giddy contagion

he takes LSD. They never saw him take it before. He

takes the LSD and

RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRROIL the whirlpool

picks him up and spins him down into the stroboscope

stereoptic prankster panopticon in full variable lag

SUCH CREATURES

Hell's Angels come reeling in, shrieking Day-

Glo, then clumping together on the floor under the

black light and then most gentle Buddha blissly passing

around among themselves various glittering Angel

esotérica, chains, Iron Crosses, knives, buttons, coins,

keys, wrenches, spark plugs, grokking over these

arcana winking in the Day-Glo. Orange & Silver devil

gliding through the dancers grinning his Zea-lot grin in

every face, and Kesey crouched amid the gleaming

coils, at the

Controls

Kesey looks out upon the stroboscopic

whirlpool—the dancers! flung and flinging! in ecstasis!

gyrating! levitating! men in slices! in ping-pong balls!

in the creamy bare essence and it reaches a

Synch

he never saw before. Heads from all over the acid

world out here and all whirling into the pudding. Now

let a man see what

Control

is. Kesey mans the strobe and a twist of the

mercury lever

and they all speed up

Now

the whole whirlpool, so far into it, they are.

Faster they dance, hands thrown up off their arms like

confetti in the strobe flashing, blissful faces falling

apart and being exchanged, for I am you and you are

me in Cosmo's Tasmanian deviltry. Turn it

Down

and they slow down—or We turn down—It—

Cosmo—turns down, still in perfect synch, one brain,

one energy, a single flow of intersubjectivity. It is

possible this alchemy so dreamed of by all the heads. It

is happening before them

Control

CURIOUSLY, AFTER THE FIRST RUSH AT THE ACID

TEST

, THERE would be long intervals of the most

exquisite boredom. Exquisite, because it was so

unsuspected after the general frenzy. Nothing would

happen, at least not in the usual sense. Those who were

... not on the bus... would come to the realization that

there was no schedule. The Grateful Dead did not play

in sets; no eight numbers to a set, then a twenty-five-

minute break, and so on, four or five sets and then the

close-out. The Dead might play one number for five

minutes or thirty minutes. Who kept time? Who could

keep time, with history cut up in slices. The Dead could

get just as stoned as anyone else. The... non-attuned

would look about and here would be all manner of

heads, including those running the show, the

Pranksters, stroked out against the walls like slices of

Jello. Waiting; with nobody looking very likely to start

it back up. Those who didn't care to wait would tend to

drift off, stoned or otherwise, and the Test would settle

down to the pudding. The Prankster band started the

strange Chinese cacophony of its own, with Gretch

wailing on the new electric organ. Norman got up and

danced, it being that time. He even fooled about a bit

with a little light projection thing of his own, although

he didn't think it was good enough, but the magic hours

were coming on like electric velvet. Kesey spoke softly

over the microphone. They were into the still of the

hurricane, the pudding.

AT DAWN — A FREAKING COLD LIGHT ON

THE MARSH GRASS AND the beach. A purple shadow

all over the ocean like one huge stone-cold bruise.

Suddenly the main door bursts open and it's Owsley.

Owsley is lurching and groping and screaming

"Survival!"

It comes out like a steam whistle forced out of a

constricted little opening

"Survival!"

Owsley, the Acid King, in his $600 head outfit,

groping through the blue bruise dawn with his eyes like

disaster craters, hissing

"Survival!"

The sight of Kesey apparently hits him with a

surge of adrenaline, however, because he recovers his

voice and starts in on Kesey:

"Kesey!"

The gist of it is that Kesey can't do this again.

This is the end. The Acid Tests are over. Kesey is a

maniac and the Tests are maniacal and the roof is

falling in. Taking LSD in a monster group like this gets

too many forces going, too much amok energy, causing

very freaky and destructive things to happen, and so

on. It's his acid and he says this is the end. None of

them can figure out precisely what he is saying. Just

that he has flipped and Kesey did it.

Little by little, they piece it together. He has had

quite a trip for himself on his own LSD, has Owsley. It

seems that Owsley took the LSD, a good dose,

apparently, and the strobe light and the incredible

layers of variable lag began rocking and rippling him

and it threw him into a time warp, or parallel time

dimension. The heads were always talking about such

things. They could cite some serious thinkers, scientists

even, such as C. D. Broad and his theory of a second

temporal dimension—"events which are separated by a

temporal gap in one dimension may be adjoined without

any gap in the other, just as two points in the earth's

surface which differ in longitude may be identical in

latitude"—or J. W. Dunne's theory of serialism, or

infinite regress—or Maurice Maeterlinck. The heads

were always talking about such things and Owsley was

primed for it. Then he got high. Then he got caught in

the whirlpool, spun out of his gourd by all the special

effects of the Pranksters' variable lag devices—and the

legend of the trip he took eventually was told as

follows:

Back he went into the eighteenth century, Count

Cagliostro! no longer plain Giuseppe Balsamo of

Palermo, the Oakland of the Mediterranean, but the

good Count, alchemist, seer, magician, master of

precognition, forecaster of lotteries, alchemical creator,

from out of base elements of... this diamond, greatest

and most dazzling in history—here, Cardinal Louis de

Rohan—but!—persecuted as a thaumaturge—thrust into

this spinning black donjon, the Bastille, seeping with

lurid water and carbonated moss and twitching

dismembered rats, anatomized in the flashing light of

the diamond they wouldn't believe, a rat shank here, a

rat metacarpal there, rat teeth, rat eyes, rat tails leaping

and frozen in the air like city lights—that noise—a mob

in the streets—either salvation—or—the Bastille begins

to disintegrate into absorbent felt cubes—

—and so on. The world began fragmenting on

him. It began coming totally to pieces, breaking up into

component parts, and he wasn't even back in the

twentieth century yet, he was trapped—where?—Paris

in 1786? ... The whole world was coming to pieces

molecule by molecule now and swimming like grease

bubbles in a cup of coffee, disappearing into the inter-

galactic ooze and gasses all around—including his own

body. He lost his skin, his skeleton, his pulmonary

veins—sneaking out into the ooze like eels, they are,

reeking phosphorus, his neural ganglia—unraveling like

hot worms and wiggling down the galactic drain, his

whole substance dissolving into gaseous nothingness

until finally he was down to one cell. One human cell:

his; that was all that was left of the entire known

world, and if he lost control of that one cell, there

would be nothing left. The world would be, like, over.

He has to rebuild himself and the entire world from that

one cell with a gigantic act of will—too overwhelming.

Where does a man start? With California Route 1 so he

can get out of here in his car? or will it turn out to be

merely the filthy Rue Ventru with the Bastille mobs

waiting? or start with the car? the differential? how do

they make the bastards? or the beach? all those

freaking grains of sand? the marsh grass? the tourist

cabins? got to put every blue door back? or the ocean?

or leave it dry? save making all those filthy blind

bathosphere black animals down there ... or the sky?

how far does it go? the Big Dipper? the Ursa Minor?

the Delphinium? suppose it is really infinite concentric

spheres of crystal making infinite gelatinous

submarinal vibrations? the Dead? the Pranksters?

Kesey, Kesey's out for good, Kesey and the

bathosphere brutes—but with a superheroic effort he

begins. But by the time he gets himself remade, it is

too much. It is overwhelming. He makes his car. He

makes the parking lot and the beginning of the road

out. He'll make the rest of it as he goes along. Freak it!

Split! Leave the rest of the known world to its own

devices, out in the gasses. He jumped into the car and

gunned off; and smashed it into a tree. A tree he hadn't

even put back yet. But the crash somehow pops the

whole world back. There it is; back from the fat-

bubbling ooze. The car is smashed, but he has survived.

Survived!

Survival!

and he plunges into the lodge to seek out the

maniac Kesey. That sombitch has prolly popped back,

too.

chapter

XIX

The Trips Festival

OWSLEY'S FREAKOUT! OWSLEY BECAME

OBSESSED WITH IT

himself. Whenever the subject was

the LSD experience— which it was most of the time

around Owsley—he would recount his experience at

Muir Beach. It seemed to horrify and intrigue him at

the same time—such morbid but wonderful details.

Everyone listens ... can such things be? In any case, it

sounded like Owsley thought Kesey was a demon and

he was going to cut off their LSD supply.

Richard Alpert was also unhappy with the Acid

Tests. Alpert, like Timothy Leary, had sacrificed his

academic career as a psychologist for the sake of the

psychedelic movement. It was hard enough to keep the

straight multitudes from going hysterical over the

subject of LSD even in the best of circumstances—let

alone when it was used for manic screaming orgies in

public places. Among the heads who leaned toward

Leary and Alpert, it was hard to even freaking believe

that the Pranksters were pulling a freaking prank like

this. Any moment they were expecting them to explode

into some sort of debacle, some sort of mass freakout,

that the press could seize on and bury the psychedelic

movement forever. The police watched them closely,

but there was very little they could do about it, except

for an occasional marijuana bust, since there was no

law against LSD at the time. The Pranksters went on to

hold Tests in Palo Alto, Portland, Oregon, two in San

Francisco, four in and around Los Angeles—and three

in Mexico—and no laws broken here, Lieutenant—only

every law of God and man—In short, a goddamn

outrage, and we're powerless—

The Acid Tests were one of those outrages, one

of those scandals, that create a new style or a new

world view. Everyone clucks, fumes, grinds their teeth

over the bad taste, the bad morals, the insolence, the

vulgarity, the childishness, the lunacy, the cruelty, the

irresponsibility, the fraudulence and, in fact, gets

worked up into such a state of excitement, such an

epitasis, such a slaver, they can't turn it loose. It

becomes a perfect obsession. And now they'll show you

how it should have been done.

The Acid Tests were the epoch of the psychedelic

style and practically everything that has gone into it. I

don't mean merely that the Pranksters did it first but,

rather, that it all came straight out of the Acid Tests in

a direct line leading to the Trips Festival of January

1966. That brought the whole thing full out in the open.

"Mixed media" entertainment—this came straight out of

the Acid Tests' combination of light and movie

projections, strobes, tapes, rock 'n' roll, black light.

"Acid rock"—the sound of the Beatles' Sergeant Pepper

album and the high-vibrato electronic sounds of the

Jefferson Airplane, the Mothers of Invention and many

other groups—the mothers of it all were the Grateful

Dead at the Acid Tests. The Dead were the audio

counterpart of Roy Seburn's light projections. Owsley

was responsible for some of this, indirectly. Owsley

had snapped back from his great Freakout and started

pouring money into the Grateful Dead and, thereby, the

Tests. Maybe he figured the Tests were the wave of the

future, whether he had freaked out or not. Maybe he

thought "acid rock" was the sound of the future and he

would become a kind of Brian Epstein for the Grateful

Dead. I don't know. In any case, he started buying the

Dead equipment such as no rock 'n' roll band ever had

before, the Beatles included, all manner of tuners,

amplifiers, receivers, loudspeakers, microphones, car-

tridges, tapes, theater horns, booms, lights, turntables,

instruments, mixers, muters, servile mesochroics,

whatever was on the market. The sound went down so

many microphones and hooked through so many mixers

and variable lags and blew up in so many amplifiers

and roiled around in so many speakers and fed back

down so many microphones, it came on like a chemical

refinery. There was something wholly new and

deliriously weird in the Dead's sound, and practically

everything new in rock 'n' roll, rock jazz I have heard it

called, came out of it.

Even details like psychedelic poster art, the

quasi-art nouveau swirls of lettering, design and

vibrating colors, electro-pastels and spectral Day-Glo,

came out of the Acid Tests. Later other impresarios and

performers would recreate the Prankster styles with a

sophistication the Pranksters never dreamed of. Art is

not eternal, boys. The posters became works of art in

the accepted cultural tradition. Others would even play

the Dead's sound more successfully, commercially,

anyway, than the Dead. Others would do the mixed-

media thing until it was pure ambrosial candy for the

brain with creamy filling every time. To which Kesey

would say: "They know where it is, but they don't know

what it is."

IT WAS ACTUALLY STEWART BRAND

WHO THOUGHT UP THE great Trips Festival of

January 1966. Brand and a San Francisco artist, Ramon

Sender. Brand was 27 and an ex-biologist who had run

across the Indian peyote cults in Arizona and New

Mexico. Brand founded an organization called America

Needs Indians. And then one day he took some LSD,

right after an Explorer satellite went up to photograph

the earth, and as the old synapses began rapping around

inside his skull at 5,000 thoughts per second, he was

struck with one of those questions that inflame men's

brains: Why Haven't We Seen a Photograph of the

Whole Earth Yet?—and he drove across America from

Berkeley, California, to 116th Street, New York City,

selling buttons with that legend on them to Leftists,

Rightists, Fundamentalists, Theosophists, malcontents,

anyone with the health or stealth of paranoia or the put-

on in their souls ...

He and his friend Sender got the idea of pulling

together all the new forms of expression that were

kicking around in the hip world at that moment and

having a Super Acid Test out in the open. Hire a hall

and call in the multitudes. They found an impresario

for the thing, Bill Graham, a New Yorker who had a lot

of cachet in the hip world of San Francisco as a

member of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, which used

to get busted for putting on political dumb shows in the

park, that kind of thing. The Trips Festival was set for

Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights, January 21—23,

at the Longshoremen's Hall in San Francisco. The Trips

Festival was billed as a big celebration that was going

to simulate an LSD experience, minus the LSD, using

light effects and music, mainly. The big night, Saturday

night, was going to be called The Acid Test, featuring

Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters.

Kesey and the Pranksters were primed for the

Festival. Even Mountain Girl was on hand. She had

wrestled the thing out in her mind and was back on the

bus. The Pranksters had just held an Acid Test at the

Fillmore Auditorium, a big ballroom in the middle of

one of San Francisco's big Negro slums, the Fillmore

district. It was a wild night. Hundreds of heads and

bohos from all over the Bay area turned out, zonked to

the eyeballs. Paul Krassner was back in town, and he

heard the word that was out on . .. The Scene.

Everybody would be "dropping acid" about 5 or 6 P.M.

to get ready for the Acid Test to begin that night at

nine o'clock at the Fillmore Auditorium. Krassner

arrives and— shit!—he sees:

... a ballroom surrealistically seething with a

couple of thousand bodies stoned out of their everlovin

bruces in crazy costumes and obscene makeup with a

raucous rock 'n roll band and stroboscope lights and a

thunder machine and balloons and heads and streamers

and electronic equipment and the back of a guy's coat

proclaiming Please don't believe in magic to a girl

dancing with 4-inch eyelashes so that even the

goddamn Pinkerton Guards were contact high.

Kesey asks him to take the microphone and

contribute to a running commentary on the scene. "All I

know," he announces into the din, "is that if I were a

cop and I came in here, I wouldn't know where to

begin."

Well, the cops came in, and they didn't know

where to begin. They came in to close the Test down at

2 A.M. in keeping with a local ordinance and the whole

thing was at its maddest height. Mountain Girl had hold

of a microphone and was shrieking encouragement to

the flailing dancers. Babbs was beaming spotlights at

heads who were veering around bombed and asking

them spectral questions over another microphone—Say

there, what's your trouble—have you l-o-s-t y-o-u-r mi-

i-i-i-i-i-i-nd! Page Browning was grinning Zea-lot. The

cops started shouting for them to close down but

couldn't make themselves heard and started pulling

plugs out, microphone plugs, loudspeaker plugs, strobe

plugs, amplifier plugs—but there were so many

goddamn plugs, the most monumental snake pit of

wires and plugs in history, and as fast as they would

pull eight plugs out, Mountain Girl would put ten plugs

back in, and finally Mountain Girl had a microphone up

on the balcony somewhere and was screaming

instructions to the dancers and the cops—louder music,

more wine—and they couldn't find her. Finally they

ordered the Pranksters to start clearing the place out,

which they did, except for Babbs, who sat down in a

chair and wouldn't budge. We said get busy, said the

cops.

"I don't have to," said Babbs. "I'm the boss here.

They're working for me. "

Yeah?—and one of the cops grabs Babbs by a

luminous vest he has on, succeeding only in separating

Babbs from the vest. Babbs grinning maniacally but

suddenly looming most large and fierce.

"You're under arrest!"

"For what?"

"Resistin'."

"Resistin' what?"

"You gonna come quietly or do we have to take

you?"

"Either way you want it," says Babbs, grinning in

the most frightening manner now, like the next step is

eight karate chops to the gizzards and giblets. Suddenly

it is a Mexican standoff—with both sides glaring but

nobody swinging a punch yet. It is a grand hassle, of

course. At the last minute a couple of Kesey's lawyers

arrive on the scene and cool everything down and talk

the cops out of it and Babbs out of it and it all rumbles

away in the valley as part of the Welthassle.

THE LAWYERS — YES. KESEY'S

ORIGINAL MARIJUANA CHARGE, on the big

arrest at La Honda, had been ricocheting around in the

San Mateo County court system for nine months.

Kesey's lawyers were attacking the warrant that enabled

the various constables to make the raid. The case had

started with a Grand Jury hearing, which is of course a

secret procedure. The County claimed it had all sorts of

evidence to the effect that Kesey and the Pranksters

had been giving dope to minors. Kesey's lawyers were

trying to get the whole case thrown out on the grounds

that the original warrant for the raid was fraudulent.

This didn't work, and Kesey now had the choice of

facing trial and a lot of lurid testimony or waiving open

trial and letting a judge decide the case on the basis of

the transcript of the Grand Jury proceedings. It was

finally arranged that Kesey would let the judge do it.

He would most likely be getting a light sentence. Even

after that he could still appeal the case on the grounds

that the warrant had been trumped up. This whole thing

with the judge was the equivalent, in a roundabout way,

of pleading no contest. On January 17, 1966, four days

before the Trips Festival, the judge duly found Kesey

guilty and sentenced him to six months on a work farm

and three years on probation. This was about what his

lawyers expected. It wasn't so bad. The work farm was

right near La Honda, ironically enough, and the

prisoners did a lot of their work clearing out a stretch

of forest back of Kesey's place. There was something

very funny about that. Lime-light bowers for the

straight multitudes. There was more irony. McMurphy,

in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, started his

adventures with a six-month stretch on a work farm.

Kesey had been a McMurphy on the outside for four

years. Now maybe he would be a McMurphy on the

inside, for real. Maybe ... anyway it was far from the

goddamn end of the world. Then an uncool thing

happened.

THE NIGHT OF JANUARY 19, TWO

NIGHTS BEFORE THE TRIPS Festival, Kesey,

Mountain Girl, and some of the Pranksters went over to

Stewart Brand's apartment, in North Beach, San Fran-

cisco, to make plans for the Trips Festival. Sometime

after midnight Kesey and Mountain Girl went up on the

roof on top of the building and spread out an old blue

pad that had been in the back of somebody's station

wagon on the gravel up there and stretched out on the

pad, grooving on the peaceful debris of North Beach.

It's nice and homey boho quaint, North Beach. Slums

with a view. Out there the lights of the bay and the

fishing boats and the honky-tonks and more lights

climbing up the hills of San Francisco and nearer, all

the asphalt squares of the other rooftops, squares and

levels and ladders—grooving on the design, which is

nice and peaceful and a little arty-looking, but that is

North Beach. Mountain Girl all dark brown hair and big

brown eyes, coming on ornery and fun-loving—it

occurs to Kesey—rather like the eyes of an Irish setter

pup just turning from awkward carefree frolic to the

task of devotion.

Mountain Girl is being enthusiastic about the

Trips Festival. "With that big new speaker," she says,

"we'll be able to wire that place so you can hear a flea

fart!"

Awkward carefree frolic to the task of—Kesey is

feeling old. Once a stud so gorged with muscle tone—

his face feels lopsided with the strain, of... the eternal

hassling, the lawyering, the legally sanctioned lying on

all sides, politicking, sucking up, getting lectured at,

cranking on the old lopsided diplomatic smile ...

"—hear a flea fart!" "Hasn't happened yet," says

Kesey.

"With this many days to set it up? Always before

we were in the hall that night and maybe set up before

we finished in the morning."

And so forth and so on—Kesey and Mountain

Girl lie on their stomachs with their chins in their

hands, gazing down four stories to the alley below and

occasionally scraping gravel off the rooftop and tossing

it down ...

... yes... ummm ... at 1:53 A.M. the cops of the

19th Precinct got a call from a woman at 18 Margrave

Place saying some drunken tormentors or something

were throwing rocks at her window. Shortly after 2

A.M. a police car pulls into the alley. So Kesey and

Mountain Girl groove on that. Yup, a police car right

down below, police car come here. A red light on a

hillside drive about 50 yards away blinks. A red light

blinks and a police car tools in the alley. Ah, always

the synch, friends. The cops are coming in this

building. Wonder on earth what for. Do I learn any-

thing? Or once again lie loaded and disbelieving as

two cops climb five stories to drag me to the cooler....

Oh, the logic of the groove and the synch. Kesey and

Mountain Girl see it all at once, now, so clearly. It is

so very obvious that it fascinates. They see it all, grok

it all—Scram, split, run, flee, hide, vanish,

disintegrate—the red alert is so very clear, it blinks

and blinks, red, nothing, red, nothing, red, nothing, red,

nothing, and yet move? and miss it all? turning so slow

in the interferrometric synch? It is like a weird time he

was in Olympic wrestling eliminations, in 1960, in the

San Francisco Olympic Club, first round against a

hulking stud, and he took a couple of vitamins before

the fray, revved up, revved up, not doped, oh

mom&dad&buddy&sis&dear-but-square-ones, all

Olympian athletes are doped, force-fed pill-heads, see

them lead them, all gorged with glistening muscle veins

and crewcut and led to the training table and by every

plate a lineup of capsules like the wineglasses at the

gourmet dinner, capsules for iron, capsules for calcium,

capsules to make you squeeze your colon and flex your

heart, capsules of B

mighty as pure amphetamine turn

your blood vessels into black snakes, capsules to make

you long and brute in the teeth, make you clean & jerk

in the arms, mad ape in the neck, sharp in the tusk,

panther in the solar plexus lineup of crewcut stud bulls

concocted out of chemicals force-fed every day at

every plate—revved up, revved up, revved up waiting

for the referee to snap his hand up in mid-air to start

the match, snap... and it is so very fascinating ... he is

like a motor running at top speed with the clutch in ...

it is intriguing, not intimidating, the way this great stud

grabs him above the knee with his huge hand and starts

pulling down—Kesey is two people, revved up here on

the mat and revved up here in the ethers like an astral

body, watching—interesting!—no man could be as

strong as this guy here and execute a takedown by

pulling downward on the knee—no danger, friends, just

fascination—and so the guy won a trophy for the fastest

pin of the tourney, while the motor revved in synch

with a different bummer—

—fascinating!—so—

—out the scroffy arty rooftop door come two

cops, Officers Fred Pardella and Thomas L. O'Donnell

of the 19th Precinct, by designation—

What happened next became the subject of two

trials in San Francisco, later, many fugitive months

later, both ending in hung juries, the second one 11 to 1

against Kesey. According to Officers Pardella and

O'Donnell, they found the suspects Kesey and the

Adams girl and a plastic bag containing a quantity of

brownish vegetation. Whereupon Officer O'Donnell

sought to collect the evidence, and Kesey wrestled him

for it, throwing the bag onto an adjoining arty rectangle

rooftop and very nearly Pardella along with it,

whereupon Officer O'Donnell drew his gun and brought

both Kesey and the girl into custody. The plastic bag,

retrieved, contained 3.54 grams of marijuana.

THIS WAS A BEAUTIFUL MESS AND NO

TWO WAYS ABOUT IT. A second offense for

possession of marijuana carried an automatic five-year

sentence with no possibility of parole. At the very least

he stood to get the full three-year sentence in San

Mateo County now, as one of the judge's conditions had

been that he no longer associate with the Pranksters.

Mountain Girl was ready to take the whole rap herself.

"We were just tying it off," she told the press. "He

wasn't supposed to hang around with any of us wild,

giddy people any more. This was the last time we were

gonna see him." Well... she tried. Kesey's probation

officer in San Mateo County advised him for godsake

stay away from the Trips Festival or he was in for it,

but the whole thing was miles beyond in-for-it, out

towards old Edge City, in fact.

Kesey left Municipal Court in San Francisco on

January 20 with Mountain Girl and Stewart Brand and

onto the whole bus full of Pranksters to roll through

San Francisco advertising the Trips Festival. They got

out at Union Square. Kesey wore a pair of white Levi's

with the backsides emblazoned with HOT on the left

side and COLD on the right and TIBET in the

middle.— and a pair of sky-blue boots. They all played

Ron Boisie's Thunder Machine for loon vibrations in

Union Square in the fibrillateing heart of San

Francisco.

If nothing else, Kesey's second arrest was great

publicity for the Trips Festival. It was all over San

Francisco newspapers. In the hip, intellectual, and even

social worlds of San Francisco, the Trips Festival

notion was spreading like a fever. The dread drug LSD.

Acid heads. An LSD experience without the LSD, it

was being billed as—moreover, people actually

believed it. But mainly the idea of a new life style was

making itself felt. Do you suppose this is the—new

wave... ?

And you buy y'r ticket, f'r chrissake—an absurd

thought to Norman Hartweg—and we've got a

promoter—all absurd, but the thousands pour into the

Longshoremen's Hall for the Trips Festival, thousands

even the first night, which was mostly Indian night, a

weird thing put on by Brand's America Needs Indians,

but now on Saturday evening the huge crush hits for the

Acid Test. Norman is absolutely zonked on acid—and

look at the freaks running in here. Norman is not the

only one. "An LSD experience without LSD"—that was

a laugh. In fact, the heads are pouring in by the

hundreds, bombed out of their gourds, hundreds of

heads coming out into the absolute open for the first

time. It is like the time the Pranksters went to the

Beatles concert in full costume, looking so bizarre and

so totally smashed that no one could believe they were.

Nobody would risk it in public like this. Well, the kids

are just having an LSD experience without LSD, that's

all, and this is what it looks like. A hulking crazed

whirlpool. That's nice. Lights and movies sweeping

around the hall; five movie projectors going and God

knows how many light machines, interferrometrics, the

intergalactic science-fiction seas all over the walls,

loudspeakers studding the hall all the way around like

flaming chandeliers, strobes exploding, black lights

with Day-Glo objects under them and Day-Glo paint to

play with, street lights at every entrance flashing red

and yellow, two bands, the Grateful Dead and Big

Brother and the Holding Company and a troop of weird

girls in leotards leaping around the edges blowing dog

whistles—and the Pranksters. Paul Foster has wrapped

black friction tape all around his shoes and up over his

ankles and swaddled his legs and hips and torso in it up

to his rib cage, where begins a white shirt and then

white bandaging all over his face and skull and just a

slit for his eyes, over which he wears dark glasses. He

also wears a crutch and a sign saying, You're in the

Pepsi Generation and I'm a pimply freak!" Rotor! Also

heads from all over, in serapes and mandala beads and

Indian headbands and Indian beads, the great era for all

that, and one in a leather jerkin with "Under Ass

Wizard Mojo Indian Fighter" stenciled on the back.

Mojo! Oh the freaking strobes turning every brain stem

into a cauliflower erupting into corrugated ping-pong

balls—can't stand it—and a girl rips off her shirt and

dances bare-breasted with her great mihs breaking up

into an endless stream of ruby-red erect nipples

streaming out of the great milk-and-honey under the

strobe lights. The dancing is ecstatic, a nice macaroni

of braless breasts jiggling and cupcake bottoms

wiggling and multiple arms writhing and leaping about.

Thousands of straight intellectuals and culturati and

square hippies, North Beach style, gawking and

learning. Dr. Francis Rigney, Psychiatrist to the Beat

Generation, looking on, and all the Big Daddies left

over from the Beat period, Eric "Big Daddy" Nord and

Tom "Big Daddy" Donahue, and the press, vibrating

under Ron Boise's thunder machine. A great rout in

progress, you understand.

And in the center of the hall—the Pranksters'

tower of Control. It had come to that, and it was

perfect. Babbs had supervised the building of a great

scaffolding of pipes and platforms in the center of the

hall. It rose and rose, this tower, as the Pranksters

added equipment, all the mikes and amplifiers and

spots and projectors and all the rest of it, the very

architecture of Control, finally. Babbs at the controls,

Hagen up there taking movies; the Movie goes on.

Kesey, meanwhile, was up on an even higher plateau of

control, up on a balcony in a silver space suit complete

with a big bubble space helmet. He conceived of it first

as a disguise, so he could be there without the various

courts being raggy and outraged, but everyone

recognized the Space Man immediately, of course, and

he perched up above the maelstrom with a projection

machine with which you could write messages on ac-

etate and project them in mammoth size on the walls.

Zonker dancing in a spin of pure unadulterated

bliss, higher than he had ever been in his life, which

for Zonker was getting up there. Norman, smashed, but

with a mission. Norman to circulate among the

multitudes with movie camera. Only he has no power

pack, so he has to plug the camera in a wall socket and

go out with a great long cord. His eye pressed against

the sighting lens and gradually the whole whirlpool

coming into his one eye, unity, I, the vessel, receiving

all, Atman and Brahman, letting it all flow in until—

satori—the perfect state is reached and he realizes he is

God. He has traveled miles through this writhing mac-

aroni ecstasy mass and could the camera still possibly

be plugged in?—or could that possibly matter? deus ex

machina, with the world flowing into one eye. Becomes

essential that he reach the Central Node, the Tower of

Control, the great electric boom of the directional mike

picking up the band sticking out from atop the

scaffolding tower—and there it is—it is all there in this

moment. Starts clambering up the scaffolding with the

huge camera still over his shoulder and up to his eye,

all funneling in, and the wire and plug snaking behind

him, through the multitudes. And who might these irate

forms be?—in truth, Babbs and Hagen, Babbs gesturing

for Norman to get off the platform, he's in the way,

there's no room, get the hell off of here—a cosmic

laugh, since obviously they don't know who he is, viz.,

God. Norman, the meek, the mild, the retiring, the

sideliner, laughs a cosmic laugh at them and keeps on

coming. At any moment, he fully realizes, he can make

them disappear down ... his eye, just two curds in the

world flow, Babbs and Hagen.

"Norman, if you don't get the hell off of here, I'm

going to throw you off! "—Babbs looking huge and

untamable in the same stance he gave the San Francisco

cops at the Fillmore, and Norman's mind split just

slightly along the chiasma, like a San Andreas fault,

one part some durable hard-core fear of getting thrown

off and breaking his ass, him, Norman, but the other,

the Cosmic laugh of God at how useless Babbs's stance

is now, vibrating slightly between God and not-God,

but then the laugh comes in a wave, just the cosmic fact

that he, Norman, now dares do this, defiance, the new I

and there is not one thing, really, they can do about

it—Babbs staring at this grinning, zonked figure with

the huge camera clambering up the scaffolding. Babbs

just throws his hands up, gives up, Norman ascends.

God! in the very Tower of Control. Well, if I'm God, I

can control this thing. Gazing down into the whirlpool.

He gestures—and it comes to pass!—there is a ripple in

the crowd there and again and there is a ripple in the

crowd here—also so clear what is going to happen, he

can predict it, a great eruption of ecstatic dancing in

that clump, under the strobes, it will break out now,

and it does, of course—a vibration along the crack, the

fault, synchronicity spoken here, and we are at play,

but they do it—start the music!—and it starts—satori,

in the Central Node, as it was written—but I say unto

you—and at that very moment, a huge message in red is

written on the wall:

ANYBODY WHO KNOWS HE IS GOD GO UP ON STAGE

Anybody?—The chiasmic halves vibrate, the God

and the not-God, and then he realizes: Kesey wrote

that. Kesey up on the balcony in his space suit wrote

that with his projection machine and flashed it on the

wall, in that very moment. What to do, Archangel of

mine, Norman stares unbelieving—unbelieving in

what?—up on stage climbs a spade with a wild head of

natural spade hair with a headband wrapped around the

hairline so the hair puffs up like a great gray

dandelion, a huge shirt swimming under the lights, and

it is Gaylord, one of the few spades in the whole thing,

gleaming the glistening grin of acid zonk and going

into a lovely godly little dance, this Gaylord God ...

What the hell. Norman gestures toward the crowd, and

it does not ripple. Not here and not there. He predicts

that clump will rise up in ecstatic levitation, and it

does not rise up. In fact, it just sinks to the floor like it

was spat there, sad moon eyes glomming up in the acid

stare. Sayonara, God. And yet... And yet...

* * *

THREE NIGHTS THE HUGE WILD CARNIVAL

WENT ON. IT WAS A big thing on every level. For

one thing, the Trips Festival grossed $12,500 in three

days, with almost no overhead, and a new nightclub and

dance-hall genre was born. Two weeks later Bill Gra-

ham was in business at the Fillmore auditorium with a

Trips Festival going every weekend and packing them

in. For the acid heads themselves, the Trips Festival

was like the first national convention of an

underground movement that had existed on a hush-hush

cell-by-cell basis. The heads were amazed at how big

their own ranks had become—and euphoric over the

fact that they could come out in the open, high as

baboons, and the sky, and the law, wouldn't fall down

on them. The press went along with the notion that this

had been an LSD experience without the LSD. Nobody

in the hip world of San Francisco had any such

delusion, and the Haight-Ashbury era began that

weekend.

The Trips Festival changed many things. But as

soon as the whirlpool died down, Kesey was right back

where he started, so far as the grinning lopsided

frowning world of the San Mateo and San Francisco

County courts were concerned. The bastids were

digging in for prisoner's base. They had already dug

him out of the place in La Honda. Part of the fiat of

Judge de Matteis was that Kesey get out of La Honda

and sell his place to somebody who had nothing to do

with him or his works and stay out of San Mateo

County except to see his probation officer or travel

through on the Harbor Freeway or over the territorial

boundaries of San Mateo County by airplane and

remove himself and all his influences from said

County. So Kesey and Faye and the kids moved into the

Spread, Babbs's place, in Santa Cruz. Winding his way

down there on January 23—there was a warrant waiting

for his arrest on the grounds of violating probation.

Well, that's their Movie, Tonto, and we all know

how that one ends. Three years in the San Mateo

donjon, plus the five or eight or twenty they come up

with in San Francisco to teach a lesson while the iron

and the spittle are hot to all the Trips Festival dope

fiends. Kesey called an immediate briefing, and

remember that little abjuration a couple months ago

about prepare for Mexico... ?

So they gathered at the Spread.

"If society wants me to be an outlaw," said

Kesey, "then I'll be an outlaw, and a damned good one.

That's something people need. People at all times need

outlaws."

The Pranksters comprehended it all at once.

So here is the current fantasy: tonight he is going

to split for Mexico. He'll go across the border in the

back of Ron Boise's truck. Boise was down at Babbs's

at the time, and he had a truck that served as a kind of

mobile studio. It had all his welding equipment and

acetylene torches and the like and he would work back

there on the mud flats out back, shaping old car fenders

into the erotic poses of the Kama Sutra. Finally Roy

Seburn's psychedelic car, his miniature bus, had been

fed to the torches back there, too, as it was broken

down for good. Nothing lasts. Art is not eternal. They

would head for Puerto Vallarta. He would use another

Prankster's driver's license as I.D. in case he needed it

down there. Meanwhile, as a cover story, one last grand

prank. The Suicide Trip.

Kesey would write a suicide note. Then D—, who

looked uncommonly like him—Dee would dress up like

him and get in an old panel truck that was around there

and drive up the coast, toward Oregon, and pick out a

likely cliff and smash the truck into a tree trunk and

get out and leave the suicide note on the seat of the

truck and throw his sky-blue boots down by the shore

so it would look like he had dived in the water and

gone out to sea, never to come back to his swamp of

troubles. The idea was that Dee would look enough like

Kesey, especially in a Prankster costume, so that if

anybody did happen to see him driving along the way,

they would remember him as someone answering

Kesey's description. Let 'em unravel that one. Even if

they don't fall for it, at least it might take the heat off.

Why should we go to all this trouble—the ninny might

be lying on the bottom of the ocean, them damn dope

fiends ...

"I hope Dee doesn't do a Dee-out," Mountain Girl

said. But she was optimistic. The whole thing had a lot

of élan du Prank.

That night Kesey and Mountain Girl got stoned

on grass and started composing the great suicide note:

"Last words. A vote for Barry is a vote for fun. I,

Ken Kesey, being of (ahem) sound mind and body, do

hereby leave the whole scene to Faye, Corporation,

cash and the works (and it occurs to me here that

nobody is going to buy this prank and now it occurs to

me that I like that even better).. ."

Shee-ut, this was fun. Put-on after put-on

bubbled up in their brains, and all the bullshit

metaphors of destiny, all the bullshit lines a good

bullshit poet would come up with upon looking the

Grim Creeper in the arsehole:

"Wind, wind send me not this place, though,

onward ..."

More! More! Louder music, more wine!

"... Ocean, ocean, ocean, I'll beat you in the end,

I'll break you this time. I'll go through with my heels

your hungry ribs..."

On and on it went, like a running account of the

mad-drive-to-be up the coast, looking for his favorite

cliff, to jump off of, presumably, the whole scene

bubbling up in his brain and Mountain Girl's on the

ratty rug in Babbs's living room. Hell, let's throw in

some acid—they'll believe the damn ninny dope fiend

would take the dread LSD and break his ass for good—

and hell, slam the freaking vehicle into a tree, bleed

verisimilitude all over the California littoral:

"... I've lost the ocean again. Beautiful. I drive

hundreds of miles looking for my particular cliff, get

so trapped behind acid I can't find the ocean, end up

slamming into a redwood ..."

Beautiful. Ready, Ron? He gets into Boise's truck

and they head off south for San Diego, the Mexican

border, Tijuana and the land of all competent Outlaws.

chapter

The Electric Kool-Aid

Acid Test

WHAT HAPPENED TO THE PRANKSTERS

AFTER KESEY'S flight to Mexico was so much like

what happened to the League after Leo fled in Hermann

Hesse's book The Journey to the East—well, it was

freaking weird, this particular synch ... exactly ... the

Pranksters ! and the great bus trip of 1964! their whole

movie. No; it went on. Hesse's fantasy coincided with

theirs all the way. It went on—all the way to this weird

divide—

The leader of the League in The Journey to the

East was named Leo. He was never openly known as

the leader: like Kesey, he was the "non-navigator" of

the brotherhood. And Leo suddenly left "in the middle

of the dangerous gorge of Morbio Inferiore," just when

the League was deepest into its Journey to the East, in

the critical phase of a trip that was being alternately

denounced and wondered at. "From that time, certainty

and unity no longer existed in our community, although

the great idea still kept us together. How well I

remember those first disputes! They were something so

new and unheard-of in our hitherto perfectly united

League. They were conducted with respect and polite-

ness—at least in the beginning. At first they led neither

to fierce conflicts nor personal reproaches or insults—

at first we were still an inseparable, united brotherhood

throughout the world ..." Things got more and more

bitter, and the narrator, "H.," left after the Morbio

Inferiore. And the narrator, Hartweg, left after ...

Very weird, the synch!

With Kesey gone, Babbs became the leader.

There was no meeting, no vote, not even a parting word

from Kesey. Babbs becomes the leader—the ... group

mind knew that at once, without a second thought. They

packed up everything at La Honda and took it up to

Oregon, to Kesey's parents' home. The Archives they

stashed at the Spread and, later, up at Chuck's house in

Oregon. This and that they bequeathed to other heads,

like the great round table with the Hell's Angels'

carvings all over it. They gave that to a new

psychedelic group, the Anonymous Artists of America,

at a place called Rancho Diablo up at Skylonda. What-

ever they could use for the Acid Tests they took along.

Babbs moved the Acid Test scene to Los Angeles

and the bus lumbered on down there. They had hardly

gotten there before the soft rumblings started—

"certainty and unity no longer existed in our

community, although the great idea still kept us to-

gether. How well I remember those first disputes!"

Babbs gives too many orders—Kesey, the non-

navigator, merely expressed a will and merely waited

for it to move forward in the Group Mind. Babbs runs

this like the Army... like the Boy Scouts... Babbs's put-

ons suddenly seemed pure sarcasm. His cryptic com-

ments, his candor, seemed cruel. Some of the

Pranksters even took to sympathizing with poor

wretches like Pancho Pillow; the universally put-down

acid-rapping fool, Pancho.

Pancho, ever in the throes of self-laceration, was

still desperate to be on the bus. The poor bastard spent

his last earthly dime and traveled from San Francisco

to Los Angeles and caught up with the bus in Lemon

Grove one day. Pancho came ambling up with a huge

grin of brotherhood and started to climb up the steps

and Babbs met him at the door of the bus.

"I don't think anybody wants you here," said

Babbs.

"What do you mean?" says Pancho. "Can't I come

on the bus ? "

"There's nobody on the bus who wants you on the

bus."

Pancho's grin is wiped off, of course, and his

eyes start batting around like pinballs, trying to make

out who is inside the bus—you all know me, I'm

Pancho!

"Well... I know I get on some people's nerves,"

says Pancho, "but I came all the way here to be with

you guys, and I spent all my money getting here—"

"We don't care," says somebody else's voice, on

the bus.

"Look," says Pancho, "I'll shut up, I'll do

whatever you want. I just want to help with the Tests.

I'll do anything—"

"We don't care." Somebody else's voice, on the

bus.

"—odd jobs, run errands, there must be a

thousand things—"

"We don't care."

Pancho stands there, speechless, his face bursts

with red.

"See," says Babbs, "it's like I said. I don't think

there's anybody who wants you on here."

Numb Pancho backs down off the steps and

trudges off in Lemon Grove.

Well, they had a good laugh over that. The

freaking Pancho Pillow! A bad-trip freak if there ever

was one! A breaker of balls extraordinaire! The human

bummer: ::::: but it was a laugh with a metallic

aftertaste, this joke on Pancho ::::::

Babbs had gotten hold of an old mansion in L.A.,

called the Sans Souci, a great incredible moldering old

place with a dome and a stone balustrade, all crumbling

and moldering, but with style. When the owner found a

bunch of beatniks in there, he freaked, but that was

later. Anyway, one day they were all in there and one

Prankster said a very unPrankster thing. He spoke up

and said:

"I want to voice this idea: I can't stand Margie

and I don't want her around."

Unfreakingbelievable. He was talking about

Marge the Barge. So then all eyes went to Babbs, who

was now thrust into the Kesey role of resolving all.

Babbs turns to Marge the Barge and says:

"What do you think about that?"

Marge says: "I think that's ridiculous," and with

such quiet flat conviction that nobody else says

anything.

A small moment—but one more moment in the

gathering schism, the Babbs loyalists versus the had-

enough-of-Babbs. Later they would realize they were in

many cases merely blaming Babbs for the mysterious

sense of loss in their venture. They were casting about

for an explanation, and Babbs was It. What they had

lost of course, was the magical cement of Kesey's

charisma. "It seemed that the more certain his loss

became, the more indispensable he seemed; without

Leo, his handsome face, his good humor and his songs,

without his enthusiasm for our great undertaking, the

undertaking itself seemed in some mysterious way to

lose meaning."

IN FACT, BABBS CARRIED THE ACID

TESTS INTO LOS ANGELES with an amazing

determination. The Pranksters were now out of their

home territory, the San Francisco area, but they

performed with an efficiency they never knew they had

before. It was as if they were all picking up on Babbs's

exhortation of months ago: "We've got to learn how to

function on acid." They were soaring out of their

gourds themselves, but they were pulling off Acid Tests

that seemed like they were orchestrated.

Babbs was in great form, as I say, and he had

also hooked up with a remarkable head named Hugh

Romney, a poet, actor, and comedian who had gone the

whole route, starting back in the Beat Generation days

and was now into the LSD thing and had "discovered

the Management," as he put it, "and when you discover

the Management there's nothing to do but go to work

for it." So Romney and his friend Bonnie Jean were

now on the bus, and they all set out to—nothing more,

nothing less—turn on Los Angeles to the Management.

.. Yesss... The first Test was at Paul Sawyer's church in

Northridge, just out from Los Angeles in the San

Fernando Valley .. . Sawyer has never lost his

willingness to experiment and is on the bus himself.

And if the Sport Shirts could see these ... new

experimental rites... including music, dance, and

sacrifice—the sacrifice?—well... it was not strictly an

Acid Test, but a "happening," which had become a

harmless and un-loaded word in Cultural circles, even

in Sawyer's Valley Unitarian-Universalist Church. A

marvelous modern building shaped like a huge Bermuda

onion, it was, forming one great towering . . . Dome,

with fantastic acoustics like it had been created for the

current fantasy itself. So the Pranksters moved in and

wired and wound up the place, and hundreds arrived for

the "happening," partaking of Prankster magic and

pineapple chili, which was a concoction the Pranksters

served, on the vile side in taste, but pineapple chili

nonetheless, a wacky thought in itself. And Cassady

had a microphone and started rapping, and Romney had

a microphone and started rapping, and he was great,

and Babbs and Paul Foster, flying with the God Rotor

and not stuttering at all... People dancing in the most

ecstatic way and getting so far into the thing, the

straight multitudes even, that even they took

microphones, and suddenly there was no longer any

separation between the entertainers and the entertained

at all, none of that well-look-at-you-startled-squares

condescension of the ordinary happening. Hundreds

were swept up in an experience, which built up like a

dream typhoon, peace on the smooth liquid centrifugal

whirling edge. In short, everybody in The Movie, on

the bus, and it was beautiful... They were like... on! the

Pranksters—now primed to draw the hundreds, the

thousands, the millions into the new experience, and in

the days ahead they came rushing in :::::

::::: Clair Brush, for one. Yes. She was a girl in

her twenties, a pretty redhead, who worked for Art

Kunkin, the editor of the hip circuit weekly, the Los

Angeles Free Press. Her old friend Doc Stanley had

called her up before the Test at Sawyer's church and

said, Clair, there is going to be a happening in a

Unitarian church in the Valley that you really ought to

pick up on, and so forth ... But one of the things Clair

did at the Free Press was compile a calendar of events

for the hip circuit and this was the big season of

"happenings" and she had been through all that a dozen

times, and each one was always billed as the wave of

the future, and was inevitably a drag. So she didn't go.

Ummmm ::::: However :::::

::::: In hearing about it from people who did

attend, though, she decided to go to the next one :::::

::::: which was set for Watts, on Lincoln's

Birthday, February 12, 1966. Watts! the very Watts

where hardly five months before the freaking

revolution of the blacks had broken out, the symbol of

all that was catastrophic and hopeless in American life,

and what is this strange space ship now approaching

Watts, the very Youth Opportunities center itself-—

Youth Opportunities!—-for the trip beyond catastrophe

:::::

::::: "I think what decided me"—Clair is recalling

it for me—"was someone's description of Art Kunkin's

spontaneous participation and enjoyment of the evening

in the church. Most of the people there were given to

improvisation as required, but Arthur and I share a

reserve in crowds.

"Anyway. The Watts site—it was actually

Compton, an incorporated city on the fringe of Watts—

was chosen for reasons unknown to me. The best

guesses I've heard have to do with the politics of taking

such a party into the recently stricken neighborhood, as

a friendship-thing; also a humorous—ironical?—site

for such carryings-on.

"The building was a warehouse, part of a Youth

Opportunities center, but still vacant. They—the Center

people—were using or were going to use the building

as a workshop for manual trades, possibly automotive?

Job-retraining, etc. It was legally leased for 24 or 48

hours by Kesey's group, with money, and the caretaker

of the center was present at all times during the Acid

Test.

"Announcements were made in the usual way,

Free Press and KPFK calendar, etc., and around 200

people were in attendance. When I arrived, nothing had

started ... people were clustered in small groups, sitting

on mats and blankets around the walls. The room, the

main room, was huge ... my conception of feet, in yards

and such, is bad, but I'd guess maybe 50 by 25. There

was a smaller room to the east and bathroom to the

west, and the large room had a corridor running along

the south wall which had open windows waist-high

without glass... through which the scene inside could

be observed.

"I had driven my car down, giving two people a

ride, but I left them immediately ... went to join some

friends who had some rosé wine and were sitting on a

pad on the floor. As I said, none of the effects had

started ... but shortly there was an announcement (I

think by Neal Cassady, but I didn't know him then) that

the evening would begin. Films were projected on the

south wall, with a commentary ... films of Furthur, the

bus, the people in the bus ... the commentary was a

rather dull travelogue and the film seemed fairly

uninspired and confused.

"Remember now, I'm a novice. I'd never even

been 'high' on 'pot' or any kind of pill or anything... my

strongest experience had been with alcohol. I knew a

few 'heads' but didn't think much of the whole thing ...

had tried pot a few times and nothing impressed me,

except for the unpleasant taste.

"This may explain why a lot of people were

digging the film, laughing, and also why a lot of people

were there ... I'm sure that I was one of a minority who

had no idea what to expect. The word must have been

passed, but didn't get to me. Also I think a lot of those

in attendance had heard of Kesey's things and were

very aware of what was being done. Not old unworldly

Clair. Story of my life.

"The film continued, some slides were shown of

flowers and patterns, this and that.. . then a large trash

can, plastic, was carried to the middle of the room, and

all were invited to help themselves to the Kool-Aid it

contained. There was no big rush to the refreshment

stand . . . people wandered up, it was being served in

paper cups, and since Kool-Aid is a staple in the homes

of Del Close and Hugh Romney and other friends of

mine, I thought it quite a natural thing to serve . .. had

a cup, had another, wandered and talked for a while,

had another ..."

. . . Ironically, for Clair, anyway, it was

Romney's inspiration to serve Electric Kool-Aid, as he

called it. They had all... yes... laced it good and heavy

with LSD. It was a prank, partly, but mainly it was the

natural culmination of the Acid Tests. It was a gesture,

it was sheer generosity giving all this acid away, it was

truly turning on the world, inviting all in to share the

Pranksters' ecstasy of the All-one ... all become divine

vessels in unison, and it is all there in Kool-Aid and a

paper cup. Cassady immediately drank about a gallon

of it. Actually there were two cans. Romney took the

microphone and said, "This one over here is for the lit-

tle folk and this one over here is for the big folk. This

one over here is for the kittens and this one over here is

for the tigers," and so forth and so on. As far as he was

concerned, he was doing everything but putting a sign

on the loaded batch saying LSD. Romney was so

thoroughly into the pudding himself it never occurred

to him that a few simpler souls might have wandered

into this unlikely way station in Watts and simply not

know ... or think that all his veiled instructions

probably referred to gin, like the two crystal bowls of

punch at either end of the long white table at a wedding

reception... or just not hear, like Clair Brush—

"Severn Darden was there, and Del Close, of

course, and I knew them from the Second City in

Chicago. Severn and I were standing under a strobe

light (first time I'd seen one, and they are kicky) doing

an improvisation ... he was a jealous husband, I an

unfaithful wife, something simple and funny. He was

choking me and throwing me around (gently, of course)

and suddenly I began to laugh ... and laugh ... and the

laugh was more primitive, more gut-tearing, than

anything I had ever known. It came from somewhere so

deep inside that I had never felt it before ... and it

continued ... and it was uncontrollable ... and wonder-

ful. Something snapped me back and I realized that

there was nothing funny ... nothing to laugh about.. .

what had I been laughing at?

"I looked around and people's faces were

distorted ... lights were flashing everywhere ... the

screen (sheets) at the end of the room had three or four

different films on it at once, and the strobe light was

flashing faster than it had been ... the band, the

Grateful Dead, was playing but I couldn't hear the

music ... people were dancing ... someone came up to

me and I shut my eyes and with a machine he projected

images on the back of my eyelids (I really think this

happened ... I asked and there was such a machine)...

and nothing was in perspective, nothing had any touch

of normalcy or reality ... I was afraid, because I

honestly thought that it was all in my mind, and that I

had finally flipped out.

"I sought a person I trusted, stopping and asking

people what was happening. . . mostly they laughed,

not believing that I didn't know. I found a man I knew

not very well but with whom I felt simpático from the

first time we met. I asked him what was happening, and

if it was all me, and he laughed and held me very close

and told me that the Kool-Aid had been 'spiked' and

that I was just beginning my first LSD experience ...

and not to be afraid, but to neither accept nor reject...

to always keep open, not to struggle or try to make it

stop. He held me for a long time and we grew closer

than two people can be ... our bones merged, our skin

was one skin, there was no place where we could sepa-

rate, where he stopped and I began. This closeness is

impossible to describe in any but melodramatic terms...

still, I did feel that we had merged and become one in

the true sense, that there was nothing that could

separate us, and that it had meaning beyond anything

that had ever been. (Note, a year and two months later

... three months ... I later read about 'imprint' and that

it was possible that we would continue to be

meaningful to each other no matter what

circumstances... I think this is true ... the person in

question remains very special in my life, and I in his,

though we have no contact and see each other

infrequently ... we share something that will last. Oh

hell! There's no way to talk about that without

sounding goopy.)

"I wasn't afraid any more and started to look

around. The setting for the above scene had been the

smaller room which was illuminated only by black

light, which turns people into beautiful color and

texture. I saw about ten people sitting directly under

the black light, which was back-draped by a white

(luminescent lavender, then) sheet, painting on

disembodied mannequins with fluorescent paint... and

on each other, their clothes, etc. I stood under the light

and drops of paint fell on my foot and sandal, and it

was exquisite. I returned to this light frequently ... it

was peaceful and beautiful beyond description. My skin

had depth and texture under the light... a velvety

purple. I remember wishing it could be that color

always. (I still do.)

"There was much activity in the large room.

People were dancing and the band was playing—but I

couldn't hear them. I can't remember a note of the

music, because the vibrations were so intense. I am

music-oriented—sing, play instruments, etc.—which is

why this seems unusual to me. I stood close to the band

and let the vibrations engulf me. They started in my

toes and every inch of me was quivering with them ...

they made a journey through my nervous system (I

remember picturing myself as one of the charts we had

studied in biology which shows the nerve network),

traveling each tiny path, finally reaching the top of my

head, where they exploded in glorious patterns of color

and line .. . perhaps like a Steinberg cartoon? ... I

remember intense colors, but always with black lines ...

not exactly patterns, but with some outlines and

definitions.

"The strobe light broke midway ... I think they

blew something in it... but that was a relief, because I

had been drawn to it but it disturbed the part of me that

was trying to hang onto reality ... playing with time-

sense was something I'd never done ... and I found it

irresistible but frightening.

"The Kool-Aid had been served at ten or so.

Almost from the first the doorway was crowded with

people walking in and out, and policemen. There were,

throughout the evening, at least six different groups of

police . .. starting with the Compton City police, then

the Highway Patrol, sheriffs deputies, L.A.P.D. and the

vice/narco squad. I seem to remember them in groups

of five or six, standing just inside the doorway,

watching, sometimes talking to passers-by, but making

no hostile gestures or threatening statements. It seems

now that they must have realized that whatever was

going on was more than could be coped with ... and a

jail full of 150 people on acid was infinitely un-

desirable ... so they'd look, comment, go away, and

others would come . . . this continued through the

night.

"Dignitaries from the neighborhood attended . . .

I'd guess around midnight, but I've no sense of the time

of any of this, until 6 A.M. or so, when I finally sat

down (I had walked, danced or stood from 10 P.M. on,

not wanting to sit down ... for what reason I can't

imagine). There were two or three women, about seven

men. One of the men was dressed in a white suit and

had a Shriner's cap on—I thought he was Elijah

Muhammed. They smiled, watched, talked with some of

the people ... stayed for about half an hour, and left,

wishing us a happy evening. No Kool-Aid was in

evidence at that time, of course ... it had been removed

quickly. The neighborhood people were Negro, natu-

rally. They seemed to have no idea of the party as

being anything but a gathering of young people, and

appeared to be pleased to welcome us to the

neighborhood. I remember one of the women was

carrying a child and many people stooped to play with

him ... probably a two-year-old boy.

"The caretaker of the building was present for

the whole time. It seems he'd go back to the office part

and sleep for a while, or maybe just get away from the

noise and the chaos... but periodically would check to

see that everything was all right. He was friendly,

happy, but very, very confused at the strange activities.

"Mostly I'd call the Acid Test a master production.

Everything was very carefully meshed and calculated to

produce the LSD effect, so that I have no idea where

the production stopped and my own head took over.

The films being shown were so vivid, with patterns and

details of flowers and trees and often just color sur-

rounded by black lines and fast-moving scenery and

details of hands and such ... again, I avoided getting

hung up watching them ...

"People were standing outside ... it was a cold,

clear night... someone panicked, got in his car and

drove away, burning rubber ... I wanted to go back to

my house, but knew that driving would be insane.

Bonnie (who was Hugh Romney's lady) was standing

alone ... we touched hands and smiled, knowing, caring

. . . Furthur was parked in the street. I went alone and

sat in the bus, and heard and felt the spirits of the

people who lived in it. . . we (the bus and I) went on a

journey through time, and I knew them so well... I went

back inside and found the man whose face was painted

half gold and half silver, with a bushy head of curly

hair, who had seemed earlier to be frightening and

strange"—

—this was Paul Foster—"and looked at him and

understood. The costumes of the Merry Pranksters had

seemed bizarre, and now they were beautiful and right.

I recalled a poster which we'd had on the ceiling of the

Free Press when our offices were under

the Fifth

Estate ... it's a poster for a production of 'The Beard'

and has 'Grah roor ograrh ... lion lioness... oh grahr ...'

(like that) printed on it... and for that moment I

understood exactly what was being said.

"A great flash of insight came to me. I've

forgotten it now, but there was one instant when

everything fell into place and made sense, and I said

aloud, 'Oh, of course!'... why didn't I see all this

before, why couldn't I have realized all these things

and not resisted them so much. That didn't last, and

hasn't recurred.

"There was a witch who was very kind and sent

out the best warm and lovely vibrations. She was

wearing red velvet and she's an older lady, really a

witch in the best possible way. I was glad she was

there, and she was smiling and understanding and en-

joying, mothering those few who were not reacting

well.

"There was one girl who was wrestling with God.

She was with friends, and I think she was all right after

a few hours. There was one man who became

completely withdrawn ... I want to say catatonic,

because we tried to bring him out of it, and could not

make contact at all... he was sort of a friend of mine,

and I had some responsibility for getting him back to

town ... he had a previous history of mental hospitals,

lack of contact with reality, etc., and when I realized

what had happened, I begged him not to drink the Kool-

Aid, but he did ... and it was very bad. These are the

only two people I know of who did have bad

experiences, but I'm sure I wasn't in contact with

everyone.

"I told you about the tape recording ('Who

CARES? ... I don't care ...') and how it was used again at

the next one. Show biz."

—Show biz—yesssss—and nooooo—Clair was

soaring on LSD, wondering what was happening to

herself and whether she was going mad, and so forth,

and the most crazed scream rang out:

"Who cares!"

And then: "Ray! ... Ra-a-a-a-ay! .. . Who cares!"

Not even such a manic scream could have been

heard over the general roar and rush of the Test

ordinarily, over the Grateful Dead wailing, or certainly

not with such clarity, except for the fact that it was

being picked up by a microphone and amplified out of

huge theater horns—

"Who cares!"

That was just the thing for somebody like Clair

to hear, Clair who thought she was going mad—the

sound of a woman freaking out, blowing her mind, all

of it amplified as if it were tearing out of every gut in

the place and up through every brain. So Clair's

protector and impromptu guide put his arms around her

again and told her, "It's a tape they made. It's just a

put-on. Hugh Romney made it." Well, that seemed

plausible. Hugh was an actor and a great satirist and

put-on artist and prankster ... In fact, between screams,

there was Hugh's voice sure enough, coming over the

microphone:

"Ladies and gentlemen, there's a cop who's come

apart in the next room! Will somebody go in there and

put that cop back together again ! "

"Ray! Ra-a-a-a-ay!... It's too perfect!"

Then Romney's voice coming back in: "Does

anybody have any tranquilizers? There's somebody

having a little trouble in the next room."

The next room was the anteroom off the big hall

that Clair had started out in. There was a girl in there

sitting on the floor and freaking out in the most

complete way. Just the thing for acid veterans. These

things happen, what you need is—and Pranksters and

other hierophants of the acid world heard about the girl

sitting in there and screaming. Who cares! and freaking

out. Norman Hartweg and Romney came in there, and

here was a fairly pretty girl, if only her face wasn't so

contorted, with one crippled leg, shrieking Who cares!

and Ra-a-a-a-ay. Ray, the very Ray himself, and

Romney looks at Ray and sees the picture at once. Ray

is a big guy with a crewcut and a T-shirt and a sleeve-

less jacket or vest or something on, which shows his

muscles very well. He looks like some sailor who fell

in with a bunch of hippies and now he wonders what in

the fock has happened— "Ray!"

The worst possible guy in the world to deal with

the Who Cares Girl. This is a job for experts, and we

have them here, some of the greatest acid experts in the

world, Romney, Norman, the Hassler—he comes in—

and here comes Babbs—and they're all gathered around

her in a bunch—Attention!—remember Rachel

Rightbred!—and it came to pass!—and they give her

the freakout expertise: "... don't fight it..."

"... go with it..."

"... neither accept nor deny ..."

". . . go with the flow . . ."

"... we're with you ..."

"... you're in the hands of experts..."

—experts—and the Pranksters are there rapping

over her, riff after riff of words—and then Romney got

hold of some Thorazine, a tranquilizer that is good at

aborting bad LSD trips and he says, "Here, take this—"

—take this—the Who Cares Girl and Ray look at

this costumed freak amid a group of costumed freaks,

all zonked, trying to hand her a capsule of God knows

what—diabolism—and Ray throws the Thorazine away

and the Who Cares Girl throws it away, the capsules go

skidding across the floor, and the Who Cares Girl goes:

harruummmppparummmparrrrumppparruuuuuuum

parum pauharuharummmpa mumbling along, drifting in

and out of the freakout, giggling for a stretch and they

say ah she's coming out of it and then:

"Who cares! ... Ray! ... Ra-a-a-a-ay! ... Oh,

what's the use! ... Sex! ... Ray! Sex! ... Who cares!"

That phrase!—it sticks in Romney's head. He

can't get it out. Her scream shrieks over the hall,

because now Babbs has brought up the microphone and

holds it near her, right in front of Ray, solicitously,

like this will do it. Ray's head sprockets around

inanely. Babbs is getting it all over the microphone to

make it part of the test—not an isolated event—but All-

one, anachoretic freak-out—Who cares! Romney looks

at Babbs and Who cares!—well, Babbs cares, with one

part of him, but with another his devotion is to the

Test, to the Archives, a freakout for the Archives,

freaked out on tape in the Archives, Who Cares in the

Prankster Archives, and the cry wails over the hall, into

every brain, including Clair's—

Romney can't get this insane cry out of his head,

Who cares, and it becomes the Who Cares Test for him,

and he is back at the microphone, with his mission

now, his voice furrowing into the microphone:

"Listen, this girl's brains are coming out! and

who cares? This girl's coming apart! and who cares?

This girl's breaking up into crispy chips! and who

cares? This girl's caked in the dust, nylon wall-to-wall

on her eyeballs! and who cares?"

—and it was very clear. Everybody who cared

would do something, pour on the Energy if nothing

else, bleed Dimensional Kreemo for her, if they truly

cared. It became a test for Romney, he could feel it, to

find the depths of how much he cared—

Who cares! she shrieks

He cares! he feels it, and feels himself

growing—

—while the tapes reel it all in.

FINALLY, EVEN AT THE WATTS TEST

THEY WEAR DOWN, AND those who are not into

the pudding begin to drift off, and the Prankster

diehards and a few discoverers like Clair Brush are still

there, and Norman can tell it is coming, the magic

hour, and Hassler gets up in a blue pageboy costume

and does a funny beautiful slow dance to the music that

is just perfect... and Page is working behind him with

the projectors, the film projectors and the slide

projectors, and he sets up a really kind of gorgeous

collage, moving projections on top of still projections

... and the Pranksters sit amazed and delighted and he

makes slow changes, abstract patterns and projections

from the slides and... it all fits together. . . everything

.. .

About 6 A.M., more cops, narcos now, six in

plainclothes—and one of the diehard three-o'clock

discoverers walks up to them and announces with a

look of total acid-stoned glistening sincerity:

"Listen, I've got more Awareness, more ...

Awareness, in my little fingernail... My Awareness is

so superior to yours that... uh .. ."—obviously from the

glistening strain on his face, there is no metaphor, no

conceit, that can be concocted in the English language

that is enormous enough to express just how superior,

and so his face falls back into a sweet sincere look,

slightly played out, and he says: "How about getting us

some cigarettes? We're all out."

Strangely, one of them did and returned very

quickly with a carton of Kools, which he passed

around. Around 9 A.M. only the Pranksters, Clair and a

few others are still around—and more cops—and finally

they say to Babbs that he ought to get everybody out

now, the L.A. sun is up, the good spades of Watts are

going to work ... and the Pranksters troop out into the

L.A. sunlight, the Devil with an orange face with silver

stars, a tall wild-haired guy with half his face silver

and half gold, Day-Glo crazies trooping out into the

sunlight at 9 A.M. out of the chilled Pandemonium

hatchery ...

And Clair Brush: "It seems that's about it... I've

rambled incredibly ... Did it last? Am I different? I

can't remember. It seems so, but I am not sure. When I

get under black light, or a strobe, it comes back vividly

...

"Del Close told me later I was wandering around

looking 'wonderful... in the sense of full of wonder.'

That's the best description I can imagine.

"I've taken LSD twice since then. Each time was

different and much less dramatic, more personal,

milder. The only strong similarity is the physical

effect, which, for me, consists of contractions quite

like labor pains and a quivering of the nerve-endings ...

anticipatory ... for prolonged periods, the feelings of

being on the verge of orgasm without any contact at

all... these things occurred all three times. Otherwise,

all have been different.

"Take it again? Oh, probably someday ... but no

urgency, no desire to run to my friendly corner pusher.

I think the best way is to take it with a lover, but

someone you're willing to have live in your head for a

long, long time. Not too many of those around. It's a

closeness not easily dismissed. "All, all. Enough, I

hope."

* * *

ABOUT 1 P.M. THE PHONE STARTS

RINGING IN ROMNEY'S apartment, waking him

up: "Romney, you guys ought to be shot!..." "Seven

people committed!"... "Freaked out!"... "Atrocity!" And

finally one from the L.A. police:

"Are you Romney? Listen, we got some two-tone

dude down here—"

Oh, the Di-men-sion-al Kree-mo ... That would

be Paul Foster. Four, five, six hundred people had been

in that madhouse all night long having a goddamned

orgy for themselves—and the cops couldn't lay a hand

on them. So—in the sour-milk L.A. sunlight of 9 A.M.

they had seen this gangling character rocking away

from the building like a Druid, half his face gold, the

other half silver, so they busted the mother, for being .

. . well. . . drunk in public, or something equally likely.

But by 1 P.M. they wish to hell somebody would come

pick up this two-tone dude ...

Christ, man! It's too much for us even! We wash

our hands of this ::::: Atrocity :::::

::::: what... exactly have we done? and :::::

::::: even to some Pranksters, the anti-Babbs

faction, the Test was a debacle. They doubted the

ethics of springing the acid in the Kool-Aid, on the one

hand, and thought the treatment of the Who Cares Girl,

piping her freakout over the speakers, was cruel.

Shortly after they got back to L.A. from La Jolla, the

Schism broke out true and rife, out front. This was a

great little Morbio Inferiore all its own, the Life

Magazine Divide.

The Watts Test in L.A., coming on top of the

Trips Festival in San Francisco, had caused the fast-

rising psychedelic thing to explode right out of the

underground in a way nobody had dreamed of. Leary

and Alpert and their experiments had had plenty of

publicity, but that seemed like a fairly isolated thing

with a couple of Harvard docs at the helm and being

pretty solemn-faced and esoteric about it, all in all.

This new San Francisco-L.A. LSD thing, with wacked-

out kids and delirious rock 'n' roll, made it seem like

the dread LSD had caught on like an infection among

the youth—which, in fact, it had. Very few realized

that it had all emanated from one electric source: Kesey

and the Merry Pranksters.

A team from Life magazine turned up, led by a

photographer, Larry Schiller, who was on to the LSD

world and had taken the pictures at the Hollywood

Test. They interviewed the Pranksters and took pictures

and said they were going to do a big spread on the acid

scene and, they hoped, put the Pranksters on the cover.

So they hailed the bus on over to a big photo studio and

Schiller convened them all. Then—Babbs refused to go

in. But the rest of them, Norman, Hagen, Cassady, a

whole flock of them, went on in, and Schiller took a lot

of pictures. To Norman it seemed square. For one

thing, the guy was working in black and white, and the

most obvious thing about the Pranksters was color,

Day-Glo, the brighter the better, the more vibrations

the better. Then Schiller had them all sit down in a

group, against a black background, and in the middle

they had Cassady stand up and wave his arms up and

down like a crow. He took the pictures in strobe, and

this would make Cassady look like he had multi-arms,

like the great god Shiva. This strobe thing was at the

time new in psychedelic photography, and the mass

media would never tire of it. Recreates the acid

experience, etc. Then Schiller told certain people to

stay around for individual shots, colorful characters

like Cassady, and Paul Foster with his wild mutton

chops and Importancy Coat, and Norman, maybe

because he had a beard. The usual... The others went on

outside where Babbs was. Finally they all left, the ones

who had stayed for the individual shots, and when they

got outside, the bus was gone. Clean gone. Babbs,

Mountain Girl, Zonker, Walker, and the others—split.

Hagen couldn't believe it. "Why—we've been

pranked!" he said.

Pranksters—and the Pranked.

Things being like they were to begin with, the

prank took on fundamental meaning. Those who got

pranked finally made their way back to the moldering

Sans Souci, and Babbs & Co. had cleared out of there,

too, taking all the money and the food. Babbs left word

that they, the inner nucleus, were going off to hold a

Test of their own and would rejoin the Satellites for the

UCLA Acid Test, scheduled for March 19. "The great

idea still kept us together"—and Norman, Cassady,

Hagen, Paul Foster, Roy Seburn, Marge and a couple

others made a stab at preparing for the UCLA Test. But

UCLA backed out of the deal because of the notoriety

after the Watts Test, and that did it. All began drifting

off. It was a strange time and a strange feeling. Nobody

could figure why Babbs had pranked Cassady; the

others maybe——although that Hagen would get

pranked was pretty strange, too—but Cassady—that

was unbelievable.

Cassady said fuck it and headed for San

Francisco. Norman and Paul Foster went to stay at

Hugh Romney's. Then by and by Norman got a chance

to go to New York with Marge the Barge and Evan

Engber, so they headed east by car.

"HARDLY HAD LEO LEFT US,

WHEN FAITH AND CONCORD amongst us was

at an end; it was as if the life-blood of our group

flowed away from an invisible wound."

One day Paul Foster cranked up the great God

Rotor and sat down and worked on a very intricate

illuminated billhead. When he got through, there was

an ornate black border, and in the middle the words

IN MEMORIAM

in florid Old English lettering, and at the bottom:

January 23, 1966, the day Kesey disappeared. Nothing

else, just In Memoriam and the date. He hung it up on

the wall.

chapter

XXI

The Fugitive

HAUL ASS, KESEY. MOVE. SCRAM. SPLIT

FLEE HIDE VANISH DISINTE-grate. Like run.

Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrevrevrevrevrevrevrevrevrevre

v or are we gonna have just a late Mexican re-run of

the scene on the rooftop in San Francisco and sit here

with the motor spinning and watch with fascination

while the cops they climb up once again to come git

you—

THEY JUST OPENED THE DOOR DOWN BELOW,

ROTOR ROOTER, so

YOU HAVE MAYBE 45 SECONDS ASSUMING

THEY BE SLOW AND SNEAKY AND SURE ABOUT

Kesey sits in a little upper room in the last house

down the beach, $80 a month, on paradise-blue

Bandarias Bay, in Puerto Vallarta, on the west coast of

Mexico, state of Jalisco, one step from the floppy green

fronds of the jungle, wherein flourish lush steamy

baboon lusts of paranoia—Kesey sits in this little

rickety upper room with his elbow on a table and his

forearm standing up perpendicular and in the palm of

his hand a little mirror, so that his forearm and the

mirror are like a big rear-view mirror stanchion on the

side of a truck and thus he can look out the window and

see them but they can't see him—

COME ON, MAN, DO YOU NEED A COPY OF THE

SCRIPT TO SEE HOW THIS MOVIE GOES? YOU

HAVE MAYBE 40 SECONDS LEFT BEFORE THEY

COME GET YOU

—a Volkswagen has been cruising up and down

the street for no earthly reason at all, except that they

are obviously working with the fake telephone linesmen

outside the window who whistle—

THERE THEY GO AGAIN

—whistle in the slow-brain brown Mexican

huarache day-laborer way, for no earthly reason except

that they are obviously synched in, finked in, with the

Volkswagen. Now a tan sedan comes along the street,

minus a license plate but plus a stenciled white

number—exactly like a prison stencil—police and two

coat-less guys inside, both in white shirts so they're not

prisoners—

ONE TURNED LOOKED BACK !

IF YOU WERE WATCHING ALL THIS ON A MOVIE

SCREEN YOU KNOW WHAT YOUR REACTION WOULD BE

THROUGH A MOUTHFUL OF POPCORN FROM THE THIRD

ROW: "WHAT MORE DO YOU NEED, YOU DOLT! SCREAM

OUTTA THERE ..."

—But he has just hooked down five dexedrines

and the old motor is spinning and rushing most nice

and euphorically in fascination and a man can't depart

this nice $80-a-month snug harbor on paradise-blue

Bandarias Bay just yet with a cool creek of speed rush

in his veins. It is such a tiny little fink scene as he sees

it in the hand mirror. He can tilt it and see his own face

entropied with the strain and then tilt it—a sign!—a

sparrow, fat and sleek, dives through the dwindling sun

into a hole in one of the lampposts; home.

More telefono trucks! Two loud whistles this

time—for no earthly reason except to come git you.

You have maybe 35 seconds left

—Kesey has Cornel Wilde Running Jacket ready

hanging on the wall, a jungle-jim corduroy jacket

stashed with fishing line, a knife, money, DDT, tablet,

ball-points, flashlight, and grass. Has it timed by test

runs that he can be out the window, down through a

hole in the roof below, down a drain pipe, over a wall

and into thickest jungle in 45 seconds—well, only 35

seconds left, but head start is all that's needed, with the

element of surprise. Besides, it's so fascinating to be

here in subastral projection with the cool rushing dex,

synched into their minds and his own, in all its surges

and tributaries and convolutions, turning it this way

and that and rationalizing the situation for the 100th

time in split seconds, such as: If they have that many

men already here, the phony telephone men, the cops in

the tan car, the cops in the Volkswagen, what are they

waiting for? why haven't they crashed right in through

the rotten doors of this Rat building— But he gets the

signal even before he finishes the question:

WAITING! THEY KNOW THEY'VE GOT YOU, FOOL,

HAVE KNOWN FOR WEEKS. BUT THEY'RE CERTAIN YOU'RE

CONNECTED WITH ALL THE LSD BEING SMUGGLED UP

FROM MEXICO AND THEY WANT TO TAKE IN AS BIG A

HAUL AS POSSIBLE WHEN THEY FINALLY SLAM IT. LIKE

LEARY; THEY MUST HAVE BEEN WATCHING A DREADFUL

LONG TIME BEFORE THEY WERE CONTENT THEY HAD

SOMETHING WORTH HIS SIZE. THIRTY YEARS. FOR A

HARVARD DOCTOR WITH GRASS. THAT'S HOW BAD THEY

WANTED THE WHOLE BUSINESS LOCKED AWAY. THAT'S

HOW DANGEROUS THEY CONSIDER THE WHOLE BUSINESS.

AND THEY WERE COMPLETELY CORRECT — IF NOT IN

THEIR FANTASY, THEN AT LEAST IN THEIR EVALUATION

OF THE PRESENT AND EVER-GROWING PSYCHEDELIC

THREAT

A NOISE DOWN BELOW.

THEM?

30 SEGUNDOS LEFT?

—maybe it's Black Maria, come back with good

things for eating and stuff for the new disguise, Steve

Lamb, mild-mannered reporter and all-around creep—

RUN, FOOL!

—Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Such a quiet secret

muffled smile will be on Black Maria's face.

Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrevrevrevrevrevrevrevrevrevrev

It could have been all so quiet, just him and Zonker and

the smoldering Black Maria in this $80-a-month

paradise-blue Bandarias Bay in Puerto Vallarta. If the

suicide ruse and the rest of the main Fugitive fantasy

had but worked.

The trip into Mexico was easy, because

everything with Boise was easy. Boise always knew.

They picked up Zonker in L.A., and then Jim Fish, and

they coasted on over the line at Tijuana. No hassle to

cross over into Mexico. The border at Tijuana is like a

huge superhighway toll station, a huge concrete apron

and ten or fifteen customs booths in a row for all the

cars pouring over into Tijuana from San Diego and

points north, all plastic green and concrete like part of

suburban superhighway America. So they rolled on

over the line with Kesey hidden in the back of Boise's

old panel truck and heart don't even thump too bad.

Spirits up, a little of the Prankster élan back in the

cosmos. In true Prankster fashion they spent one third

their money stash on a Madman Muntz autostereo rig to

go along with all the other valuables, like tape

recorders and many tapes.

The next likely hassle is visas, because this

shapes up as a long stay. Might be hot to try to get

Kesey one in Tijuana, because Tijuana is just a

California annex, really, the slums of San Diego, and

they just might very well know about the case.

"We'll do it in Sonoita, man," says Boise. "They

don't give a shit there. Put down a couple of bucks and

they can't see anything else."

Sonoita is almost due east of Tijuana, just south

of the Arizona border. Kesey uses his good shuck ID

there and all is jake in Sonoita. Fugitive!—real-life and

for sure now.

Then south down so-called Route 2 and so-called

Route 15, bouncing and grinding along through the

brown dust and scrawny chickens and animal dung

brown dust fumes of western Mexico, towns of Coyote,

Caborca, Santa Ana, Querobabi, Cornelio, El Oasis,

hee, Hermosillo, hah, Pocitos Casas, Cieneguito,

Guaymas, Camaxtli, Mixcoatl, Tlazolteotl,

Quetzalcoatl, Huitzilopochtli, Tezcatlipoca haunting

the Dairy Queen Rat Queen crossroads in the guise of a

Rat, a Popoluactli-screeing rat, Tetzcotl, Yaotl,

Titlacahuan he whose slaves we are, Ochpaniiztl

priesty Angel-freaked out in a motorcycle made from

the vaseline skin of Gang Bang Girl Meets White Trash

... A confetti of skulls and death in western Mexico, the

Rat lands. Not one inch of it is picturesque burros and

shawls or nova Zapata hats or color-TV pink chunks of

watermelon or water lilies or gold feathers or long

eyelashes or high combs or tortillas and tacos and chili

powder or fluty camote vendors or muletas or toreros or

oles or mariachi bands or water lilies or blood of the

dahlia or tinny cantinas or serapes or movie black

marias with shiny black hair and steaming little high

round pubescent bottoms. None of the old Mexico we

know and love on the 21-day excursion fare. Just the

boogering brown dust and bloated rat corpses by the

road, goats, cows, chickens with all four feet up in the

air at the Tezcatlipocan skull rot crossroads of Mexico.

To Kesey it was a hopeless flea-bitten desert he

was fleeing into. But Boise made it bearable. Boise

always knew. Boise was wizened and thin-faced and he

had the awfulest New England high flat whine, and he

didn't belong anywhere near here, but he was here,

now, and he knew. The truck breaks down for the four-

teenth time—

"No hassle, man. We just back it up on a rock,

man ... Then we just take the tire off and fix it."

More flat, Rat country, mosquito and flea, into

total nothing, like the lines of perspective in a

surrealist painting, but Boise makes you realize it is all

the same, here as anywhere. Boise lecherously scanning

the streets as they bounce through the dead chicken

towns just like it was only Saturday night on Broadway

in North Beach, spotting a good looking gringa

muchacha padding along the side of the road with

honest calves,

25 SECONDS LEFT, FOOL!

and he says, "Shall we get her over and ball her,

man?" all in the same New England whine, as if he

were saying, Wanna Coke, or not? Kesey looks at

Boise's lined face and his thin lips, looks ancient, only

a glitter comes out of the eyes, nice and lecherous,

dead certain and crazy alive at the same time. And

Boise in that moment is in the tiny knot of Perfect

Pranksters, the inner circle, ascending into the sangha

for good.

In Guaymas, on the gulf, Jim Fish wants out. An

early attack of paranoia, Jim Fish? and catches a bus

back to the U.S., leaving Kesey, Boise and Zonker and

the equipment. But was it not ever so? You're either on

the bus or off the bus. Kesey's spirits were picking up.

Boise was pulling everything together ::: this crazy

New Englander is here in these Rat lands.

"Hey, man ..." Boise points at a construction

scene they're going by. "... see that?" as if to say,

There's the whole thing, right there.

A whole gang of workmen are trying to put the

stucco on the ceiling of a building they're finishing up.

One fat man is mixing up the stucco in a washtub. One

skinny one is scooping the stucco up out of the tub with

a little trowel and pitching it up underhanded at the

ceiling. A little of it sticks—and three or four guys

stand on a plank scaffolding taking stabs at smoothing

it out—but most of it falls down on the floor and three

or four more are hunkered down there scraping it up off

the floor and shoveling it back in the tub and the

skinny guy skinnies up another little gob with his

skinny trowel and they all stare again to see what

happens. They are all hunkering around in huaraches,

worthless flat Rat woven sandals, up on the

scaffolding, down on the floor, waiting to see what

happens, how fate brings it off with this little gob of

nothing pitched up at the Rat expanse .. .

And it's all there—the whole Mexico Trip—

"They have a saying, 'Hay tiemp—' " Boise hooks

the steering wheel to get around an ice-cream vendor in

the middle of the road " '—o,' 'There is time.' "

20 SECONDS, IDIOT!

Huaraches, which are the Rat shoe. It all

synches. Mexico is the Rat paradise. But of course! It

is not worthless—it is perfection. It is as if the Rat

things of all the Rat lands of America, all the drive-ins,

mobile-home parks, Dairy Queens, superettes, Sunset

Strips, auto-accessory stores, septic-tank developments,

souvenir shops, snack bars, lay-away furniture stores,

Daveniter living rooms, hot-plate hotels, bus-station

paperback racks, luncheonette in-the-booth jukebox

slots, raw-concrete service-station toilets with a head

of urine in the bowl, Greyhound bus toilettes with

paper towels and vomit hanging over the hockey-

puckblack rim, Army-Navy stores with Bikini Kodpiece

Briefs for men, Super Giant racks with matching green

twill shirts and balloon-bottom pants for honest toilers,

$8,000 bungalows with plastic accordion-folding

partitions and the baby asleep in there in a foldaway

crib of plastic net, picnic tables with the benches built

onto them used in the dining room, Jonni-Trot Bar-B-Q

sandwiches with a carbonated fruit drink, aluminum

slat awnings, aluminum sidings, lukewarm coffee-

"with" in a china mug with a pale brown pool in the

saucer and a few ashes, a spade counter chef scraping a

short-order grill with a chalky Kitchy-Brik and he

won't take your order till he's through, a first-come-

first-serve doctor's waiting room with modest char-

women with their dresses stuck on the seats of shiny

vinyl chairs and they won't move to get loose for fear

you'll look Up their dress, plaid car coats from Sears

and a canvas cap with a bill, synthetic dresses for

waitresses looking like milky cellophane, Rat cones,

Rat sodas, Rat meat-salad sandwiches, Rat cheezis,

Rat-burgers—it is as if the Rat things of all the Rat

lands of America had been looking for their country,

their Canaan, their Is-ra-el, and they found it in

Mexico. It has its own Rat aesthetic. It's hulking

beautiful...

Then they reached Mazatlan, the first full-

fledged resort you reach on the west coast of Mexico,

coming down from the States. Everybody's trip was

fishing in Mazatlan. Along the old Avenida

del Mar and the Paseo Claussen, white walls with

nice artistic Rat fishing scenes and hotel archways with

great shiny blue martins hanging inside the arches and

gringos with duckbill caps here to catch some marlin.

Mariachi music at last, with the trumpets always

breaking and dropping off the note and then struggling

up again. Zonker has the bright idea of going to

O'Brien's Bar, on the beach front, place he got beat up

out back of once by thirteen Mexican fags. Zonker

enjoys revisiting scenes of previous debacles. Like also

spends hours on the beach telling them how his true

and fiercest fear is of being attacked by a shark while

swimming . . . as he picks flea-bite scabs until his legs

stream blood to the luscious world. . . then goes

swimming.

O'Brien's brings on the paranoia right away. It is

a break in the Rat movie. It is dark and a Mexican band

plays—signaling to the Rat sensibility that it will cost

too much. Rat souls everywhere fear dark, picturesque

restaurant, knowing instinctively they will pay dearly

for the bullshit ambiance, dollar a drink probably.

O'Brien's was crowded, and then through the cocktail

gloom: heads. A bunch of kids with the jesuschrist

hair, the temple bells and donkey beads, serape vests,

mandalas; in short, American heads. Zonker recognizes

them immediately. They're not only American heads,

but from San Jose, and some had been to the Acid

Tests. Just what the Fugitive needs to blow the whole

suicide ruse. "Guess who I saw in Mexico..." Naturally,

Zonk, with his zest for debacle, hails them over. Kesey

is introduced as "Joe," and nobody pays him much mind

except for one dark little girl, Mexican-looking, with

long black hair.

"When were you born?" she says to Kesey. She

doesn't sound Mexican. She sounds like Lauren Bacall

speaking through a tube.

"I'm a Virgo." No sense hitting a ball three bits

you can see coming if you can cut across the fourth.

"I thought so. I'm a Scorpio."

"Beautiful."

The black Scorpio obviously knows Zonk best.

She knows him when. But Zonk belongs to the ages and

it comes to pass that Zonk or no Zonk, she and Kesey

relax out in the open air on the pier one night down by

a Mazatlan Rat beach, all dirt and scrabble, but the

waves and the wind and the harbor lights do it up right

and the moon hits some kind of concrete shaft there,

putting her in the dark, in the shadow, and him in the

light, lit up by the moon, as if some designer drew a

line precisely between their bodies. Blacky Maria, he

decides.

So Black Maria joins the Fugitive band and they

go off to Puerto Vallarta. Puerto Vallarta is out of the

Rat lands. All picture-book Mexico. Paradise-blue

Bandarias Bay and a pure white beach and white latino

collages right up against the jungle, which is a deep

raw green, and clean. Fat green fronds lapping up

against the back of the houses on the beach. Macaw

sounds, or very near it. Secret poisonous orchid and

orange pops and petals winking out when the foliage

moves. A nice romantic Gothic jungle. Zonker hassles

with an oily little real-estate man and gets the last

house on the edge of town for $80 a month. The rent is

low because the jungle is too close for the tourists, the

jungle and too many Mexican kids and chickens and the

rural dung dust. Boise heads back to the U.S. and

Kesey, Zonker and Black Maria move in. They have the

upper half of the house, one floor and a spiral staircase

up to the roof. Up on the roof is a kind of thatched hut,

the highest perch around, a perfect lookout post and a

snug harbor. Kesey decides to risk a phone call to the

States to let Faye and everybody know he's O.K. He

goes into town and calls Peter Demma in the Hip

Pocket Book Store in Santa Cruz. A little metallic

clanking about by the telefonista señoritas down at cen-

tral. And then,

"Peter?"

From many Rat miles away: "Ken!" Very

surprised, naturally ...

So Kesey whiled the time sitting in the snug

hacienda on the edge of Puerto Vallarta sipping beer

and smoking many joints

and writing in a notebook occasionally. He

wanted to get a little of all this down and send ii to

Larry McMurtry.

"Larry:

"Phone calls to the states eight bucks apiece

besides was ever a good board to bound my favorite

ball of bullshit prose offen, it was you ..."

Like all about Black Maria. In many ways she

was so great. She is quiet and has a kind of broody

beauty. She cooks. She looks Mex and speaks Mex. She

can even hassle Mex. She sounds out the Mayor of

Puerto Vallarta as to how safe Kesey will be here in

town. Hay tiempo, he says. The extradition takes

forever. Very nice to know . ..

And yet Black Maria is not completely a

Prankster. She wants to be a part of all this, she wants

to do this thing, but she does it without belief. It is like

the Mexican part of her Black Maria thing. She has all

the trappings of Mexican—she looks it, she speaks it,

her grandfather was even Mexican—but she is not

Mexican. She is Carolyn Hannah of San Jose,

California, under everything else, even the blood. He

wrote in the notebook::Meving the dark Indian

10 SECONDS LEFT, YOU FREAKING EE-JOT!

! ! !

body out of the Indian land weakened the Indian

blood with chicken soup and matzoh balls. So much of

the fire concealed by the dark and broody beauty lies

just that deep. Because she does it without belief. And

yet it is very nice up here in this thatched perch atop

the last house. A car heads up the street—Zonker and

Black Maria coming back to the house. He peers over

the edge at the car kicking up the dust, then writes in

the notebook, it is a perfect lookout, allowing me to see

them, without them seeing me. Many things. .. synch.

ZONKER AND BLACK MARIA DROVE

DOWN THE ROAD, Scattering up the kids and the

chickens and the dust, and Black Maria pointed up to

the top of the house and said to Zonker:

"Look, there's Kesey." Then she looked out the

window and stared at the jungle. "I bet he thinks we

can't see him."

THE JIG IS UP. ZONKER BRINGS A

TELEGRAM FROM PAUL Robertson back in San

Jose and it is a bear. It is not even a warning, it

5 SECONDS — 5 SECONDS LEFT — YOU

REALLY JES GON’ SIT THERE FOR THE SQUASH?

is final. THE JIG IS UP, is says. Meaning, it turned

out, that the suicide ruse had been exposed and the

cops knew he was in Puerto Vallarta. Exposed?—hell,

the suicide prank had turned into a goddamn comic

opera. For a start, Dee had pulled a sort of Dee-out, as

Mountain Girl feared. Dee had driven up looking for a

cliff near Humboldt Bay, about 250 miles north of San

Francisco, up near Eureka, California, not far from the

Oregon border in redwoods country. He got up to the

last hill going up there and the panel truck wouldn't

pull the hill. So he called into town for a tow truck and

the garage man and the tow truck pulled the suicide

vehicle up the last mile. Hired and paid for and thanks

a lot. Always nice to hire some help to commit suicide.

Next Dee dropped Kesey's distinctive sky-blue boots

down to the shore below—but they hit the water instead

and sank without a bubble. Next, the goddamned

romantic suicide desolate foaming cliff was so

goddamned desolate, nobody noticed the truck for

about two weeks, despite the Ira Sandperl for President

sign on the rear bumper. Apparently people figured the

old heap had been abandoned. The Humboldt county

police finally checked it out on February 11. Next, the

suicide note, which seemed so ineluctably convincing

as Kesey and Mountain Girl smoked a few joints and

soared into passages of Shelleyan Weltschmerz—

it gave off a giddy scent of put-on, even to the straight

cops of the Humboldt. There were certain

inconsistencies. Like the part about the truck smashing

into a redwood. Well—even in a Dee-out, Dee couldn't

exactly ask the tow-truck man, Well, now that you've

towed it up here, how about jamming it into a tree for

me. Demma had really been bowled over to hear from

Kesey. A lot of people, a lot of people who liked him,

had really been worried that he was dead. And now

here was Kesey calling him—alive—with a message for

Faye and the whole thing. That was Saturday. The next

night, Sunday, February 13, Demma dropped into

Manuel's Mexican Restaurant in Santa Cruz, and there

was his old friend Bob Levy. By way of making

conversation, Levy says,

"What have you heard from Ken?"

"I just got a call from him!" says Demma. "From

Puerto Vallarta!"

That's interesting.

Levy happened to be a reporter for the

Watsonville Register-Pajaronian, Watsonville being a

town near Santa Cruz. The next afternoon, Monday, the

lead story in the Watsonville Register-Pajaronian

carried a five-column headline reading:

MISSING NOVELIST TURNS UP IN MEXICO

The next day, Tuesday, the San Jose Mercury

picked up the story and put a little more spin on it with

a story headlined:

KESEY'S CORPSE HAVING A BALL IN PUERTO

VALLARTA

2 SECONDS, OH CORPSE OF MINE!

THAT'S NO BLACK MARIA SHHHHHHHHUFFLING UP

THE STAIRS

OUTSIDE

THE DOOR, DOLT, IT'S A COP CLUMP UP THE STAIRS

NO EARTHLY

SOUND LIKE IT

SHARP WHISTLE FROM THE TELEFONISTAS

VW BACKING DOWN THE STREET

THIS IS TRULY IT, TRULY IT

GRAB THE CORNEL WILDE RUNNING JACKET, FOOL!

MAKE THE BRAIN CATCH HOLD!

RRRRRRRRRRRRRRREVREVREVREV SPINNING AND IN

THE GIANT PYRAMIDAL CELLS OF BETZ OF PRE-

CENTRAL CEREBRAL CORTEX RISE AND HEAVE

AND SLIP GANGLIONIC LAYER SHUDDERS AND

GIGGLES SYNAPSES LIGHT LIKE RANDOM

BEATLE FLASHBULBS KHEEWWW BLASTING OUT

SILLY FROM MOTOR HO-MUNCULUS YOU

MISSED YR FLASH OH MIGHTY

MASTICATOR, SALIVATOR, VOCALIZER, SWALLOWER,

LICKER, BITER SUCKER BROW-KNITTER LOOKER BLINKER

RUBBERNECKER THUMBER PRODDER UP-YOURS FINGERER

RINGWEARER NOSEPICKER WAVER DRINKER

ARMLIFTER BODYBENDER HIPSWIVELER KNEER SPRINGER

RUNNER ZERO::::::::OOOOOOOOO:::::::: RUN!

Sonbitch! The gears catch at last, he springs up,

grabs Cornel Wilde jacket, leaps through the back

window, down through the hole, down the drainpipe—

now vault the wall, you mother, into the jungle

floppy—

AWWRRRRRAMMMMANNNNNNN

WHAZZAT?

His head is down but he can see it

WHAZZAT !

Up there in the window he just jumped out of

BROWN !

He can feel it. There is a vibration on the

parasympathetic efferent fibres behind the eyeballs and

it hums

HRRRRRRRRRMANNNNNNNNNNN

TWO of them one brown dumpy Mex with gold-

handle butt gun one crewcut American FBI body-

snatcher watching him flying like a monkey over the

wall into the jungle the brown Mex holds gold gun but

the brain behind that face too brown moldering Mex

earth to worry about couldn't hit a peeing dog

PLUNGE

into the lapping P.V. fronds bursting orchid and

orange the motor homunculus working perfect now

powerful gallop into the picturebook jungles of

Mexico—

A MOMENT LATER BLACK MARIA

WALKED INTO THE Apartment. She found Kesey

gone and the Cornel Wilde jungle running jacket gone.

That trip again. Well, he'll come back when he's ready

to, worn out, and things will be cool for a while. Kesey

had gotten paranoid as hell, but that wasn't the only

thing. He liked this Fugitive game. Man, he'd scram out

in the jungle and hide out there for two or three days

and smoke a lot of grass and finally straggle in. That

started before the telegram even. There was a whole

signal they worked out. Or he worked out. When the

coast was clear, she was supposed to hang up a yellow

shirt of Zonk's on the line outside the back window,

facing the jungle. It was a yellow shirt with a black and

brown print on it, on the faggy side, if you asked Black

Maria. The flag would go up and finally Kesey would

straggle back home beat, having run himself about to

death in the jungle or along the beach.

And yet it was nice. It was crazy but nice. Kesey

was the most magnetic person she had ever met. He

radiated something, a kind of power. His thoughts, the

things he talked about, were very complex and

metaphysical and cryptic but his manner was back-

home, almost back-country. Even while he was reeking

with paranoia, he seemed to have total confidence. That

was very strange. He could make you feel like part of

something very ... He had even given her a new name,

Black Maria. She was. .. Black Maria.

As a girl in San Jose, California, she had felt like

everything she really was had been smothered under

layers and layers of games she couldn't control.

Externally there was nothing wrong. Her father and

mother were both teachers and life in San Jose was

comfortable and serene in the California suburban

manner. But half the time nobody ever understands

about growing up in this country. Little Penguin

Islands full of kids playing Lord of the Flies, a world

of pygmy tribes, invisible to the Isfahan adult eye,

these little devils, tribes of studs, tribes of rakes, tribes

of IntelFinks even, tribes of greasers, and an

amorphous mass of hopeless cases left over. Until—

psychedelics started around there, mainly grass and

acid. The new scene started and suddenly all sorts of. .

. well, beautiful people blossomed forth from out of the

polyglot, people who really had a lot to them, only it

had been smothered by all the eternal social games that

had been set up. Suddenly they found each other.

One night she was high and experienced the

unity, the All-one. A light was behind her in the room

and hit her body from behind and broke up into beams

and shone out before her, hitting the floor and the walls

in spokes of light with shadows in between. The room

broke up before her eyes and separated in just that

pattern with bars of light vibrating. Suddenly it became

very clear, the way the room was put together, the way

the parts fit, the way the parts of everything fit, as if

someone had taken an Indian puzzle ring apart for her.

It was clear how everything fit together and it wasn't

really a world split up into pointless games and cliques.

That was merely the way it looked before you knew the

key. And now there were beautiful people who knew

the key and this experience could be shared.

Her mother gave her money for the second

semester at San Jose State, and although it would hurt

her mother at first, she knew what she had to do. She

took the money and headed off to Mexico with some

beautiful kids. It was a little more complicated than

that. She knew Zonk at San Jose State and she knew he

was heading for Mexico, for Mazatlan, although she

didn't know about the Kesey prank, and so she was

following Zonk, for if there were beautiful people,

Zonk was one of them.

Mazatlan was just beginning to be the acid heads'

favorite spot on the Mexican west coast. It wasn't a

place the real hard-core tourists were onto yet. They

went on down the coast to Acapulco, generally. At the

same time Mazatlan wasn't so unbearably Mexicali...

sad... like the true Acid Central of Mexico, Ajijic, on

Lake Chapala. Those poor sad Lake Chapala villages,

Ajijic, Chapala, Jocotepec, with the lake drying up and

the old suck-smack lily-pad scum mud showing and

failed American aesthetes padding around earnestly in

sandals, 48-year-old bohos sucking up to young heads

of the new generation of Hip. Very sad. It is truly a sad

thing when an American boho says fuck this and picks

up and leaves this fucking tailfin and shopping plaza

and war-crazy civilization and goes to live among real

people, the honest folk-type folk, in the land of Earth

feelings, Mexico, and the hell with tile baths—and then

he sits there, in Mexico, amid the hunkering hardcheese

mestizos, and, man, it is honest and real here .. . and

just as miserable as hell, and he is a miserable aging

fuckup with no place else to go.

But Mazatlan—the head scene there was a happy

thing and a groove. So she sat down in Mazatlan and

wrote her mother a Beautiful People letter ...

And she found Zonk and, unexpectedly, the

famous Ken Kesey and beautiful people. But one thing

about the beautiful people themselves—Namely, the

Merry Pranksters. She had heard

of the fabulous Merry Pranksters even in San

Jose. Kesey and Zonk talked about them all the time, of

course. The fabulous Babbs, the fabulous Mountain

Girl, the fabulous Cassady, Hermit, Hassler and the

rest. She had a Prankster name, Black Maria, but she

was not yet a Prankster. She was sensitive even to the

contours of Kesey's world, too. Sooner or later Kesey

would reunite with the Pranksters. ..

Well. .. put out Zonker's shirt when the coast is

clear. Zonker's billowy faggy-looking shirt. Let him

stay out on his jungle run for a while. If he enjoys the

Fugitive game, why spoil it.

SHHHHHHHHHHWAAAAAAAAAP

flopping lush P.V. fronds Kesey thrashes out of

the jungle and across the road—

CARS? ONE MEX ONE AMERICAN COMING IN PALE

TAN

VW? no, no cars, man, and then down across the

road to rocky scrabble down by the ocean on the rocks,

his heart rattling away, he sinks down in his Cornel

Wilde running jacket listening

WHOP!

surf hits the rocks, just a little holiday in

picturesque P.V. with the sea kicking up at twilight. He

concentrates on the surf—analogy spoken here?—but

the surf is too aimless this way. His heart rattles

tachycardiac at this speed, and the surf is synched in to

another thing WHOPping against the rocks

BRANNGGGH

a tin-door sound up on the road like the ominous

tin-car-door sounds in Hud always bring on the bad

action—like brown Mex and crewcut drip-dry American

up on the road eyes rocketing around, Brown Mex

puffing I’m-supposed-to-be-off-duty-now-señor. Kesey

faces out to sea, pulls a tablet out of the jacket. Makes

the pink cover visible as if to prove just an aimless surf

artist drawing water swells furl by furl like Leonardo

who must have been a head, all the minute instincts, to

sit by the water drawing the little furls as the water

laps up on beach then starts rolling back toward the sea

and minute little churning furls in the lead edge of the

water, he drew it all, furl by furl, like a very meth head

plugged into the great God Rotor. More surf, then

KABOOM!

first—they're FIRING on him. They don't give a

shit.

HOT PURSUIT!

we got the guns and the rights, signed on this

piece of paper here, one move blow yr fucking head off

and you have already moved, Kesey—

HOT PURSUIT!

KABOOM!

but nothing happens. Silence except for the surf.

THAT IS VERY PARANOID, HONDO why would they

try to blast you out of the tub with elephant guns

anyway. It must be workmen using dynamite. So he

edges up to the road and it is workmen all right,

sweating and heaving while the green fronds flap up the

hill. He'll just sit here and

watch them dynamite

SURE

just watch them dynamite while every gringo car

comes spinning off the shore drive out here Baskin-

Robbins tourist matron lookout and say "Hey, Honey,

that's Ken Kee-zee..."

Back into the jungle, Cornel Wilde. Heart still

banging up to the edge of fibrillation, through the lush

shadowy danks of the jungle. Well, yessir, lookee here

a minute, what's this. A three-sided hut in the jungle,

some kind of woodsman's hut, with a cot in it and a

little hoard of mango papaya, some kind of pallid little

fruit. He sinks back on the cot, unzips his fly to air out

his sweating nuts and dips into his jacket and pulls out

three roaches and wraps a leaf around them like a cone

and lights up. He cuts open a fruit and it bleeds meek

white and he puts it aside.

A TRAP FOR JUNGLE RUNNERS

this perfect little snug harbor to suck you in, a

hut, a cot, meek milk white fruit to eat, a joint of sorts,

oh to be back in Baskin-Robbins country just one time

facing endless beige tubs of ice cream 31 flavor

decisions to make, pointed cone or cup-style

¡PARANOIA!

but this is the real-life jungle, Major. Two-

winged flies, dapple-wing Anapholes, Culex tarsalis,

verruga-crazed Phlebotomus biting 8-day fever and

Oriental sores, greenhead rabbit-fever horseflies,

tularemic Loa loa, tsetse mites, Mexican fleas,

chinches, chiggers, velvet ants, crab lice crawling up

your balls up your belly under your arms right up to

your eyelashes for a nice fix of Mexican murine typhus,

puss caterpillars, cantharidae beetles, Indian bedbugs,

ticks, itch mites nice for scabies and rickety pox,

Pacific Coast female tick hiding in the hairs at the base

of the head sucking in the death bloat with blood,

paralysis coming up from the toes will it reach the

lungs before the big blood sausage mother drops off, a

blood bag with tiny feet wriggling like worm hairs

DDT!

he gets down and pulls the DDT can out of the

jacket and starts dusting all around the ground there

around the cot, setting up a mighty defense perimeter

against the mites of the jungle—which is very funny,

come to think of it—down on all fours in deadly battle

with the microscopic mites while

THEY

close in to slam you away for five, eight, twenty

years... driven at last out onto the edge of your

professed beliefs. You believed that a man should move

off his sure center out onto the outer edges, that the

outlaw, even more than the artist, is he who tests the

limits of life and that—The Movie :::: by getting totally

into Now and paying total Attention until it all flows

together in the synch and imagining them all into the

Movie, your will will determine the flow and control

all jungles great and small

NEXT TO LAST JOINT IN ALL OF MEXICO

he pulls it out of his pocket and lights up. Maybe

I'll knock off the grass for a while. Su-u-u-ure.

AND THEN BELIEVE ALL THAT CRAP YOU'VE BEEN

CLAIMING ABOUT ALTERING BY ACCEPTING. BELIEVE IT!

OR YOU ARE A GONER, AND BOY, A WALKING DEAD MAN

FOREVERMORE FADING FINALLY INAUDIBLE LIKE THE

VOICES MUMBLING BITONES IN THE CATHE-

DRAL !

And now that I've got your attention—if he sits

very still, the rush lowers in his ears, he can

concentrate, pay total attention, an even, even, even

world, flowing into now, no past terrors, no an-

ticipation of the future horror, only now, this movie,

the vibrating parallel rods, and he can feel them drawn

into the flow, his, every verruga fly, velvet ant, murine

fleas and crabs, every chinch and tick, every lizard,

cat, palm, the very power of the most ancient palm,

held in his will, and he is immune—

chapter

XXII

¡Diablo!

MOUNTAIN GIRL STUCK IT OUT WITH

BABBS, GRETCH, Walker—for the sake of the great

idea—and she meant it—but any way she thought it out,

it came out Kesey. Mountain Girl was almost eight

months pregnant now. The bus, The Movie, was at a

total standstill now, sinking into the swamper bogs.

One day a package came in by mail, from Mexico, a

tape, from Kesey, to Mountain Girl. And there was his

voice. She could hardly make out a word he said, the

quality of the tape was so bad—all she could make out

was, he was in the jungle somewhere and paranoid as

hell and smoking a lot of grass.

O DEAR DEAD ONE!

Then Babbs made the decision to take the bus to

Mexico. They were a little paranoid themselves, about

the heat put on the Acid Tests. Two days after the story

broke about Kesey being in Puerto Vallarta, the good

fink California press ran another big one: KESEY'S PALS

LSD PARTY IN L.A. — a barnburner about the Watts

Test. But mainly they couldn't hack it any more; not

even Babbs. Get the goddamn bus moving, that was the

main thing.

Mountain Girl had one more ordeal to go

through. She had to stand trial in San Francisco for

possession of marijuana, result of the bust on the

rooftop. All the shit in society that the Pranksters had

liberated themselves from through years of arduous

initiation—the shit rolled in, in lava gulps. She had to

sit there, great with child, like a prisoner of war in a

bamboo' cage, while the straight world put her on prize

exhibit and clucked and remonstrated and scolded and

then shook its head and blubbered a little over her.

Doped, seduced and abandoned, the poor miscreant

teenager. She got a little Prankster mileage out of it

even then, although she had to play it fairly straight,

just to let them play out their game so she could get on

with it. Their fantasy for her was a new dawn for this

unfortunate girl, not a beeline for Mexico, but that was

their fantasy.

Mountain Girl showed up in court on March 20 in

a red dress, four inches above the knees, and this was

long before mini-dresses were on every eyeball, and

pregnant as hell. She came to court on the arm of the

Cavalier Hassler. Hassler was great throughout the

whole thing. He was her sanity. Hassler came to court

with her, wearing a green velveteen shirt, yellow

bouclé stretch pants and red boots, and when the

reporters came up slavering for sob stuff, he put them

on so righteously, it was beautiful.

"We must do everything possible," he would say,

peering out as sincere as the Student Council president

from under his Prince Valiant locks, "to get Carolyn on

her feet and out of this life of crime"—Carolyn Adams,

naturally, being the fantasy that the Court knew her by.

"I'm going to be the strong stabilizing force in her

life"—vibrating yellow and green. "She's had a lot of

misjudgment."

"My misjudgment may extend to you," said

Mountain Girl. Great fun had by all.

The sob-story angle was the fantasy they all

came up with for

her in court, her lawyer included. It was like they

had all looked at her and thought it over and

hmmmmmmmm this poor misguided runaway girl 20

years old, lately a teenager, you understand, and more

than seven months in the family way seduction by the

demon Kesey who left her to take the whole blame for

the dope charge as well as abandoning her with an

unborn child. Urgggggggggghhhhhh the prosecutor

agreed on it, her lawyer agreed on it, the Judge agreed

on it. So went the Justice game. And where was the

demon Kesey who left so fast breathing dope from

every nostril—it was as if everybody was going to be

nice to her by way of pointing out the lesson of Kesey's

evil.

Her lawyer, Steven Dedina, said: "Carolyn is no

dope fiend, no dope addict. Her one addiction is a

perennial overdose of solicitude for persons who are far

away. Were it not for that particular addiction, this

defendant would not be standing in this particular place

at this particular time."

So on March 22 Mountain Girl was let off with a

fine of $250 for possession of marijuana. Yet if Kesey

had left her in a lurch, it was a lurch that they would

never understand in a million years.

THE TRIP DOWN INTO MEXICO WAS THE

BUS AT ITS MOST Awful. Mountain Girl, so

pregnant, just held on and forced back the bilious as

the thing bounced and pitched and rolled through the

desert. She felt like a 200-pound egg. But moving

again! that was the main thing. Anything was better

than what she had been going through. And this was

truly something. Every 20 miles it seemed like the bus

broke down and Babbs sweated over it. All the

vibrations outside were bad. Corpses, chiefly. Scrub

cactus, brown dung dust and bloated corpses, dogs,

coyotes, armadillos, a cow, all gas-bellied and dead,

swollen and dead, Babbs, Gretch, Faye and the kids,

Walker and Mountain Girl.

The fantasy this time had been dreamed up by

Zonker. Zonker had gotten in touch with them, and

Hagen had already driven down in an old car. Now the

bus was going to keep a secret rendezvous with them in

Mazatlan. Kesey had lit out for Mazatlan after the big

scare in Puerto Vallarta.

In Puerto Vallarta, Kesey had sure enough had

something to worry about after all. Chief Arturo

Martínez Garza of the Mexican Federales had ordered a

search of Puerto Vallarta on February 16, two days

after the story broke in the California papers. They had

hassled all strange bohemian-looking Americans on the

streets and so on. But Kesey had already made a run for

it, back to Mazatlan. Zonker had arranged the

rendezvous for the beach at Mazatlan, such-and-such a

day, such-and-such an hour.

Babbs flogged the bus through the corpse horizon

day and night, desperate to make it on time, with the

bus breaking down over and over again, everybody ill,

not just Mountain Girl, but flogging on like it was life

or death. And finally, Mazatlan, the sea, the big curve

of the malecón—they made it. This was the flow, and it

was a sickening horrible flow, but they had made it,

and they tooled up to the rendezvous point—no Kesey.

No Zonker and no Hagen.

It was too much, this particular predictable

fuckup, after all that. It wasn't a cool thing for them to

just sit there by the beach in this lurid freak of a bus,

such as Mexico had never seen, but this was too much,

and they sat there, beat, and let the hours tool by. They

were a hell of a hit with the Mexicans, however. They

never saw anything like it. "¡Diablo!" they kept saying.

Women hid their children with their skirts. A whole

bunch of locals gathered around the bus and grinned

their hideous magenta-gummed native grins and stared

at the crazies.

Heeeee!—an old car with no windows in the

mother comes by, slowing down. The face at the

driver's window, with the incredulous look—Hagen.

And that old gray head peeking over the window's edge

in the back, just peeking over ever so gingerly—could

it possibly be . .. Hagen stops and gets out. Then the

back door opens ever so gingerly and out steps a gray-

haired soul with his head cocked to one side, radiating

surprise and appall and not at all happy about the

Diablo multitudes.

He has on a hincty washed-out faded tourist sport

shirt and balloon-seat pants. He walks like a repertory

theater shambles. He looks ten or fifteen years older,

like an old workadaddy on the 21-day plan to Mexico.

Ecce Fugitive.

Shee-ut, it's all too freaking absurd, this secret

rendezvous. The bus glowing Day-Glo on the beach at

Mazatlan, the Diablo multitudes whooping it up like a

cock fight, Mountain Girl beautiful and fulsome with

her hair down to her waist and dyed yellow from the

last Test—they could have sold tickets.

You're looking at the New Super Fugitive,

Mountain Girl: Steve Lamb—45-year-old gray-haired

ninny. Certified I.D.; Zonker's driver's license with the

Steve Lambrecht doctored to read Steve Lamb and the

birth date altered to make him 45 instead of 25. Mild-

mannered lamb among men, Steve Lamb, 45-year-old

reporter, creep and amateur ornithologist, broadcaster

for KSRO, Mighty 590 on your dial. Got his tape

recorder right here, yessir, for collecting bird calls.

Also you never know when the spot news will break

and the diligent reporter is always ready, even on

holiday. Old mild-mannered Steve Lamb has learned

the secret of invisibility, which is to crawl into the rut,

the bottomest awfulest part of the sunken way society

has dug for all those who properly fear her might, O

Mighty 590.

But hardly seem worth it, somehow, with the bus

beginning to glow in the Mexican dusk. ¡Fuck it!

¡Diablo! ¡Cosmo! Let's bull it through, here in the Rat

lands! Glittering Prankster glances all around. Paint it

big enough and bright enough and they won't even be

able to see it! Kesey and Mountain Girl and Babbs and

Gretch and Faye and the kids standing here in the Rat

vistas... and along the edge of the circle a little

Mexican-looking girl with long black hair just emerged

from the old car ... Black Maria stares out to sea.

chapter

XXIII

The Red Tide

FOCKING RED TIDE, MAN, AND

EVERYBODY IN MANZANILLO is up tight. Tropic of

Cancer, heat 110 degrees, no wind, many mosquitoes,

and the red tide killing the fish. Thousands, tens of

thousands focking dead fish floating belly up in the red

tide. The stench you would not believe, and there is

something in the air spewed up from the ocean that

makes your eyes smart. Some people they feel like they

have it in the lungs, like the flu. There is no greater

calamity than the red tide, because we live on the

fishing here in Manzanillo. Unless it is the American

crazies. On top of the red tide, appearing like they rose

up out of the red tide itself, we have the American

crazies. Focking plague themselves, riding about in a

devilish criminal bus. They ride into the plaza, near the

great jaracanda tree, in a devilish bus covered in crazed

fluorescent cholera flowers, gaudier than the red

blossoms of Manzanillo's great jaracanda tree

RED TIDE! and old women and children say,

"¡Diablo!", and cross themselves, which the American

crazies think is very funny. We do not, however.

The biggest of them, with a great mocking grin

and American lightbulb eyeballs and pants of many

colors, comes into our marketplace with a blond woman

whom he calls Gretch and a trail of blond children

behind him, rolling his grinning head around until he

sees that all the world is watching, and then he throws

his great arms of an ape up into the air and turns his

eyeballs up and shouts:

"¡EAT ALLEY! ¡EAT ALLEY! ¡TAKE ME TO EAT

ALLEY

"You mean the market, señor?"

Then he grins and stares with an intensity at the

poor mestizo as if he has just uttered the most

penetrating remark in the history of all Mexico and

says:

"Yeah! Yeah! Right! Right! Right!"

And all the world gives way, wondering, as this

strange train goes escombering into the marketplace.

There is much talk here about the crazies. Many

think that these people are Germans, refugees from a

cabala that failed. They mistake their strange talk for

German. Some people think that they are American

gangsters, in hiding. But I think that they came up out

of the red tide.

¡AGUAJE!

In truth! Out in the ocean, where the water was

once deepest blue-green, or, at worst, yellow-green

near the beach, there are now vast streaks of reddish

water, as if there were a channel cutting through the

ocean itself, stretching for miles, hot and turbid, thick

as mucus. The fish die almost at once when they enter

it. I have watched a mullet come upon it. She swam

from the blue-green water into the red tide and

suddenly she is keeling over, as if paralyzed, then

struggling to come upright again, then thrashing about

crazily as if dizzy, then heading for the surface, where

she whirls, flashing in the sunlight, then collapses,

keeling over on her side again, paralyzed, then sinks,

and then, by and by, without doubt, floats back up,

dead, to join the great stinking school of dead fish,

dead crabs, dead sea bass, mullets, thread herring,

mackerel, shrimp, even barnacles, coquinas, sailfish,

marlin, porpoises, turtles, huge gobs of reeking gluey

tissue floating in a grisly death school on the red tide.

Struck dead—

—by what? By the plankton. All the world knows

that the plankton cause the red tide—as if that could be

called a cause. For the plankton are always there,

millions of invisible animiculae, thousands to a cupful

of seawater. It is they who reflect blue-green and give

our ocean its color, although elsewhere they reflect red

and make the Red Sea red, without harm to any animal,

and the Vermillion Sea vermillion and the Lake of

Blood a rose-red milk of sulphur. But here, off the

placid Bay of Manzanillo in the Pacific Ocean, this

little invisible ... um ... dinoflagellate, Gymnodinium

brevis, just one cell to him and two whips, whipping

and darting about, begins to multiply. And suddenly he

appears to explode, should one look at him under a mi-

croscope, as Charles Darwin once did, and he divides

into two dinoflagellates, and they divide into four, and

so on, in a progression of utmost rapidity until there

are in truth ten million of them in a cup of water, and

the water turns red from their red pigment, which

reflects light, until finally, from the focking millions of

explosions, a poison as powerful as aconitine gives off

into the water—but why?—why has it started now, this

malignant explosion of the plankton into—

—one vast immortal Group Animicula, fifteen

miles long and three miles wide, immortal, in truth.

The first little Gymnodinium brevis still lives just as

surely as the 128-billionth as the red tide spreads. For

they increase simply by cell division. The great marlins

die, the porpoises, all the creatures of the sea die, and

the fishermen die, but the Gymnodinium is immortal,

the instant brother of every Gymnodinium brevis who

ever lived, no past, no future, only Now, and immortal,

the little fockers. No cause, señor, no starting point in

time, just the point at which your game intersected the

256-octillionth Gymnodinium and all his ancestors and

successors in old Manzanillo and brought you up tight.

We know only that yesterday there were fish, and today

the fish are dead and the poison plankton and the

American crazies are alive, and tomorrow we must find

out the cause and the cure—or could it possibly be that

yesterday and tomorrow are merely more of Now

stretching fifteen miles and three miles wide

immortal—

THEN, NOW, ESAU, JUDITH,

BASHEMATH, REUEL, SUSPENDED in the mucus;

what a bummer. Mountain Girl lies on the bed in her

room; staring at the ceiling; a pisspoor job of

plastering it is, too; and all of them suspended in 110-

degree mucus. She; Kesey; Faye; their children; George

Walker; the new chick, Black Maria; have a house by

the beach; new; raw certified Rat construction;

cinderblock and plaster; she could scrabble through it

with her hands. Fifty yards away, across the beach

road, The Rat Shack; this being a Purina Chow factory;

yep; inhabited by Babbs, Gretchen Fetchin and Babbs's

children; a curious little building empty of Purina

Chow and glistening with tiles inside. All of them

gittin stuck and stranded like flies in this 110-degree

mucus of Manzanillo with the red tide stinking the

place up for good measure; Hagen, with his leg in a

cast; Julius Karpin, the Hardest Head in the West, from

Berkeley, of the Prankster outer circle, here with his

leg in a cast. They picked out Manzanillo for these very

reasons, however; isolated, few Americans in the sum-

mer, off the tourist trail; secure desert island. Stranded

in an uptight town; no roads leading north and no roads

leading south; nine or ten hours of hell by bus to

Guadalajara the only way to git back to the rest of the

world; can't git out in the daytime and do anything

because of the heat; can't git out at night because of the

mosquitoes; the jungle beyond the Rat Shack filthy

with cocoa palms and all sortsa jungle shit; itching

crawling alive like a chigger-ridden groin; all manner

exotic vermin; sting inflame chigger-blister mosquito

heaven, with scorpions for good measure coming up

outta the dung dust like lobsters as the crab louse is to

the crab. Standing dead still in this shit; jes waiting;

for what; for bread, mainly; every day in supplication

at the altar of the Telégrafo, for money from Stateside;

Kesey's lawyers supposed to be hassling up money; and

everyday some soul, like the chick Kesey picked up,

Black Maria, down to the Telégrafo using an alias

waiting for telégrafo coming from some lawyer in San

Francisco; or from the Mexico City lawyer Kesey's

stateside lawyers had gotten hold of to straighten

things out with the Mexican police; he was called

Estrella; for Star Lawyer? who the fuck knows; here on

Devil's Island, us fugitives; no sense of time at all;

unbelievable bad news is all that filters from the U.S.;

Ron Boise, who had a rheumatic heart, has died of a

heart attack at the age of thirty-two; Norman Hartweg

in an accident on the drive east with Marge the Barge

and Evan Engber, and he is in a hospital in Ann Arbor,

almost completely paralyzed; unbelievable things out

of the time-death Karma; and here no time; jes a dead

still now stretching back eternally and forward

eternally.

So Mountain Girl lies on the bed and stares up

through the heat waves rising in the 110-degree mucus

of Manzanillo; and she is not high on anything; maybe

slightly out of her head, but not high; no, not even out

of her head; but it's like that acid time-warp thing; like

they're all thrust back permanently into a primitive

time; this is permanent; Kesey can't go back ever; they

will slam him away for good; meaning she can't go

back ever, either; how? back to the bamboo cage to be

clucked and lectured and blubbered over until she

drowned?; none of them can go back; 'cause there is

nothing to go back to; it is all here now; Mexico, even

as Kesey foresaw that day in La Honda and she started

learning Spanish; which none of them really know,

however, except Black Maria; always in a cocoon shut

off from the worthy up-tight nativos; only the

Pranksters are the primitives; thrown back on their own

resources; reliving the primitive life of man with only

the dwindling hope of a bountiful miracle from the sa-

cred Telégrafo to possibly break the spell... of 3,000

years ago.

Three thousand years ago Mountain Girl walks

down to the water, the backwater, every day to wash

clothes, diapers and sundry other shit; every day

walking through the heat waves under the salty sun

through the scrub grass and dung sand, to wash clothes,

by the waters of the ... Nile and the daughter of

Pharaoh came down to wash herself at the river; and

her maidens walked along by the river's side; and when

she saw the ark among the flags, she sent her maid to

fetch it... it is as if she is walking down to the river and

she is watching herself, a maiden, 3,000 years ago,

walking down to the river, at the same time, in ... the

Middle East; it is always the Middle East somehow, out

of an old illustrated Bible; 110 degrees, bulrushes and

the eternal laundry bummer; nothing to read here but

The Nova Express by William Burroughs; the Nietzsche

and Dostoevsky that Kesey has; and in the Bible;

everybody goes through Nova Express in a couple of

hours; but the Bible they can linger over ... and

gradually without anybody hardly saying anything

about it, without getting high even, they are in another

time dimension; biblical tribe, biblical tribeswoman

washing in the water; living like the children of Isaac

and Rebecca in the First Book; even taking biblical

identities; they each choose, become a character in the

Bible; in truth; it is 3,000 years ago, now stretching

back infinitely to ... the very Genesis; to Esau; Kesey

is Esau; the hairy one; and Esau was a cunning hunter;

a man of the field; and Jacob was a plain man, dwelling

in tents; 13. Did they grow up alike? Describe them.—

Esau was a skillful hunter, and Jacob was a quiet man,

fond of home; 14. Which was the first born?—Esau; 15.

Did he value his birthright? The proof?—He sold it,

when hungry, and faint, to Jacob for a dish of potted

beans or other food. So thousands, for present pleasure,

will risk or lose their souls; 16. To whom did he sell it,

and for what?—See No. 15; 23. Whom did Esau choose

as his wives?—Judith and Bashemath, Hittites. Gen.

26:34.; 24. Did his parents approve his choice?—No;

they were grieved by it; and Bashemath bore Reuel...

3,000 years ago; for there is no time in this place; only

an eternal now stretching on infinitely over the entire

world and all the history thereof; for the world seeketh

its own level; which is the sea; and all living creatures

of the sea shall die; but the Gymnodinium brevis, which

knoweth no time, except now, shall live forever; ye

have heard that it was said by them of old time, The

earth is round; but I say unto you . . .

KESEY WOULD LIE OUTSIDE THE CASA

GRANDE IN A HAMMOCK. Black Maria, in tight

black slacks, would keep brooding, staring out to sea

with her back to them, which annoyed everyone. They

would occasionally snigger slightly, which made her

more up tight, of course. Julius and Mike Hagen both

had their casts painted most lurid and glorious Day-Glo

in bus designs. Kesey lay in the hammock reading

Nietzsche :::: who would have thought the old

whiskered Valkyrie was such a head, into the pudding...

And little cycles within cycles. Hagen kept

repeating traumatic injuries. In Barcelona he had a

motorcycle accident and kept riding and ended up with

a permanently injured shoulder. In Canada the same

thing all over again. And now in Mexico with his

broken leg in a Day-Glo cast he felt something... grisly

. . . under there, and spied a tick, and cut open the cast

and found two more and pus oozing under the cast. He

closed the whole thing up by wrapping adhesive around

the cast.

"Why'd you put that tape over your pretty cast,

Mike?"

"Looking for ticks."

Couple of days later he couldn't even walk as far

as the Rat Shack. Nothing to do but deliver himself up

to the Rat ministry of the Hospital Civil.

"Give me some speed, Julius, so I can deal with

the bastards."

Kesey tries to cheer him up by telling him he can

film the forthcoming wedding between Mountain Girl

and George Walker.

"Hey!" says Hagen. "Maybe we can get the guy,

the mayor jefe, to do the ceremony out here."

Hagen begins to jack-leg around on the cast,

snapping his fingers. The dexedrine is beginning to stir

and tickle at the boy inside the cast.

"Fuck that," says Mountain Girl.

"And a lot of flowers!"

"Fuck that."

Mountain Girl looks like a great gorgeous

Amazon—and very down-in-the-mouth, with her lurid

Acid Test yellow hair hanging down to her waist but a

little circle of black on top, like a cap where it is

coming in natural at the roots. Like Mike, she'll put off

the mundane bullshit she loathes just so long as

possible. We've known for three weeks that she'd love

to be legally married, for her child to have legal

Mexican rights and she's known for nine months when

that marriage deadline would have to be met.

George, Faye and Zonk come back from the

market with food, George wearing Zonker's blue velour

pants, a shirt with broad orange and white vertical

stripes, by Gretchen Fetchin, and knee-high boots he

has painted in diagonal orange and white stripes, and

his hair with orange tips from the Acid Test lurid

bleach. All is arranged at city hall for the marriage,

Miss Carolyn Adams and Mr. George Walker, and at

the Hospital Civil for the baby.

"—and we'll buy a cot of white—"

"Fuck that."

"—and we'll film it on the beach at sunset with

microphones. Babbs can run a cable out and a

speaker—and music—we can have Gretch on the organ

with The Wedding March?'

"Fuck that," says Mountain Girl.

SO MOUNTAIN GIRL AND GEORGE WERE

MARRIED, QUIETLY, IN town. And Mountain Girl

had the baby in the Hospital Civil, a healthy blond girl,

whom she named Sunshine. At sea level...

Kesey in la casa grande—there's always a taffy

triangle being pulled at the house, what with four

private rooms laced with endless variations on the

Faye—me—George—Mountain Girl theme.

Mountain Girl is grimming on: "Look at this

wall. It's awful. No, I'm serious, look at it. I could

scrabble through this wall in five minutes."

"Whyn't you go roll us a joint?"

"Can we smoke it in my room so I don't have to

keep jumping every time Faye bangs the door?"

"Hmmmm ..."

"Never mind. That's a tricky question. Besides it

keeps me on my toes in here."

SPIRITS PICKING UP SLIGHTLY IN

THE RED TIDE TORPOR. Pranksters beginning

to do small Prankster things. Hagen back from the

Hospital Civil hobbling but hassling with the old sweet

Vesper boy charm. No stereo rigs, projectors, video

tapes to be hassled hereabouts on Devil's Island, but he

finds the biggest rig there is and hassles some poor

local out of it—a turtle. A huge sea turtle, weighs

about 50 pounds. Much jubilation over the monster, but

nobody knows what to do with it, not even Faye, the pi-

oneer wife and master cook, dietician, technician and

mechanic. No caldron they are ever likely to get can

deal with it. So they put a huge skull and crossbones in

Day-Glo on its shell and put it back in the sea, thinking

happily of another 200 years of life they have assured

it. Nobody in Zecotopetl death-god Mexico will seek

this one for his stewpot...

Babbs, after many days of glumming in his

Purina Chow redoubt, strolls over, lewding out, "Hi,

Je-e-e-ed!" to Kesey's three-year-old son. Only Babbs

in his Be-elzebabbs best could greet a three-year-old

with such lewd lubricious loonacy.

Page Browning has pulled in, ready to go,

enchanted with Huaraches and the Rat thing. Huaraches

on every foot in Mexico! Zea-lot himself could not

have devised a more devilish troublesome contrivance.

"They keep 'em strung out on huaraches! You

can't run in 'em, you can't walk in 'em, they never fit,

they hurt your feet. All you can do is sit tight. That's

how they keep this country straight. They keep 'em

strung out on this bummer!" and so on.

Suddenly—Sandy Lehmann-Haupt turns up, back

from way over the edge, on a motorcycle. He drove all

the way from New York City on this motorcycle,

halfway across the U.S.A. and all the way through the

Rat lands to this southwesternmost edge of Mexico, no

mean stint even for a Neal Cassady. Kesey looks at him

and can't believe it. He looks stronger, healthier,

calmer, more confident than he has ever seen him. It

gives him a foreboding that he can't put a name on ...

Even Bob Stone sails in, Bob Stone from way

back from old Perry Lane days. He pulls in in a Hertz

car. He flew into Mexico City, got a Hertz car. He has

an assignment from Esquire to do a story on Kesey in

Exile. Ah; so the old world still waits. Stone, still

hypersensitive, seeing the FBI and Federales behind

every cocoa palm—or else scorpions—and in that very

moment, however, plunging head first, as always, into

whatever chaos debacle any Prankster cares to dream

up, crying lissen this is dangerous as he swandives off

every handy cliff.

Hooking down dexedrine. Stone and Babbs go off

in Stone's car, high on pills, heading up Tepic way, in

Rat country. Come back giggling and carrying on over

weird experience with the Road Animal. They had

driven through the dung dust, days without sleep and

soaring on dex, scrub country and burros, and night fell

and it got really weird. Stone sees little Mex bridges

and they become gila monsters, and Babbs sees them,

too. The road becomes the veriest little tightrope

between the no-man's land of the monsters, and then all

at once the monsters take command of the road!—up

ahead, the biggest road monster any man has ever seen,

so huge it straddles the road, like a tarantula with legs

10 feet high, on the edges of the road, and its huge

filthy body and jaws over the middle waiting for food

and their car is bearing down toward it, don't dare stop

and don't dare go on—

"No! Don't go near it!" shouts Stone.

"No," says Babbs, "we've got to. We've got to go

through it."

"Through it!!"

"We've got to," says Babbs. "If we don't, we'll

never make any

progress. "

Suddenly it seems the most crucial thing in the

history of the world that they make progress. "I know!

But it's too—"

"Got to go through it!" says Babbs. They steel

for the debacle, Armageddon, the end of all— —and

sail through it!—

—-it's a focking great road-building machine of

some sort, tooling down the highway at Mex huarache

speed, the mestizos up top look down bewildered at this

car that just shot under them at 60 or 70 ...

Stone and Kesey tooling up toward Sonora, nice

and high on speed. Stone thinks he's behind tinted glass

in a cab, although he is doing the driving. So like a

taxi! They pick up a kid, an American, hitchhiking back

to California. They can take him as far as Sonora.

We're going to California, says Stone, and they gun off.

"Californee!" says Kesey, in the stupidest country way

possible. "Yeah," says Stone. "I'm driving this fella

here"—Kesey—"up to California to see the sun come

up. He's never seen the sun come up."

"Awww," says Kesey, "yer pullin my leg. Ain't

no sun come up.

"I wouldn't put you on," says Stone. "The sun

comes up and you're going to see it." Passing strange

somehow to be riding in a taxi cab through the Mexican

nowhere with Kesey, behind a tinted glass.

"Awwwww," says Kesey. The kid, meanwhile, is

deathly quiet.

"I'm not lying!" says Stone. "Look up there.

There it is, the sum

"Uhhh, uhhhh, God, you was right, there it is, the

sun! Why ... it fi-i-i-i-lls the sky! It li-i-i-i-i-ights up

the valley! It shi-i-i-i-ines upon the ocean!"

After a few miles the kid speaks up in a casual

way, best he can, "Say, fellows, I think I'll get out in

Tepic instead of Sonora. 1 just remembered, I got to

see somebody there."

So he gets out.

Never trust a Prankster!

And Cassady—Cassady barreling onto the Rat

strand in yet another Cassady vehicle, revved up revved

up revved up at the ; eternal Cassady speed, with a new

typical Cassady Excalibur. He has a four-pound sledge

hammer with the handle wrapped in Day-Glo tape,

which he throws about from noon to doom like an

Indian club, flipping it up in the air and catching it,

flipping it up in double spins, triples, quadruples, true

spins, eccentric spins, sprocketing his shoulders his

elbows his knees his feet about in the jerky beat. The

Prank and the Schism are apparently long forgotten. If

there's any soul can break up this focking red tide and

clear the mucus air sailing speedily on all channels, it

is Cassady. So they smoke some grass and climb up on

top of la casa grande and sit up there while Cassady

circuses and sprockets with his sledge hammer off on

his speedy trip just the barest l/30th second from Now

at dusk. Cassady does his wild American sledge

hammer ballet by the side of a pool of backwater and

they can see Cassady's reflection in the pool and their

own reflection looking down at Cassady, but looking up

in the pool in perfect asymmetric playback, winking

Day-Glo and dusk, invoking apparitions from the past,

a moon door, for the world in the immense act of

contemplating itself, Domnu, sativa and rajas all at

once, fons et origo, instant Movie—Now

Wet-handle Harry!

And the Halusion Gulp begins to shake its wings

again like leather paddle flaps on the wheel o' fortune

carnival game, a Rat bird, but it knows the one hole in

the sky. Kesey in la casa grande with the wind up and

the sky cloudy, and the Gulp flapping, and the Rat

plaster paneled with pages from out of Marvel comics,

whole scenes of Dr. Strange, Sub Mariner, the

Incredible Hulk, the Fantastic Four, the Human Torch—

Superheroes, in short. All heads believe them to be

drawn by meth freaks, because of the minute

phosphorescent dedication of their hands. Super-

heroes! Übermenschen! It was passing strange that

Nietzsche, that curious little Peter Lorre misanthrope

with whiskers and a sour black Tubingen professorial

frock coat on, should be into the essence of the thing—

—and Kesey can hear Bob Stone telling him,

"Nietzsche is up in Heaven now, Ken, saying 'I dig

what you're doing—but don't read my books' "—

—yet the old Valkyrie was into the thing. The

world not a line of cause and effect heading forward

forever, but finite and ever-repeating, so that all that

ever was and ever will be is caught up in now, in

endless Recurrence, only waiting for the Superheroes to

resurface; after which, a total revaluation. And

combining Nietzsche's inspiration with his own of at-

present-best—of man forever watching his own movie

and never being able to get to the paradise beyond the

screen: as Nietzsche glimmered, life is a circle and so

it is the going, not the getting there, that counts. Live

in the moment. Lots of good heads said it. I tried. I

devoted much time and much energy. To find that those

good heads had been tricked—that simple trick\ of I

was right about living in the moment but we can never

get in the moment! Orggggggg!

Yet, as Pranksters and many close and near

believe, he knows he has somehow caught sight of the

great flapping beast and is somewhere beyond this side

of the screen and into the true old full bare essence of

the thing—he is onto what is popularly thought of as

enlightenment... thinking back:

Nighttime and he had gone out to the water, high

on grass, and sat down and the light from the electric

signs—Coca-Cola?—in the town came across the bay,

and every line of light came off straight, the primitive

line, Stone Age, the line of grass

CUT TO

nighttime, same spot, high on acid, and the lines

come off not straight but in perfect half circles, the

acid line, the line of the

present, the perfect circle, like the spiders they

injected with acid, and they wove perfect little round

webs

CUT TO

nighttime, same spot, high on opium, only time

he ever took hard dope, and the lines came off starting

into circles and instead finished with a little hook, like

the little hook in the water of a Japanese print, like the

little hook even in the lines of that strange comic strip,

The Spirit, and this was the line of the future, com-

pleting the circle without having to go all the way

every time, getting there by knowing the beginning of

the trip

CUT TO

Nighttime and an electrical storm in the Mexican

heat flashes, high on acid, the lightning breaking out—

there!—there!—and the electricity flows through him

and out of him, a second skin, a suit of electricity, and

if the time was ever now it is—Now!—and he hurls his

hand toward the sky to make the lightning break out

where he points—Now!—we've got to close it, the gap

between the flash and the eye, and make it, the reentry

into Now ... as Superheroes ... open ... until he falls to

the beach and Mountain Girl finds him holding his

throat and choking as if he is gagging on sand ...

Beyond acid. They have made the trip now,

closed the circle, all of them, and they either emerge as

Superheroes, closing the door behind them and soaring

through the hole in the sapling sky, or just lollygag in

the loop-the-loop of the lag. Almost clear! Presque

vu!—many good heads have seen it—Paul telling the

early Christians: hooking down wine for the Holy

Spirit—sooner or later the Blood has got to flood into

you for good—Zoroaster telling his followers: you can't

keep taking haoma water to see the names of Vohu

Mano—you've got to become the flames,

n—And Dr.

Strange and Sub Mariner and the Incredible Hulk and

the Fantastic Four and the Human Torch prank about on

the Rat walls of la casa grande like stroboscopic

sledgehammer Cassadys, fons et origo ::::: and it is

either make this thing permanent inside of you or

forever just climb draggled up into the conning tower

every time for one short glimpse of the horizon :::::

chapter

XXIV

The Mexican Bust

HAGEN, MEANWHILE, WAS MORE AND

MORE . . . HAGEN. The irresistible charmer ... and it

seems some beautiful deb from California had insisted

on following him to Mexico. Dear Dad. Don't worry

about me. I am in Mexico with some beautiful people.. .

Her father sensed beatnik and dope right away, of

course, and pulled all manner of strings to find out

where she was and get her back. At least the Pranksters

figured later that was what explained the mysterious

debacle that came next, on the road to Guadalajara.

Hagen, Kesey and Ram Rod were driving up

toward Guadalajara in a panel truck one night when

they came upon a roadblock manned by Mexican

Federales. What to do? Turn around? bust through?

fake it? At the time, everything had been so cool with

the local legals, they were feeling strong and confident,

and so Kesey decided to stop and just do the old thing

of draw them into the movie. God knows the Pranksters

had coped with many cops before.

But—of course, they couldn't speak Mexican, so

they couldn't even get the Movie going with these

Federales. The Federales grabbed all three of them and

searched the truck immediately for grass, which they

found, and that wrapped that up. Out in the rain and the

dark in the Rat lands. The Mexicans don't hassle people

over grass as much as the American cops, but they have

the same kind of laws, and they are not delighted to

have American heads guests of their country, and

Kesey was "hot," as they say. A certified debacle, in a

word.

This Route 15 ran along the railroad tracks that

come up from the Guatemalan border. Between the road

and the tracks were the spiky dark clumps of a lot of

high foliage, scrub and shit, thorns, razor leaves. Kesey

smiles sadly and goes through a big well-you-got us,

fellas, fair-and-square pantomine, that's the way it

goes. The Federales take his turista card, which is a

fake. Yup-you-win-fellas, and say, Lemme just go over

in them bushes a second before you haul us off. Fella

has to take a leak; all men equal, gringos and Mex and

whatever, when the piss call comes, right-fellas? So the

Federales say O.K. and Kesey goes off in the scrub—

—out the corner of his eye he sees a train easing

over the siding on the tracks, coming around the bend

slow—

—Haul ass! Rotor Rooter! Kesey plunges into the

brush toward the tracks, thorns and razor leaves raking

his legs, the light from the train shaking that weird sick

ochre cast over the spiky brush clumps, thrashing

through this shit, up against the side of the train jumps

up on top of a coupling, grabs a ladder to the top of the

boxcar. Rain comes in a sudden sheet, lightning breaks

out, lighting up the whole scene and his body—

Federales huffing and galomping through the scrub like

comic-movie Mexicans popping buttons off their guts

and screaming ¡hoy! ¡pronto! and then

HRHAAAAAAAAAAMMMNNNNNNNNNN

The bastards are shooting at him! Mama don't

'low no grass-smokin' in hyar! Testy out here on edges

of professed belief—

blackness—then Cosmo let him in on it for an

instant with a flash of lightning—more huffing

harroomping

HRHAAAAAAAAMMMNNNNNNNNNN

comic latino cops—until the train picks up speed

and he lies battened down to the top of the car heading

off to somebody's Edge City somewhere.

Which turns out to be Guadalajara. He has no

money on him, no grass, no nothing. He heads for the

inevitable mariachi square, hunkers down in the dark,

wet and shivering. Wonder do they tolerate gringo

bums in this town? Daylight a Mexican comes through

the park and strikes up a conversation, speaks English.

He is a slender guy in his twenties, very handsome like

a Valentino, almost feminine

¡QUEER!

offers to let Kesey rest up in his hotel room

¡QUEER!

so beat and shivering he takes him on it. The

hotel is one step above a flophouse, but clean. He has a

neat little room, this Mario, a snug harbor. "Go ahead,

get some sleep." Kesey tries to fight off the sleep

fantasy

¡QUEER ASSAULT!

but he falls asleep anyway, wakes up a long time

later, all intact. Mario is broke himself, but gets off a

collect telegram to Manzanillo under Kesey's new alias,

Sol Almande. Salamander, you understand—the beast

that lives in fire. Wait around all day and the next,

Mario being nothing but a totally sweet person.

WHAT'S HIS GAME?

Down to the holy telégrafo to pray. All the

huarache telégrafo workers sitting around under

fluttering leaves of telegrams piling up. Hay tiempo.

You have to know how to approach them, says Mario.

Goes upstairs in the telégrafo. Presently the Huarache

Chief rummages through the whole heap for a message

for the burning Almande. But—nothing.

Next morning Kesey decides to risk it, goes down

to the American consulate as a poor broke grizzled

balding American fisherman stranded and got to get

back to Manzanillo. A girl there, a Miss Hitchcock,

gives him 27 pesos for third-class bus fare to

Manzanillo, and he gets on, with Mario waving a sweet

valedictory goodbye. That was your bummer, Kesey,

not to understand that the pure humble Mexican strain

of sweetness—that was all that Mario was about, just a

muy simpático human being. The bus ride was horrible,

eighteen hours of bouncing through the Rat lands, half

road and half no road, the Rat lands and yet so many

open faces. They look at you just like a head, totally

open, wanting to find something rather than hide

something. Many piss stops, and Kesey can only

struggle around grizzled, waiting for the driver to get

on with it. Kesey is hungry and burnt out like a husk.

About ten hours out, they're stopped and the driver

walks back and stares at Kesey with the wide-open

simpático look and gives him six pesos, just like that,

without a word, worth about 17 cents but good for a

taco or suchlike, and walks on back to the front of the

bus. A strange land, this Rat land! Sometimes they

know. There is hope!—not just for the Superaware

elected few, but for the unsuspected multitudes who

open up and look. They are waiting, here in this Rat

land.

Back in Manzanillo, and the adrenaline was

flowing again. Hagen and Ram Rod were salted away in

jail. Like everything in Mexico, the jail scene was

tough and soft at the same time. It was filthy, crawling

with ticks, lice, scorpions, the whole scene. The food

was filthy, too. But you could have anything you

wanted to put down your gullet sent in, if you could

pay for it, from luscious enchilada meals to grass,

speed and acid. Hagen and Ram Rod stayed delightfully

high and miserable.

In any case, Kesey began to feel like it was only

a matter of time before they closed in. It wasn't so

much the Mexicans he was worried about. The

Mexicans were always ready to make a deal. It was the

Stateside zealots. The FBI bodysnatchers worried him.

He knew about Morton Sobell, the atom spy, who

suddenly turned up one day at a border town in the

custody of an FBI agent, walking across the border

with the Feds. If the FBI can grab you in Mexico,

physically, the Mexicans will play along with that, too.

And the zealous head-buff San Mateo County cops.

Word was that San Mateo cops were taking their

vacations in Mexico for no other reason than to go

Kesey-hunting and make more fat headlines. La casa

grande and the Rat Shack becoming steadily more

uncool as first one head and then another showed up,

with big comradely grins on, kids from California, even

from New York, who had somehow learned where

Kesey is. They always came on like naturally the

Pranksters would be shining with joy to see them—we

holy few, we initiates of the acid scene—with the grins

spilling out over the edge of their lower teeth.

Obviously it was a big thing on the acid scene in the

States to know where Kesey is. That was being very

inside the thing. Yeah—I saw Kesey down there.

Then—various Pranksters brought friends over.

Including girls, of course. And Page struck up with a

tall blond girl, kind of a Danish maiden sort, whom

they all called Doris Delay. It was getting like La

Honda, the tropical annex, La Honda in the Tropic of

Cancer. People were bunked in and straggled all over

the place, in the house, in the Rat Shack, on the bus. A

girl named Jeannie got bit by a scorpion one night.

Everybody woke up and what to do. They pondered

awhile and decided to go with the flow and they all

went back to sleep. She survived.

Kesey remained very permissive about the whole

thing. Nobody got shunted off. Put my professed beliefs

to the Test. In any case, it was no longer possible to

believe there was any semblance of secrecy about the

whole Fugitive movie now. It was just a matter of time

or lackadaisicalityityityityityityity . . . The whole

scene would get Kesey up tight and he would get in a

car and drive up on a bluff overlooking the ocean and

smoke grass and watch the ocean ... like Black Maria,

come to think of it.

Black Maria was going through a private hell.

Namely, she was lonely as hell. Lonely? One means,

how could a truly out-front person feel lonely amid so

many truly out-front people doing so many things

together and getting high together all the time. Would

Mountain Girl ever feel lonely? Would Mountain Girl

ever feel desperate? It was unthinkable; Mountain Girl

was synched into this whole thing. She, Black Maria,

was probably the only person in the history of this

whole thing to get lonely ... in the Prankster hierarchy.

Prankster hierarchy? There wasn't supposed to

be any Prankster hierarchy. Even Kesey was supposed

to be the non-navigator and non-teacher. Certainly

everybody else was an equal in the brotherhood, for

there was no competition, there were no games. They

had left all that behind in the straight world .. . but. ..

call it a game or what you will. Right now, among the

women, Mountain Girl was first, closest to Kesey, and

Faye was second, or was it really vice versa, and Black

Maria was maybe third, but actually so remote it didn't

matter. Among the men, there was Babbs, always the

favorite ... and no games... but sometimes it seemed

like the old personality game ... looks, and all the old

aggressive, outgoing charm, even athletic ability—it

won out here, like everywhere else .. .

Yet by and by Black Maria was a Prankster. It

was just there, in the air, the fact that she was now a

Prankster. She had altered the flow, and not by

accepting it, either.

Page's girl, Doris Delay, was going through the

same thing. There was something she wanted to ask

somebody, but how could she ask it. Finally she came

up to Sandy Lehmann-Haupt and said, 'What do they

mean—Never trust a Prankster?"

chapter

XXV

Secret Agent Number One

AFTERNOON — PAGE COMES BUSTING

IN LA CASA GRANDE saying, "Hey! There's a

guy across the road taking pictures of us!"

Sure enough. There is a guy peeking over the

edge of a window in an unfinished cottage across the

beach road, another cinderblock Rat wonder. The sun

highlights off his camera lens. Kesey gets the

adrenaline pumping for a run, but Page charges across

the road to the cottage like he owns the place, followed

shortly by Babbs.

Inside the cottage he finds a Mexican, dressed

like a businessman, metallic suit, white shirt and tie,

looks like he's in his thirties.

"What the hell do you think you're doing?" says

Page.

"Hello, amigo!" the guy says, looking fairly cool.

He speaks English. "I theenk maybe I buy thees house.

You like the beach here?"

"Yeah! Yeah! Right! Right! Right!" says Babbs.

Babbs has his friendly put-on grin turned up to such

maximum intensity the guy flinches his cool

momentarily, but he gets it back. ' "Yes?"

"Yeah! Yeah! Right! Right! Right!"

"Yes. I am glad. I like another person's opeenion

in thees theengs. Well—so long, amigos!"—and he

steps outside like he's going.

"Send us some pictures if they turn out good,"

says Babbs.

"Some pictures?"

"Yeah! Yeah! Right! Right! Right!"

"What pictures?"

"Of us. We like pictures. We have a whole

scrapbook. We like candid pictures, you know? I bet

you took some good ones."

"Yes." The Mexican looks very thoughtful. "I tell

you, fren, maybe you can help me."

"Yeah! Yeah! Right! Right! Right!"

"I am weeth the Mexican Naval Intelligence, and

maybe you can help ... us. We have reports of Russian

submarines operating in these waters."

"Sub-ma-rines!" says Babbs in total put-on

wonderment.

Several Pranksters have gathered in front of la

casa grande to watch Babbs and Page and the Mexican

outside the Rat cottage.

"Yes," says the Mexican. "We have reports that

thees submarines are coming een to shore at night, in

thees waters. Have you notice eeny such acteevity?"

"No-tice!" says Babbs. "Well I reckon by Christ

we have! You oughta come out here some night! Some

nights there's so goddamn many of them, you can't go

to sleep for the signal lights. Shine right in the

windows, blinking something fierce, and it's a tough

code. A tough code. But we'll break it yet. We got a

lotta good heads working on it. Why, this fella right

here"—pointing to Page, and rattling on about the

incredible brazen activity of the Russian submarines in

these waters—while Cassady comes across the road,

flipping his sledge hammer, singles, doubles, triples,

way up in the air looping it, catching it behind his

back,

and so on, but not looking at them for a second.

Cassady sets a brick up on a fence about fifteen feet

from the Mexican, but doesn't say a word or even look,

ratcheting his arms and legs this way and that to his

private Joe Cuba. Then he heads back across the road.

"Yes," says the Mexican. "Please may I ask you

thees. We have a report on one of thees Russian who

maybe was landing here from a submarine. He ees

about five feet eleven, he ees a ... muscular man ... he

looks about thirty years old ... he has ... blond hair,

hees hair ees curly and he ees a leetle bald on the top...

Have you seen eeny such person?"

"One of these Russians!" says Babbs. "Have you

been to Eat Alley?"

"Eat Alley?"

"Yeah! Yeah! Right! Right! Right! The

marketplace ace. All you hear in the marketplace is

Russian. They're all over the place. This thing is wide

open already, man ! "

The guy cocks his head and stares at Babbs

through his shades as if maybe this will bring him into

focus—

—just then—

FEEOOFEEOOFEEOOFEEOOFEEOOFEEOOFEEOOFEEOO

¡WHOP!

—Cassady—twenty feet away across the beach

road has suddenly wheeled and fired the four-pound

sledge hammer end-over-end like a bolo and smashed

the brick on top of the fence into obliteration, fifteen

feet from the Mexican.

"Yes," says the Mexican. "Thank you, fren." And

he wheels and walks off at a good clip, down the road,

and gets into a sedan and hauls out of there.

THE NEXT DAY, HOWEVER, THE LITTLE

DUDE IS BACK, WALKING along the beach road with

a bounce, so Babbs goes out to meet him.

"Amigo!" the guy says. "Have you seen any

Russians today!"—this with a big sparkling grin, as if

to say it's all been a grand joke among us fellows who

are in on it.

So Babbs thinks it over and says, Let's go up to

the Polynesian palace and have a talk about the whole

thing. Man to man.

So the Mexican says O.K. and they head up

toward town toward a Polynesian restaurant up the way.

Well, that gets the guy away from la casa grande, at

least. Kesey has been primed for this, ready to make a

run for it in one of the cars. He could head for the

jungle, but the jungle is such a total bummer. On the

other hand the road out is no bargain, either. If they are

really closing in, they could have Route 15 bottled up

so fast he'd never make it. Well, get out of la casa

grande, in any case. So he and Stone get into Stone's

car and drive up to the bluff overlooking the ocean and

have a couple of tokes to assess the situation.

They park up on the bluff and look down at the

festering red tide. The focking festering red tide. They

turn the situation this way and that, and then Kesey

decides: it is no use running either into the jungle or up

the road. That's their game, the cops-and-robbers game.

That's their movie, and they know their movie

backward and forward, and they know how that one

comes out, and we know how it comes out. Justice

triumphs after a merry chase and the Fugitive eats dung

dust in the last reel to show the horror of his dope-

fiend ways. The only way out is to make it the

Prankster movie and imagine this metallic little dude

into the Prankster movie. There's no one to run to to

say, Mommy, this movie is no fun any more, it's too

real, Mommy. Up tight against the professed beliefs,

Major, and you better believe! or else draggle your ass

inaudible ... They get to talk about Fugitive movies

they have seen in which the Fugitive wins out, and they

hit upon Casablanca, the Humphrey Bogart picture.

Bogart was a fugitive in Casablanca, in the Moroccan

desert, operating a restaurant during World War II,

aiding and abetting Resistance fighters from Europe,

and the Nazi-type or Vichy France—type FBI man, the

cop heavy, in any case, comes in to question him.

"Why did you come to Casablanca?" he says.

"For the waters," says Bogart.

"There is no water here," says the cop heavy.

"We are in the middle of the desert."

"Oh?" says Bogart. "I was misinformed."

There it is! The Movie! So Stone and Kesey drive

back and join Babbs and the Mexican dude in the

Polynesian bar.

The Mexican dude and Babbs have been having

quite a time. Six or eight beer bottles are on the table,

and the Mexican dude is waxing very high and

expansive, gesturing grandly, urging them to sit down

and carrying on. He wants to know Kesey's name and

Kesey says Sol Almande. Babbs has given him a shuck

name of his own, and Stone says he is from Esquire

magazine. He studies an expense voucher from Esquire

that Stone has as if it is a highly suspicious document.

Then he whips out his billfold from inside his coat and

flips it open, displaying a big badge with the number 1

on it.

"What's that?" says Babbs.

"That! I am Agent número uno!"

"Se-cret A-gent Num-ber One!" says Babbs.

"Yeah! Yeah! Right! Right! Right!" says Agent

Number One, drawing his head back and taking an

angle on Babbs. It is like a cross between Zorro and

Nero.

Then he goes into a history of his famous cases.

"Eleezabeth Taylor ees coming to Mexico City?

Si. That ees my case. I know her very well. Si. I am

going around to her hotel, and she has all thees

people—Uhhh"—he turns his hands up and pulls his

chin down under his collarbone as if to say it is

doubtful they could even comprehend how many people

she has—"all thees functionaries doing thees and doing

that, een the corridor outside even, and one of theem,

thees beeg maricón"—meaning queer—"he tells me, 'No

one can go een! No one.' "

" No one, ay,' I tell heem. He ees a beeg maricón.

I can tell. There ees a look they have, thees maricóns.

They have cojinas the size of habichuelas, one can see

it een the face, een the voice ... they are soft like sheet,

thees maricóns...

" 'MARICÓN!' I say to heem.

"Hees voice, eet jes 'oops!'—you know?—like a

leetle theeng of water.

" 'OUT OF MY WAY, MARICÓN!' "—Agent Number

One half leaps out of his chair with the reenactment,

his eyes bouncing off his shades, shooting up like he is

galvanized with a thousand volts.

Then he sinks back.

"We-e-e-ellll," he says very softly, and smiles

like someone getting ready to drop off to sleep. The

way he says it, you can see the maricón collapsing,

dissolving, turning into little driblets of jelly and

opening the door to Miss Taylor's suite.

There is no stopping Agent Number One now.

Exploit after exploit bubbles up in his brain. Cornered

like a rat, he faces them down. About to be cut down in

fusillades, he whips his revolver and fires one shot, one

shot, amigo, and that takes care of that. The

sonsabeetches theenk they have him outsmarted, ready

to make their move, and he has already made his move

and is waiting for them, like a bucket under a faucet,

and so on.

The strange thing, however, is that none of these

fabulous cases has anything to do with celebrities.

They're all marijuana cases, usually involving

Americans. Yes.

Finally he takes out his camera and takes a

picture of each of them.

Kesey says, "Why don't you come to our party

tomorrow night? A lot of people will be there."

"Your party?"

"Yeah, we're having a farewell party tomorrow

night."

"Farewell?"

"Yeah. We're leaving Mexico and going back up

to California, so we're giving a farewell party."

"Well, thank you, amigo. I weel be there."

So began the first Mexican Acid Test

AGENT NUMBER ONE WASN'T THE MOST BRILLIANT

COP IN THE Americas, but time was obviously running

out in old Mexico. It was time to get the Movie going

on all projectors. And the bus. The new fantasy was to

get on the bus and keep moving; roam through Mexico

and give Acid Tests and be on the bus, keeping the

Pranksters movie going at top speed at all times.

They held the Manzanillo Test in the courtyard

of Babbs's Rat Shack, under the aegis of the Purina

Chow. It was a small one, with all random heads in the

area welcome. No Grateful Dead, of course, so they

gave the Polynesian restaurant latino combo ten bucks

to come down the road and play during their intermis-

sions. Between times the Pranksters themselves

furnished the music, rolling all the fantastic coils of

wire out, with Gretch on the organ, and the movies and

lights and all the rest. The night was full of heat

lightning, which was nice, and the Prankster musicians

screeled their weird Chinese tones, wailing

electronically in the Rat netherlands. But no Secret

Agent Número Uno.

Kesey actually hoped the guy would turn up. He

was just crazy enough to be adaptable for the Movie.

He was a creature of fantasy himself. In any case,

better him there gathering more data for his fabulous

career than lurking in the cocoa palms working himself

up to spring his ultimate cop fantasy on them. Well, if

so, they would go out freaking and wailing on the

shores of the red tide.

The Polynesian players came down the road again

and played. It was nice to get freaked to latino

syncopation. Then a lull, and then the shit—

¡HOY! ¡PRONTO!

—this piping shout from the other side of the Rat

Shack. And where have I heard that cry before, Cosmo?

¡HOY! ¡PRONTO!

And all veer stroked out waiting for the pounce.

More pounce to the ounce in a Mexican bust. Well, let's

have it—let's see the Federales do their fantasy to

mariachis, breaking on the high notes and struggling up

again and huffing and galomphing with gold butts and

stars in their teeth

¡HOY! ¡PRONTO!

Come on in, fellas, it's strictly Dutch freak here

inside—

—and around the corner comes only the owner of

the Polynesian palace, pissed off because his combo is

hung up on the crazies here long past intermission and

he has enough problems in the red-tide doldrums

without them malingering with the crazies.

"¡Hoy! ¡Pronto!" he keeps shouting. ¡Hurry up!

Get your asses back to the store! prodding and herding

them out of the Purina Chow palace delirium.

¡HOY! ¡PRONTO!

The heat freak lightning flashes crazy enough

and it is a good sign. The Movie is going.

THE PRANKSTERS PULLED OUT OF

MANZANILLO THE NEXT DAY without a word or a

move from Agent Number One, big as life on the bus,

plus a small caravan of cars. They headed to Guadala-

jara and gave an Acid Test in a restaurant there. The

Test went on two nights and each night a well-dressed

Mexicano with the gleaming nighttime Mexico white

shirt over his staunch midriff turned up with a go-go

girl and stayed right through, although they didn't take

acid. Smiled and danced and seemed to enjoy

themselves. Turned out he was the local jefe of

detectives. We are not alone.

The bus tooled into Aguascalientes, 364 miles

northwest of Mexico City, loaded for Acid Tests.

Aguascalientes is 6,000 feet up in tierras frescas with a

paradise climate in late summer, a nicely weird city,

built above a vast system of tunnels by ... an unknown

race ... Pranksters in the time warp of many millennia

ago. Suddenly Sandy was immensely enthusiastic.

Sandy had packed his motorcycle onto the bus. He was

getting more and more robust day by day, all for this

Mexican adventure.

The mineral springs! said Sandy. You got to try

them! A warm soothing mineral spring bath soaking

late-summer paradise into every bone—Cleanliness is

Next. Aguascalientes was what all these tierras del

fuego were piled up rock by rock for, this little bit of

Heaven in the upper altitudes.

Mountain Girl listened to all this and she knew,

well, that would be that. They would hang around

Aguascalientes the rest of the day. If there was one

thing Kesey couldn't resist, it was the prospect of a

long warm soak. He would stay in a warm tub one hour

any time, and the paradisiacal Aguascalientes were

good for four or five hours, easy.

So Kesey and many Pranksters went off and

immersed up to their chops in the warm springs. Hagen

was delegated to stay behind and watch the bus and all

the Acid Test equipment inside. Sandy went off to take

a spin on his motorcycle.

Presently Sandy turned back up at the bus. He

looked most big and bright. He had on an orange jacket

gleaming Day-Glo and much orange Day-Glo on his

bike and was looking strong. Sandy climbed up in the

bus and went back in there and presently he emerged

carrying the big Ampex.

"What are you doing with that?" says Hagen.

"I need something heavy to put on the back of my

bike for a test run," says Sandy. "I'm going to be

carrying a lot of stuff back to New York and I want to

find out how much I can maneuver with on this thing."

"Well—I don't know," says Hagen. Man, there's

something wrong with this. "Prankster equipment isn't

supposed to leave the bus. You know what the Chief

says."

"It's not leaving the bus," says Sandy. "I just

want to take it down a few blocks to see how the bike

handles with a weight on it."

All the time Sandy is tying the huge clump of

equipment down on the back rider's seat of the bike.

It's so heavy and bulky it doesn't look like he could

make ten miles with it.

"I don't think you should," says Hagen.

"I'll be right back," says Sandy—and he guns off,

with the bike drooping in the back.

An hour goes by, two hours, and he isn't back.

Hagen is worried. Then Kesey shows up, back from the

baths. Let's go! says Kesey. He sees the whole thing

right away. The fateful Ampex that Sandy had hassled

over a year ago. The sombitch has split.

They jump in a car and take off up the highway

north, toward Zacatecas. He has a big start but he won't

be getting very far with that back end loaded down like

it is. They go barreling through the Coca-Cola and

Carta Blanca crossroads of old Mexico, up past

Chicalote and Rincón de Romos and San Francisco,

everywhere stopping and shouting at the Mex drugstore

cowboys on the corner.

"Hey! Have you seen a crazy gringo on a

motorcycle—all dressed in orange?"

"No." "No." "No."—the bastards, they're too

battened down in their huaraches to say so anyway—

and they barrel on up through the dung dust but finally

give up and trail on back to the bus.

"Shit," says Mountain Girl, "that Ampex is the

guts of the Acid Test."

The whole complicated thing of the instruments,

the variable lag, the synchronicity, the taping for the

Archives—they can't do it without the Ampex. Sandy

has taken the Prankster Ampex—to the Pranksters there

was not the slightest doubt in the world that the

equipment was the Pranksters'. Not Prankster Sandy

Lehmann-Haupt's but the Pranksters'. The Prankster

family, the Prankster order, superseded all straight-

world ties, contracts and chattel laws and who is my

mother or my brethren? And he looked round about on

them which sat about him, and said, Behold my mother

and my brethren! For whosoever shall do the will of

God, the same is my brother, and my sister, and my

mother.

And there was nothing left but the vision of the

sombitch tooling up the Mexican National Highway,

struggling on his Suzuki to haul.. . possessions back to

New York. New York. So this was what he had built up

the strength for. Six thousand freaking miles on a 250-

pound motorcycle to seek out his electronic chattel and

draggle it back, freaking Day-Glo in the sundown

toward the border.

ABOUT 4,500 FEET AWAY, SANDY

RESTED IN THE SHADOW Behind a big

corrugated tin shed. Out in the open sun there—the

runway of the Aguascalientes airport with brown

Mexicans in coveralls lollygagging around. Sandy had

been a man of his word, up to a given point, so to

speak. He had gone a couple of blocks, like he said.

Then he took a right and rode on over to the city

airport and parked behind the shed ... and waited ... and

was Kesey really so far into Now, such a master

precognition, that he would shoot the Zen arrow ... or

let him draw it, rather, and come straight there and

hassle him upside the bus again and in that moment let

him know irrevocably who has the Power, the control

over his mind forever ...

Strangely, the paranoia lasted only for a twinge

as he caught his breath in the shade. In fact, he was

strangely calm, as if the chase were now over, rather

than begun. He had done it. It had been his movie. He

had drawn them into his scenario. Mike Hagen. "We-e-

e-e-11," he had said. "I don't kno-o-o-ow. You know

what the Chief says." He knew. He had been on the bus

for three years. The trip had been liberation and

captivity all at the same time, liberation, power, will,

the greatest in the world—and whose will? The group

mind's? Well, he had never had a dream war with the

group mind, he had never been held in thrall by the

group mind, he had never been subject to absolute

judgment by the group mind, waiting for the one

cryptic word that will say, It's O.K., Sandy.

Naturally he could never haul the big Ampex

3,000 miles on a motorcycle. It would be a little pile of

gleaming whimsy, like one of Paul Foster's acid-bag

transistor radios, by the time he reached the border,

from the interminable bouncing. But he had that figured

out. There was a Railway Express Agency in Aguas-

calientes. He would take the Ampex over there and ship

it to New York collect and ride back on the motorcycle

free as a bird. Which he did.

A YEAR LATER I TALKED TO SANDY IN

CENTRAL PARK, DOWN BY the edge of the lake near

Central Park South. He looked good, strong, calm. He

was going with a good-looking blonde whom I had met.

He had a job as a sound engineer with one of the

recording companies. We got to talking for a long time

about his adventures with the Pranksters, and dusk

came on, and we related what we had each heard of

Kesey recently, and it started getting dark, so we got

up and left the park. And in all of it Sandy spoke with

warmth, about Kesey, about the whole experience, with

no traces of rancor. It started getting dark and we got

up and walked out of the park. Just before we parted,

Sandy turned to me and said, "You know ... I'll always

be on the bus."

"LEO! LEO! YOU ARE LEO, AREN'T YOU?

DO YOU NOT KNOW ME any more? We were League

brothers together and should still be so. We were both

travelers on the journey to the East."

THE PRANKSTERS MOVED ON TO

MEXICO CITY AND ENVIRONS, giving a couple of

Acid Tests, but without any astounding gusto.

American heads from the Ajijic—San Miguel de

Allende—Mexico City Circuit gathered proudly—

Yeah—I ran into Kesey and the Pranksters in Mexico

and we all got stoned. A few Indians came and got

taciturnly freaked.

Meanwhile, Kesey's lawyers were hassling with

Mexico City immigration legals in Mexico City to see

about getting him a proper visa for a long haul, and

they blew hot and cool. And then cooler and cooler.

They seemed to be followed, the Pranksters and the

bus, by carloads of well-dressed Mexican dudes here

and there. Stone saw more than anyone else but kept

driving. Cassady hauling the bus over the Mexico

tierras frías with his new goal up against now of going

the length and breadth of Mexico without using the

brakes and without stopping for anything, hauling off

onto crumbling scrubroot shoulders rather than stop for

carts or cars or animals, smoothing out his stroke, from

the Joe Cuba spastokinetic jerk, the sudden straight

lines, into a new line—the new line—Kesey can see it

happening even in the eternal Cassady—but of

course!—in him first of all—from Fire to Water, from

the Stone Age into the Acid Age and in a moment—

now— Furthur—

HAUL ASS, KESEY! IT WAS NOW

TIME TO BRING THE FUTURE back to the

U.S.A., back to San Francisco, and brazen it out with

the cops and whatever else there. The Mexican legals

were hinting at booting him out, maybe in a month, on

the technicality of no visa. But the Rat lands were

spent anyway. They had junked it through on the

fabulous junk of Mexico. They had gorged it up. They

had ... in truth, Major, there were no more spas to wa-

ter at in the Rat lands.

The current fantasy was to take the Outlaw prank

to its ultimate, be a Prankster Fugitive Extraordinaire

in the Baskin-Robbins bosom of the U.S.A. You have

never seen a Prankster Fugitive? Now watch that

movie; draws you right in ...

Kesey had a good melodrama for going back in.

Paint it big enough and bright enough, and they will

never see you. He figured to sneak back in on the

purloined-letter principle. If you are gross enough

about the whole thing, they will never know it's you.

Kesey picked Brownsville, Texas, for the reentry.

It was the easternmost entry point on the Mexican

border, practically on the Gulf of Mexico, and the least

likely spot for heads to pick to go back in at. Most of

the heads used the western end, the Tijuana end,

because they were going back to California.

So he put on a cowboy hat and just before the

U.S. Customs and Immigration Station at Brownsville

raunched into view, he rented a Mexican's swayback

white horse and got on with his cowboy hat cocked on

crazily, playing a guitar and lolling his head around

like he was drunk. He came cross the border lurching

along on an old white horse as "Singing Jimmy

Anglund."

"How long you been in Mexico?"

"Too damn long."

"May I see your visa?"

"I don't have it."

"Where is it?"

Visa—how the hell did he know. Came down to

play a country & western show in that fuckin

Matamoros, and be damned if they didn't get him

drunk, them fuckin Mexes, their fuckin women and

their margaritas, and they rolled his ass in the streets of

Matamoros, took his money and his papers, cleaned him

out, and he got drunker and he stayed drunker in this

godderned Mexico, bricked up his bowels with terra

cotta, and him just a good old boy from Boise, Idaho,

and that's where he's going back, no more Mexico, no

more Las Vegas—

"Have you got any identification?"

"All I got's this here—"

—and he shows the browntrooper a credit card,

Bank of America, reading James C. Anglund, Las

Vegas, Nevada.

So they let him across and he headed down the

road clawing

on the guitar and lolling around on the back of

the horse, although they retrieved the horse from him—

can't let any disease sneak across the border from the

Rat lands, you understand—

Singing Jimmy Anglund started thumbing out in

the dust with his Rat-tar under the other arm ...

chapter

XXVI

The Cops and Robbers

Game

Singing Jimmy,

Hocking hoarse and phlegmy,

Sticks his grizzle

In the dust-muck Brownsville drizzle,

Starts to thumbing

Up the Texas belly bumming,

Heeee! the cops and robbers game.

Lone superhero, Superhighway Cosmo hero,

Never lies.

Honesty's the best disguise In the cops and

robbers game.

See, cop fellas?

Freaked-out head-buff Cercosporellas

Here's my Rat-tar

And my buckskin cowboy suit.

Prankster red boots

From Guadalajara.

My cowboy hat

Shows you where I'm at

In the cops and robbers game.

I ain't Clark Kent.

I ain't Steve Lamb.

Popeye the Sailor I am what I am

In the cops and robbers game.

Came a car

Didn't take him very far

In the cops and robbers game.

At the wheel

In this fuckedup dust-muck hitchhike deal

Was a Mississippi kite

With a smile of ebonite.

Inchy road

Heavy duty, heavy load

In the cops and robbers game.

Shit.

The Cosmos Kid, he

Split

At the coffee-light eggs-lookin-atcha bus depot.

On the bus!

In the cops and robbers game.

Greyhound humid

Most mightily piss-fumid

All the way to Salt Lake City

On the bus

In the cops and robbers game.

Riding second class

With shock absorbers up my ass

Reminds me

Of the RB. Eyes left behind me

Out front! superhero

Of the cops and robbers game.

Took a flight

To San Francisco late at night.

Cop alert?

For hero in a buckskin shirt?

Cocked to shoot?

At superdude in red dude boots?

Not hardly.

Official mind destroyer,

This prankster suit of flaming Orion paranoia

Hardly visible,

This risible cowboy

Cardiac drummer

Marching to a different bummer

In the cops and robbers game.

From the airport

With creamy Prankster pudding escorts

Neal and Hugh

Day-Glo Marvel Comic crew

Commence the movie:

FREAK THE COPS!

Shuck the narcos

Shuck the Feds

Shuck the San Mateo Sheriff

Shuck the San Francisco Chief

Shuck the Judges in their chambers

We shall not flag or fail

We shall go on to the end

We shall shuck you on the beaches

We shall shuck you on the landing grounds

We shall shuck you in the fields, in the streets,

on the hills

And in the trees.

Groovy plot

Hot movie

In these trees.

See the very hunted coons

Salt J. Edgar Hoover's wounds!

Yah! the cops and robbers game.

Kesey holes up at his old friend———'s house in

Palo Alto. He is in a strange state of mind. He is in the

cops' movie now, the Cops and Robbers Game, and

eventually they will win, because it is their movie—

Gotcha! Unless he makes it his movie, which will take

the utmost risk and daring. Here I am, boys... In the

cops and robbers game you creep and skulk about in a

state of tachycardia, and they like to think of you in

your reptile misery—so—

Break skulk!

In short, the fantasy is now to become a kind of

Day-Glo Pimpernel, popping up here and there, right

out in public, then vanishing, reeking legend in the

wake. He will be like one of those movie criminals who

send florid coded notes to the police about au pair girls

he intends to garrote—and then does it—while all the

world pants for next week's broken hyoid bone. Only he

hasn't been strangling, merely smoking grass. You

would never know that, however, from the excitement

in San Francisco ...

A strange sort of guest to have in the house—

and----------hardly knows what to make of the

performance, Kesey veering wildly from paranoia and

hyper-security to extraordinary disregard for his own

safety, one state giving way to the other in no fixed

order. Kesey gets up about noon or 1 P.M., eats, then

goes out in the garden out back and sits there in his

buckskin shirt playing a Prankster flute. If one plays

anything much more bizarre than a transistor radio out

back in the garden in Palo Alto, it amounts to freaking

insurrection; let alone a big muscular Mountain Man in

a buckskin shirt playing a flute. Then at night—a few

tokes here, a few tokes there, it adds up, Major, Kesey

and a Prankster or two start to rapping, gently

Rapping

Cortex tapping

Rat-tat-tatting

Tatter-ratting

Fooling, puling, ululation

Skeel goose screeling glossolalia

Crested screamers! Megascops!

Bust the eardrums! FREAK THE COPS!

until 2 A.M. the house would be reeling with

enough Rat-tars, loon cries, tapes and howling grass

euphoria to wake up all of sweet dream tunnel Palo

Alto for the next fifteen years—but then suddenly at 4

A.M., or 5, after outlasting everyone in the mad howl,

Kesey would suddenly decide it was time for maximum

security precautions and would disappear into the cellar

to a snug nest behind the packing cases, in the

cobwebs. Well, at least the bastards won't get him with

Gestapo tap on the shoulder—All right, Kesey ...

That movie—but then awakening and starting his

movie almost at once. Neal, Hugh Romney, Kesey and a

small detachment of Hell's Angels head for a three-day

"trips festival" in progress at San Francisco State

College, Saturday night, October 1. The seeds one has

sown... The Acid Tests have already caught hold in the

college world. San Francisco State has become the acid

heads' true universitas, sort of the way Ohio State is

for football freaks. They are trying the whole thing, the

Acid Test, with the utmost faithful eclecticism.

Alpha,

Beta,

Delta Handa Poker.

Movies at the smoker.

Collegiate!

Donkey beads,

Temple bells,

Sandles and

Mandalas

Psychedelic!

The Hell's Angels are riding shotgun for the

Fugitive. They like this. They can freak out any

approaching cops, in cruiser or battalion. For some

suitable weird reason all the lights are left on in the

campus buildings. The festival is in the gymnasium—

full of scaffolding and people sweeping the ceilings

with movies and light projections—Control towers—

and the Grateful Dead on the bandstand, all careful

homage to the original Acid Tests, and then suddenly

KESEY

will be there, broadcasting into the gymnasium

from a campus radio station ... a very tight ship, this

fantasy, even up to Hell's Angels standing guard

outside the studio. Except that by the time they get all

the wiring hooked up, and start rapping, Cassady with a

microphone inside the hall—introducing

KEN KEEEEE-ZEEEEEE

it is about 4 A.M. Kesey is hidden in the studio,

talking over the hugest Prankster hookup of wires,

running long over the college campus to the

gymnasium. Freewheeling Frank, the Hell's Angel,

zonked on acid, barges into the studio, and sees Kesey

there sitting on a stool with an electric guitar and wires

running all around his legs and his neck, branging on

the guitar, rapping poetry into the microphone with

fluorescent light and ON THE AIR sign filling up the

room—The god of LSD—He's so wired up it scares

me—This god reminds me of a satellite that flies

around in the skies—whereupon Frank hugs him and

feels an immediate surge of electricity and sits down on

the floor and starts playing a harmonica and Kesey raps

on for the benefit of the hundreds watching the swirling

light shows in the gymnasium: "You who stand sit and

crawl around and about the floor about you and above

you on the ceiling that madness that's running in color

is your brain!"—and then he stalks out of the room—

He's mad because he has not captured my mind—

thinks Frank—he has so many million minds that he has

captured that not even a smile is left on his face.

But there were no millions or even hundreds left

in the gymnasium because it was so late it was down to

a group of hard-core heads, many of whom were so

high they were used to all sorts of time and geography

warps. Everything was real, Mani, Madame Blavatsky's

Chohan maya, Ken Kesey broadcasting over the p.a.

system ... Kesey finally comes out and walks through

the residue, but they are all wacked out and he is

hardly visible ... in his Prankster suit of flaming Orion

paranoia . . .

Nevertheless! the word is now out among the

heads of Haight-Ashbury. Kesey is back, the Man, the

Castro who won them what they have today in the first

place. The seeds we ...

. . . HAVE SOWN . . . DOWN IN RAT

LAND RED TIDE MANZANILLO, Kesey and the

Pranksters had been so cut off they got almost no news

from San Francisco. It was all perfect Devil's Island

down there. They had only a dim idea of what was

going on among the heads in Haight-Ashbury. But now,

like, you don't even have to look for it. It hits you in

the face. It's a whole carnival... All you have to do is

walk up into the Haight-Ashbury—and Kesey chances a

run through ... Hell, in Haight-Ashbury a muscular guy

in cowboy boots and a cowboy hat—he ... looks

healthy. The cops are busy trying to figure out these

new longhairs, these beatniks—these crazies are

somehow weirder than the North Beach beatniks ever

were. They glow blue like a TV tube. The hippie-

dippies.. . their Jesus hair, men with hair falling down

to the shoulders and beards to their chests, all lank and

thin and limp like... lungers! Sergeant, they're

lollygagging up against the storefronts on Haight Street

up near that Psychedelic Shop like somebody hocked a

bunch of T.B. lungers up against windows and they've

oozed down to the sidewalks, staring at you with these

huge zombie eyes, just staring. And a lot of weird

American Indian and Indian from India shit, beaded

headbands and donkey beads and temple bells—and the

live ones, promenading up and down Haight Street in

costumes, or half-costumes, like some kind of a

doorman's coat with piping and crap but with blue jeans

for pants and Mod boots.. . The cops!—oh, how it

messed up their minds.

The cops knew drunks and junkies by heart, and

they knew about LSD, but this thing that was going on .

. . The heads could con the cops blind and it was wild.

Haight-Ashbury had always been a brave little

tenement district up the hill from the Panhandle

entrance to Golden Gate Park, with whites and Negroes

living next door in peace. Rents had been going up in

North Beach. A lot of young couples with bohemian

enthusiasms had been moving to Haight-Ashbury. Some

of the old beats had moved in. They hung around a

place called the Blue Unicorn. But the Trips Festival of

eight months before was what really kicked the whole

thing off. Eight months!—and all of a sudden it was

like the Acid Tests had taken root and sprung up into

people living the Tests like a whole life style.

The Grateful Dead had moved into a house in

Haight-Ashbury, and it wasn't just the old communal

living where everybody piled into some place. They

lived in Prankster-style, as a group with a name and a

mission, which was music and the psychedelic vision ...

Yes... A thin, almost caved-in guy with incredible

freaking light-brown Jesus hair and beard flowing all

over him and round wire-rim spectacles, named Chet

Helms, had a group called the Family Dog. They also

lived in Prankster-style, in a garage at 1090 Page,

holding rock 'n' roll dances amid a lot of Indian

symbols. They had taken part in the Trips Festival.

Helms was a head but a very practical head. He saw it

coming, with the Trips Festival, the whole wave. He

started an ongoing Trips Festival, every week, selling

tickets, at a ballroom, the Avalon, at Van Ness and

Sutter. Bill Graham, the impresario for the Trips

Festival, was into the thing too and had a Trips Festival

scene going in the Fillmore Auditorium, a dancehall at

Fillmore and Geary. Graham and Kesey had had a

falling out at the Trips Festival itself over things like

who was going to handle the gate and it ended in a

badass moment when Graham put out his hand to shake

and make up and Kesey just looked at it and walked

away. But Graham picked up on the Acid Test format

exactly. Both the Fillmore and the Avalon did the

Pranksters Acid Test with all the mixed media stuff, the

rock 'n' roll and movie projections and the weird

intergalactic amoeba light shows. The Avalon even had

it down to details like the strobes and sections of the

floor where you could play with Day-Glo paint under

black light. Everything but the . .. fourth dimension ...

Cosmo ... the three o'clock thing ... the experience, the

kairos... They know where it is, but they don't know

what it is... Still, the ballrooms were like a big

announcement and a front door ... into The Life.

The new communal groups themselves were into

the pudding. Like the Diggers, led by a guy named

Emmett Grogan, whose hero was Kesey. They went in

for pranks. They had a Frame of Reference, a huge

frame nine feet tall that they set up in the street and

asked people to walk through ... "so we'll all be in the

same frame of reference." Then they started handing

out free food to all comers, heads, winos, anybody, at 4

P.M. in the Panhandle part of the park. The food they

cadged from wholesalers, and boosted, and so on. It

was a goddamn sketch, seeing them ladle out the stew

every day out of big milk cans... Up at Fulton and Scott

is a great shambling old Gothic house, a freaking

decayed giant, known as The Russian Embassy. A new

group called the Calliope Company lives in there, led

by Bill Tara, an actor. Many colorful characters like

Paul Hawken, and Michael Laton, who always wears a

Russian astrakhan hat, and Jack the Fluke, who is a

laughing grizzly Irishman with a beard like an Airedale

and a cab driver's cap and flapping tweeds bought from

the Slightly Soiled Shop ... all of them sitting around

the great parlor, bare but a glory of old carved wood,

fourteen-foot ceilings... Jack the Fluke tells about his

girlfriend Sandra, a teenage girl who just pulled in

from Bucks County, Pa.:

"I come in"—and he motions with his head up

toward his room on the top floor—"and, dig: she has a

joint rolled this big, like a cigar, man!—and she's

goofing off the radio and puffing on this, I mean,

Corona corona joint and goofing and puffing—it was

beautiful! It really takes me back."

But of course! the esoteric nostalgia of those

first days of discovery, the first little easing open of

the doors of the mind with marijuana and that thing you

do at that stage!—that goofing off the radio thing—You

know? And it's beautiful, the kids beginning to pour in

to Haight-Ashbury ... for The Life ... It's a carnival! the

Garden of Eden! one big urban La Honda scene! right

out in the open! with all things available. Money is

floating around in the air. That's no hassle. Hell, in

three hours you can pick up nine or ten bucks

panhandling. Christ, when the straight citizens see a

kid in a beard and beads and flowers with a sign around

his neck saying My Heart is Prouder than my Stomach,

it fucking blows their minds, and they lay quarters on

you, dollar bills. It's too much. And if worse comes to

worse, there is always ...

"Anybody want a straight job?" says a girl named

Jeannie, who lives here at The Embassy. Michael Laton

says yeah, and it turns out Jeannie is working three or

four hours a night as a Topless Shoe Shine girl in a

little shoeshine shack on Broadway in North Beach, and

they need a barker outside on the sidewalk to spiel in

customers. Michael Laton takes this, yes, straight job,

and stands out there at night in a tuxedo and a tall hat

hawking in the dentists who are crawling all over North

Beach panting over the Topless. They come inside the

shack and climb up on the shoeshine stand and put their

feet on the shoeshine stirrups and watch Jeannie's tits

dangle and jiggle for ninety seconds while she shines

their shoes for two dollars and a big lugubrious spade

stands by with his hand near a lead beer bottle to smash

wiseguys and sex fiends with and they all come out

saying the exact same thing: "And the funny part is, it's

a damned good shoeshine!"

"... so I dropped a little acid, like just for the

flash, you know," says Michael Laton, "and these two

Marines come up, this big sergeant and another one,

with hashmarks on their sleeves, like up to here. I'm

eight feet tall by this time, and they're like ants, I'm so

stoned, and I yell right in their faces: 'If they stop the

war, you guys will be out of a job!' And the sergeant

says Yeahhh?—and man! like it reverses—now they're

eight feet tall all of a sudden and I'm an ant! and . .."

A very carnival! and it wasn't politics, what he

said, just a prank, because the political thing, the whole

New Left, is all of a sudden like over on the hip circuit

around San Francisco, even at Berkeley, the very

citadel of the Student Revolution and all. Some kid

who could always be counted on to demonstrate for the

grape workers or even do dangerous things like work

for CORE in Mississippi turns up one day—and

immediately everybody knows he has become a head.

His hair has the long jesuschrist look. He is wearing

the costume clothes. But most of all, he now has a very

tolerant and therefore withering attitude toward all

those who are still struggling in the old activist

political ways for civil rights, against Vietnam, against

poverty, for the free peoples. He sees them as still

trapped in the old "political games," unwittingly

supporting the oppressors by playing their kind of game

and using their kind of tactics, while he, with the help

of psychedelic chemicals, is exploring the infinite

regions of human consciousness ... Paul Hawken here

in The Embassy—in 1965 he was an outstanding

activist, sweat shirts and blue jeans and toggle coats,

went on the March from Selma, worked as a photogra-

pher for CORE in Mississippi, risked his life to take

pictures of Negro working conditions, and so on. Now

he's got on a great Hussar's coat with gold frogging.

His hair is all over his forehead and coming around his

neck in terrific black Mykonos curls.

"I take it you aren't too tight with CORE any

more."

He just laughs.

"What about all the things you were involved in

last year?"

"All that's changed. You should have seen them

leaving for Sacramento"—Cal students leaving

Berkeley for Sacramento and a demonstration.

"Yeah," says Tara.

"It was all fraternity men with sports shirts and

crew cuts and their own cars and painted signs, you

know, like you get from a commercial artist. There was

a lot of bread out there."

"Yeah," says Tara, "and they're all talking about

channels. They're going to do this and that through

existing channels, or they can't do this or that through

existing channels, they're all talking about channels."

"Yeah," says Paul, "and shaking their fists"—he

raises his fist and shakes it in a big shuck way—"and

saying, 'We're off to Sacramento to protest, with our

dates!' It's all changed. It's all a bunch of fraternity

men in their Mustangs."

A bunch of fraternity men in their Mustangs! In

the intellectual-hip world of California, there is no

more scathing epithet imaginable. A bunch of fraternity

men in their Mustangs. Just savor it. Oh Mario, and

Dylan, and Joan Baez, oh Free Speech and Anti-

Vietnam—who in his right mind would have ever

dreamed it could come to this in twelve months—

abandoned to the supermarket and the breezeway

scions—a bunch of fraternity men in Mustangs—and it

is, unbelievably, all as the provocateur Kesey has

prophesied it, droning on his goddamned harmonica and

saying Just walk away and say fuck it...

Square hip! Boy Scout bohemians! and the great

rallies at Berkeley that used to pull 10,000 are now

lucky to get a thousand. All changed! Even the thing

with the spades. All of a sudden the Negroes are out of

the hip scene, except for a couple of pushers like

Superspade and a couple of characters like Gaylord and

Heavy. The explanation around Haight-Ashbury is that

Negroes don't take to LSD. The big thing with spades

on the hip scene has always been the quality known as

cool. And LSD freaking well blows that whole lead

shield known as cool, like it brings you right out front,

hang-ups and all. Also the spades don't get much of a

kick out of the nostalgia for the mud that all the white

middle-class kids who are coming to Haight-Ashbury

like, piling into pads and living freaking basic, you

understand, on greasy mattresses on the floor that the

filthiest spade walkup in Fillmore wouldn't have, and

slopping up soda pop and shit out of the same bottle,

just passing it around from mouth to mouth, not being

hung up on that old American plumbing&hygiene thing,

you understand, even grokking the weird medieval

vermin diseases that are flashing through every groin—

crab lice! you know that thing, man, where you first

look down at your lower belly and see these little

scars, they look like, little scabs or something, tiny

little mothers, and like you pick one, root it out, and it

starts crawling] Oh shit! and then they're all crawling

and you start exploring your mons pubis and your balls

and they're alive. It's like a jungle you never saw

before, in your own crotch, your own shag, and it's

alive, a freaking bestiary, in fact, the little bastids, like

soft-shell crabs that could dance on the head of a pin,

and you keeping picking them off but every time you

look you see eight more creeping over the veld and the

savannas and you practically go blind staring at the

little Africa down there between your legs and it's A-

200 Time, man—A-200! Pyrinate Liquid—the only

solution—that little green bottle, man! do you

remember] and so on. .. Nostalgia for the mud!... The

...

... Life ... Even down in a place like La Jolla, in

north San Diego, the poshest resort on the Pacific

beaches, T———, one of the great young surfers, turns

up one day with a three-wheel trunk motorcycle, the

kind drugstore delivery boys use, and he pulls up into

one driveway after another and the kids come out and—

help yourself.—and he's got every pill and capsule you

ever imagined, plus lids of grass, and ... The Life is on.

Even devoted surfing cliques like the Pump House

Gang—the mysterioso sea and all that!—are easing into

The Life, and some move up the beach from the Pump

House, away from the everlasting sets of goodsurfing

waves they used to wait for like Phrygian sacristans, up

from the Pump House to the Parking Lot, where they sit

in cars with special amethyst-tinted windows and grok

in fullness the Pacific sun as it comes through the

weird glass and the cops wonder what in hell they're

doing in cars all day instead of being on the beach, and

they roust them and search the cars and find nothing,

but warn—We know you kids are drinking beer out

here... Beer! . .. One of the Pump House Gang leaders,

Artie, pulls into Haight-Ashbury, because this is the

underground word in The Life in all the high schools in

California already, even though Haight-Ashbury has

never been mentioned in the newspapers ... Haight-

Ashbury! they know the whole new legend, right down

to Owsley, now known as The White Rabbit, the

paranoid acid genius . . . Artie pulls into Haight-

Ashbury, walking along amid those endless staggers of

bay windows, slums with a view, and who is sitting out

on a curbing on Haight Street but J——— of Pump

House days gone by, just sitting there with an

Emporium shopping bag beside him.

"Hi, J———!"

J———just barely glances at him and says, "Oh,

hi, Artie," as if naturally they're both in Haight-

Ashbury and have been for years, and then he says,

"Here, have a lid," and he reaches in the shopping bag

and just offers him a whole lid of grass, free, out in the

open .. . Artie looks up Anchovy's communal pad.

Anchovy, who was little known in La Jolla in the old

surfing days, he wasn't a surfer, is now a beautiful

person and the good shepherd in Haight-Ashbury for all

the La Jolla kids up here. Artie makes the rounds in

Haight-Ashbury and it's ... a carnival!—everybody

working for the Management in wondrous ways,

popping Owsley LSD up from out of Pez candy

dispensers, smoking grass, taking methedrine and

fucking and carrying on wherever and whenever they

feel like it, on the streets practically ... Later Anchovy

has love-ins called Trans-Love Airways going on the

San Diego campus of the University, and everybody is

freaking out on the grass to the loudest rock 'n' roll in

history and smoking grass in a goddamned green cloud,

f'r chrissake, and taking movies of it all for ... the

archives, and they're allied now with real people, Good

People, a motorcycle band known as the Pallbearers,

the local version ... of the Hell's Angels ... ah umm-

mmm ... and Artie leans up against a tree smoking a

fake joint rolled of plain Bull Durham tobacco, because

you got to look like you're into the thing at all times ...

but, in fact, it is getting to be too much... About nine

different constabularies stage a mass raid to wipe out

the dope plague from the San Diego County high

schools and they pounce on La Colonia Tijuana, which

means the Tijuana Slums, name here in La Jolla

underground for the apartments a lot of people in The

Life share this summer near the beach, and some good

Pump House souls are busted, but that is The Life, the

world divided into surfer heads and surfer lames...

Besides, it was a laugh and a half, the look on the cops'

faces when they saw the ceilings of La Colonia

Tijuana, canopied in huge laceworks of interlocked

pop-top rings off beer cans billowing in such groovy

silvery ripples of grokkable reflections...

The Probation Generation! Not the Lost

Generation or the Beat Generation or the Silent

Generation or even the Flower Generation, but the

Probation Generation, with kids busted right and left up

and down the coast for grass, and all get off the first

time, on probation—What's probation!—with this

millennium at hand, and it is, because there's no earthly

stopping this thing. It's like a boulder rolling down a

hill—you can watch it and talk about it and scream and

say Shit! but you can't stop it. It's just a question of

where it's going to go. Right now there are two ways it

can go in Haight-Ashbury. One is the Buddhist di-

rection, the Leary thing. There are good heads like

Michael Bowen and Gary Goldhill who want to start the

League for Spiritual Discovery here and pull the whole

movement together into one church and give it a focus

and even legal respectability. And they have given up

much for this dream. Goldhill is a beautiful head! He is

an Englishman who was writing this experimental stuff

for TV in England and the BBC sent him to the U.S. to

apply for a big grant, a Guggenheim or something, and

he took a vacation in Mexico and ran into some

American heads in San Miguel de Allende who said,

Man, you got to come back here when the rainy seasons

start and take some magic mushrooms, and damned if

they didn't send him a telegram in Guadalajara or

wherever — RAINS CAME MUSHROOMS UP—and he

returned out of curiosity and took the mushrooms, just

as Leary had, and discovered the Management and gave

up all, all the TV BBC game and dedicated himself to

The Life ... And Bowen has an apartment with India-

print spreads lining the walls and couches on the floor

and hand-made Indian teapots and cups and three small

crystals suspended from the ceiling by almost invisible

threads and picking up lights like jewels in the air, a

place devoid of all the shit and gadgetry of the modern

American plastic life, for, as Leary has said, a home

should be a place of purity that the Gautama Buddha

himself could walk into from 485 B.C. and feel at home.

For some day grass must grow again in the streets, in

pastoral purity, for life is shit, a duress of bad karmas,

endless fight against catastrophe, which is to be warded

off finally only by utter purification of the soul, utter

passivity in which one becomes nothing... but a vessel

of the All... the All-one ...

... as against the Kesey direction, which has

become the prevailing life style of Haight-Ashbury . . .

beyond catastrophe . . . like, picking up on anything

that works and moves, every hot wire, every tube, ray,

volt, decibel, beam, floodlight and combustion of

American flag-flying neon Day-Glo America and wind-

ing it up to some mystical extreme carrying to the

western-most edge of experience—

The Day... was coming, but the movement lacked

a single great charismatic leader, a visionary who could

pull the whole thing together. Leary was too old,

heading toward fifty years old, and too remote

somehow, holed up in Millbrook, N.Y. As for Kesey—

he is swamp-bound in exile in some alligator-infested

Mexican hideaway, it was presumed ... Yet here come

the Merry Pranksters pulling back into San Francisco

from Mexico via their own route ... The Calliope

Company gives them their Warehouse on Harriet Street

to live in for a month, a place Tara wants to turn into a

theater, an old garage in an abandoned hotel in the

Tenderloin where Jack Dempsey used to train in a

special amphitheater with a sloping wooden floor now

all fully claimed by the vermin and the winos—but

Colored Power! and the Day-Glo bus and the

Pranksters come rolling in, and good heads start

gathering around in the Day-Glo gloom of the place,

like the Telepathic Kid who gets unspoken messages—

we need beds— and he climbs a ladder and starts

rigging the platforms on the theater scaffolding in here

... as the Pranksters assemble from all over, Hermit—

back from dark adventures in Napa Valley; Stewart

Brand and Lois Jennings—back from the Southwest;

Paul Foster—back from India ... all joining the veteran

Mexican band, Cassady, Babbs, Gretch, Mountain Girl,

Faye and the children, Ram Rod, Hagen, Page, Doris

Delay, Zonker, Black Maria ...

... and all at once it dawns, the main truth,

spreading over the jungle drums all over the Haight-

Ashbury: Kesey himself is back, too ::::: The Man ::::

SUCH WAS THE BACKGROUND OF THE

UNDERGROUND SUMMIT meeting between Kesey

and Owsley. It was as crazy a scene as anybody ever

dreamed up. For a start, it was in the apartment of

Margot St. James, which looks like she once read a

historical novel about a Roman banquet. The meeting

began to shape up as a debate. Owsley, the White

Rabbit, was sitting over here—and Kesey, the Fugitive,

was sitting over there. Owsley was dressed like an

uptown head—long hair, a dueling shirt with billowing

sleeves, a sleeveless jacket, and beads, amulets,

mandalas hanging down over his chest, tight pants and

high boots. Kesey had on his buckskin shirt and tight

ginger-corduroy pants and the Guadalajara red

Prankster boots—and he was in a chuckling, giggling

mood. Standing around, along with Margot, were

various Pranksters, Haight-Ashbury heads, San

Francisco State heads, Berkeley heads, and two or three

Hell's Angels, including Terry the Tramp.

Kesey presents his theory of going "beyond

acid." You find what you came to find when you're on

acid and we've got to start doing it without acid; there's

no use opening the door and going through it and then

always going back out again. We've got to move on to

the next step... This notion has Owsley slightly

freaked, naturally. He has his voice wound all the way

up:

"Bullshit, Kesey! It's the drugs that do it. It's all

the drugs, man. None of it would have happened

without the drugs"—and so forth.

Kesey keeps cocking his head to one side and

giggling in the upcountry manner and saying: "No, it's

not the drugs. In fact"—chuckle, giggle—"I'm going to

tell everyone to start doing it without the drugs"—and

so forth.

People in the room start following this exchange

like a tennis match, the heads batting this way and that.

One unfortunate kid from San Francisco State happens

to get into this state of obsession about one foot in

front of Terry the Tramp. He keeps edging closer and

batting his head around, and edging in closer, until he

is standing in front of Terry the Tramp and cutting off

his line of vision, which is bad enough, but then he has

to take out a cigarette and light it, all of this

practically in Terry the Tramp's face, or within a

couple of feet of it, which is all the same to Terry.

One billow comes up from the kid's cigarette and

Terry the Tramp says, "Hey, man, how about a

cigarette?"

He says it with a tone you have to hear to fully

comprehend. It is the patented Hell's Angels tone of

soft grinning menace, kind of like the tone the second-

story man uses on the watchdog, "Come here, fel-la...

(so I CAN SQUASH YOUR HEAD WITH THIS BRICK)." He

says it soft, but it stops the whole room like High

Noon.

"Hey, man, how about a cigarette?"

The kid smells debacle in the air. It registers

from his solar plexus to his earthworm lips. But he

hasn't quite figured out what it's all about. He just

hurries into his shirt pocket and takes out the cigarettes

and shakes one free and offers it to Terry the Tramp,

who takes it and puts it in his pocket. Then he says,

with the soft grin menace smile snaking up out of his

beard:

"How about another one?"

The kid mumbles O.K. and fishes into his pocket

and shakes loose another cigarette and Terry the Tramp

takes it and puts it into his pocket. The kid, meantime,

is frozen, like a rabbit frozen by the eyebeams of a

cougar. He knows it is time to split, but he can't move.

He is stricken and fascinated by his own impending

destruction. It's like there is nothing to do but play out

the sequence. He puts the cigarettes back in his

pocket— and precisely then, naturally, comes again the

milky atropine:

"How about another one?"

O.K.—and Terry the Tramp takes another one

and the kid puts them back in his pocket and Terry the

Tramp says,

"How about another one?"

O.K.—and Terry the Tramp takes another one,

and now every eye in the room watches the rabbit and

the snake, panting for the next broken hyoid bone—how

many cigarettes does the kid have left, fans? Eight—

ten?—and what then, after all the cigarettes are gone?

How about your shirt?

O.K.—uhhh—

How about your boots?

O.K.—uhh—

How about your pants?

O.K.—uhhh—

And now your HIDE, mother!

My ... hide!

Your very HIDE, mother! Your very ASS ! The

last vestige of your pride and honor!

AAARRRRRRRCHHHHHHHHH!!!! ... and his bones

crunched like baked baby ortolans ...

Everyone in the room can see the entire movie in

an instant, like some crucible of the prison brutes,

Terry the Tramp slowly picking meat off the turkey—

fascinating!—stay tuned in for next week's broken

hyoid bone!—

—until a couple of Pranksters intervene, with

overtones of He's just a baby, Terry, don't snuff him.

So the Kesey-Owsley debate resumed.

It was a small moment. No heads were broken.

Certainly, the Angels have done worse. The kid even

got away that night with a whole half a pack of

cigarettes. Yet it stuck in the throat. One way or

another, the Hell's Angels came to symbolize the side

of the Kesey adventure that panicked the hip world.

The Angels were too freaking real. Outlaws? they were

outlaws by choice, from the word go, all the way out in

Edge City. Furthur! The hip world, the vast majority of

the acid heads, were still playing the eternal charade of

the middle-class intellectuals—Behold my wings!

Freedom! Flight!—but you don't actually expect me to

jump off that cliff, do you? It is the eternal game in

which Clement Attlee, bald as Lenin, lively as a toy

tank, yodels blood to the dockworkers of Liverpool—

and dies buried in striped pants with a magenta sash

across his chest and a coin with the Queen's likeness

upon each eyelid. In their heart of hearts, the heads of

Haight-Ashbury could never stretch their fantasy as far

out as the Hell's Angels. Overtly, publicly, they

included them in—suddenly, they were the Raw Vital

Proles of this thing, the favorite minority, replacing the

spades. Privately, the heads remained true to their

class, and to its visceral panics ... One trouble with this

Kesey was, he really meant it.

BUT! STEP UP THE MOVIE, HE SUDDENLY TURNED

UP ONE

afternoon at Ed McClanahan's creative-writing

class at Stanford. He sticks his head in the door and

smiles from underneath a cowboy hat and says, "Happy

birthday, Ed ..." In truth, it is his birthday. Then he

comes on in, the Fugitive in buckskin shirt and red

Guadalajara boots; tells the students why he wants to

move beyond writing to more ... electric forms... then

vanishes, that damned Pimpernel.

Then the Haight-Ashbury heads held the first big

"be-in," the Love Festival on October 7, on the

occasion of the California law against LSD going into

effect. Thousands of heads piled in, in high costume,

ringing bells, chanting, dancing ecstatically, blowing

their minds one way and another and making their

favorite satiric gesture to the cops, handing them

flowers, burying the bastids in tender fruity petals of

love. Oh christ, Tom, the thing was fantastic, a

freaking mindblower, thousands of high-loving heads

out there messing up the minds of the cops and

everybody else in a fiesta of love and euphoria. And

who pops up in the middle of it all, down in the

panhandle strip of the Golden Gate Park, but the

Pimpernel, in Guadalajara boots and cowboy suit, and

just as the word gets to ricocheting through the crowd

real good—Kesey's here! Kesey's here—he vanishes,

accursed Pimpernel.

Just in case there was anybody left who didn't get

the Gestalt here, Kesey made his big move in the press.

He met with Donovan Bess, a reporter for the San

Francisco Chronicle, and gave him the story of his

flight to Mexico and his plans, as The Fugitive. The

story was a real barn burner, Secret Interview with

Fugitive Wanted by FBI, with all the trimmings, awash

in screamers all across the San Francisco Chronicle.

The line that captured all imaginations was where

Kesey said:

"I intend to stay in this country as a fugitive, and

as salt in J. Edgar Hoover's wounds."

Then—this next prank was beautiful. A TV

interview. The Fugitive on TV, while all, F B. Eyes and

everyone, watch helpless as the full face of the

Fugitive, Kesey, beams forth into every home and bar

and hospital and detective bureau in the Bay Area. It

was beautiful to even think about, this prank. It was set

up, much sly planning, with Roger Grimsby, a San

Francisco television personality, on Station KGO, the

local ABC outlet. The fantasy was that Grimsby would

tape an interview with Kesey in a hideaway in the

Portrero section of San Francisco, which was far away

from both Haight-Ashbury and North Beach, and then

put it on the air a couple of days later, October 20, a

Friday. This fantasy came off like a dream. Grimsby

taped the interview, and all was cool, and on Friday

afternoon Kesey's face beamed into every home, bar,

hospital and detective bureau, saying it all again, in

person:

"I intend to stay in this country as a fugitive, and

as salt in J. Edgar Hoover's wounds. .."

See the very hunted coons

Salt J. Edgar Hoover's wounds!

Yah! the cops and robbers game.

All that remains to be done is the grand finale.

Fugitive Extraordinaire! In this fantasy Kesey will

present himself in person, in the flesh—Kesey!—only

inches away from the greatest collection of cops in the

history of the drug scene and then

VANISH

like Mandrake. The Pranksters will hold a

monster trips festival, the Acid Test of all times, the

ultimate, on Halloween, in San Francisco's largest hall,

Winterland, for all the heads on the West Coast or

coast to coast and galaxy to galaxy. Naturally, the cops

will converge on this hideous bacchanal to watch for

Kesey and other felons and bad actors. But of course!

An integral part of the fantasy! It will be a masked

ball, this Test. Nobody will know which freak is who.

At the midnight hour, Kesey, masked and disguised in a

Superhero costume, on the order of Captain America of

the Marvel Comics pantheon, will come up on stage and

deliver his vision of the future, of the way "beyond

acid." Who is this apocalyptic— Then he will rip off

his mask—Why—it's Ken Kee-zee!—and as the law

rushes for him, he will leap up on a rope hanging down

from the roof at center stage and climb, hand over

hand, without even using his legs, with his cape flying,

straight up, up, up, up through a trap door in the roof,

to where Babbs will be waiting with a helicopter,

Captain Midnight of the U.S. Marines, and they will

ascend into the California ozone looking down one last

time into the upturned moon faces of all the put-on,

nonplused, outwitted, befuddled befreaked shucked!

constables and sleuths Yeah! Yeah! Right! Right!

Right!

right right right right an even even even even

even world twenty-five minutes after the Grimsby TV

show Friday afternoon, October 20, Kesey and Hassler

driving out of San Francisco on the Bayshore freeway,

toward Palo Alto, in an old red panel truck. The current

fantasy . . . this movie is too real, Mommy—but they

have actually pulled it off. They have just been in town

in the hideaway watching Kesey the Fugitive on TV,

and this prank was too beautiful. The FBI and all cops

everywhere shucked in the most public galling way.

The sun slants down on the Bayshore freeway in the

afternoon and all the shiny black-shoe multitudes are

out in their 300-horsepower fantasy cars heading into

the rush hour, out the freeway, toward the waiting

breezeway slots. It's actually peaceful, this rush hour

We pulled it off

thousands of cars sailing up the swooping

expressway like so many Salt Flat Futur-o-matics with

taillight bands like hard red candy ... It's relaxing, the

rush hour is, and hypnotic, it drones, and it winks like

red hard candy with the sun shining through it, and the

sun shines in Kesey's side of the panel truck, very

relaxing, and he takes off his disguise, the cowboy hat

and dark glasses

SEE THE VERY HUNTED COONS

SALT J. EDGAR HOOVER'S WOUNDS

Hassler, driving, vaguely aware of the cars

floating by in the rush hour, shiny hulls with so many

shaved globes sticking up inside ...

KESEY!

Suddenly coming up on his left Hassler sees a car

full of shiny haircut faces, jammed full of them, all

staring at them—Hassler and Kesey—and now gray

Alumicron arms flapping out the

window, stabbing and motioning Pull Over, much

grimacing and shouting soundlessly into the slipstream

of the rush hour, and one with his wallet dangling out

the window, flapping his badge at them

RUN! SPLIT! VANISH!

But there is no place to vanish to. It is all clear

in a flash—trapped in the rush hour for a start—and the

panel truck can't outrun their sedan anyway. Opposite

side pickoff!—Hassler tries to squeeze between cars

and lose them that way, like a basketball play, but it's

no use. The cops keep floating abreast, grimacing and

flapping, and drifting back and pulling even again

THERE !

Kesey motions to the shoulder of the expressway,

by an embankment and Hassler cuts over there, skids to

a stop

THRASH !

Kesey out the door and plunges over the

guardrail and down the embankment, with the dust

flying . . .

Hassler just sits there as the sedan skids to a stop

in front of him, cutting him off. Seems like twenty

doors fly open, haircut faces and gray-Alumicron

bodies popping out in every direction, leaping over the

guardrail—

ALL IN SHINY BLACK SHOES

One orders Hassler out of the panel truck and

Hassler gets out and sits down on the edge of the

freeway. Very strange. The great swarm of cars with

hard-candy tails keeps sailing past, hypnotically.

Hassler gets into the lotus position, sitting cross-legged

on the asphalt, looking straight ahead. Three sets of

SHINY BLACK FBI SHOES

standing around him now. They all have these

shiny black shoes on. Then one of them goes back to

the sedan and comes back with a flare gun and stands

over him with that. Hassler wonders if he intends to

shoot him with a flare. A very Day-Glo death. Thread-

soul, the causal body, ablation, Upanishads,

Krishnamurti, the karmic vestiture of the soul, the

nirvanic consciousness—it all runs together right here,

like a tinned stew, and Hassler isn't even high. On the

other side of the expressway, on the edge of the bay,

great fat seagulls are wheeling in the air in a great

weird O pattern, coasting down below the level of the

highway, then struggling up, dripping garbage out of

their gullets, but a nice pattern, all in all—

THE VISITACION DRAIN

It's the Visitacion Drain they've picked to work

out their karma in ... ah, we're synched up this

afternoon .. . and the gulls wax fat gulping garbage at

the drain and grease a slippery fat O in the sky and it

occurs to Hassler that today is his twenty-seventh

birthday.

Skidding down the embankment chocking up dust

like in a Western the blur of the Drain flats out beyond

Kesey vaults over an erosion fence at the bottom of the

embankment

RI-I-I-I-I-IP

a picket catches his pants in the crotch rips out

the in-seams of both pants legs most neatly flapping on

his legs like Low Rent cowboy chaps running and

flapping through the Visitacion flats poor petered-out

suckmuck marginal housing development last blasted

edge of land you can build houses on before they just

sink into the ooze and the compost poor Visitacion

Drain kids playing ball in the last street before the ooze

runs flapping through their ballgame stare at him

AND AT THE GHOST ON MY HEELS?

like the whole world turns into an endless kids'

ballgame on the edge of the ooze thousands of Drain

kids furling toward the horizon like an urchin funnel

AND THAT ALUMICRON BLUR BEHIND ME?

shiny black shoes tusking up behind him stops

stock still in the Visitacion Drain and

GOTCHA!

in the cops and robbers game.

chapter

XXVII

The Graduation

THEY HAVE KESEY ON THREE FELONIES:

THE ORIGINAL Conviction in San Mateo County for

possession of marijuana, which he never served time

on; the arrest for possession in San Francisco, after

which he fled to Mexico; and a Federal charge of

unlawful flight to avoid prosecution. A felon and a

fugitive ... who; yes; was going to rub the FBI's nose in

it for good measure ... and all about dope, at that... and

throw away the key ... For three days they shuttle

Kesey back and forth between County and Federal

courthouses and jails in Redwood City and San

Francisco. It will take a miracle to even get him out on

bail, an inspiration, a vision ::::: ummm, a vision :::::

we can work it out ::::: Kesey's lawyers, Pat Hallinan,

Brian Rohan and Paul Robertson, have a vision. The

next morning they're in the courtroom in Redwood City

at a bail hearing. The new style of Courtroom Modern,

this courtroom, all great lineless slabs of blonde wood,

and lowslung like ... the friendly banks of the suburbs.

All very sunny under the fluorescent tubes. Kesey sits

at the defense table wearing a blue workshirt.

Robertson is on his feet telling the judge about a

certain vision Mr. Kesey has had, of "beyond acid," an

inspiration, a miracle, a light he has seen, although

never mind the details of the beach in Manzanillo,

not... those lights... In any case ... Mr. Kesey has a

very public-spirited plan ... He has returned voluntarily

from exile in his safe harbor, to risk certain arrest and

imprisonment, in order to call a mass meeting of all

LSD takers, past, present and potential, for the purpose

of telling them to move beyond this pestilent habit of

taking LSD .. . Robertson's talking a streak. It's a grand

speech. Kesey is sitting up straight at the table staring

blue bolts at the judge. But Robertson's words are like

a fog. Kesey disappears in the soup, he reappears in a

mist, undergoing metamorphosis before your very eyes.

He's found religion, contrition, redemption, the error of

his ways, and now he's going to tell The Youth his sad

lesson ... Faye and the kids are in the audience. Also

many of their old Perry Lane friends, Jim and Dorothea

Fadiman, Ed McClanahan, Jim Woltman, and some

others ... Several will stake their homes as bail

security, $35,000 worth ... Repentance and redemption

are sailing around the courtroom like cherubim. All us

reporters are scribbling away ... Now Kesey is standing

up facing the judge with his arms folded and the judge

is giving him a lecture ... He may be a great literary

lion and a romantic figure to some misguided youth but

to this court he is a childish ass, an egotist who never

grew up, a ... The judge is pouring it on, pouring it

down his throat like cod-liver oil, but it's obvious it's

just a buildup to saying he's going to grant bail anyway

under the circumstances... Nevertheless Kesey is

burning ... You can see him setting his jaw and getting

ready to move his lips... God knows Hallinan and

Robertson can see it. They're crouched beside him like

bandits. The first peep out of him they're going to grab

him around the throat... Keep your mouth shut, damn it.

Don't blow it now. It's only cod-liver oil... But the

judge has finished and it's over. He's out on bail in San

Mateo County.

The whole dam breaks after that. The FBI drops

the Federal charge of unlawful flight to avoid

prosecution. All of a sudden they don't seem very

interested in the case, despite the salt in J. Edgar

Hoover's wounds and the rest of it. Then back in San

Francisco, and Kesey is standing in front of the judge

in a faded sport shirt, work pants and boots. The judge

has a terrific speech ready, saying this case has been

blown up out of proportions in the press and it is only a

common dope case as far as he is concerned, and Kesey

is no dragon, just an ordinary jackass ... and Kesey is

starting to say something and Hallinan and Rohan are

crouched for the garrote, but again it's over and Kesey

is out on bail in San Francisco, too. It's unbelievable.

He's out after only five days.

In the San Francisco jail

Before he got out on bail

Kesey met a kid with magic fingernails.

"Take a lick," said the kid

And everybody did.

They all licked his nails and blew their lids.

Twenty-seven psyches

Going off like Nike

Missiles through the lye-scoured

Concrete skyways of the San Francisco jail.

The kid had LSD on his magic fingernails.

Now—

Kesey told this story

To the local news reporters

Who pressed around him in the courtroom,

After the hearing on his bail,

Just to prove how hopeless

Was the drive to stamp out dope

With things like cops and jails.

Try and stop a kid with magic fingernails !

The headlines said

LSD ORGY IN THE SAN FRANCISCO JAIL!

Ah...

Certain local heads cried Judas.

Finked on a stash, this Judas!

While he himself so shrewdly

Copped out of jail, on bail.

A finking fingernail stash betrayal!

If the truth be known—

These good hearts flapped in fibrillation.

They feared the rogue vibrations

From the freaking Acid Graduation

Kesey and the Pranksters planned;

Their freaking Day-Glo last round-up in

Winterland.

Like, I mean,

You know,

Can't you see it coming:

Ten thousand children of the flowers and grass

and acid, speed

and poppers, yellow jackets, amyl nitrate,

Ten thousand heads, freaks, beats, hippy-dippies,

teeny-boppers

descending from the crest of Haight Street

Tinkling, temple bells, rattling, donkey beads,

reeking, grass,

shuffling, elf boots, swarming prostrate

Before the returning Prophet in the bowels of

Winterland.

All of psychedelphia moaning to the polyphonic

droning of the

Merry Prankster band!

It's too easy for this headline-blazing superhero

This amazing Cagliostro Elmer Gantry Day-Glo

Nero—

ON THE TOP FLOOR OF THE RUSSIAN

EMBASSY, IN AN Extremely crummy brown room ...

It looks inflammable, or spontaneous-combustible, the

next cough, maybe, and it's all up in here. Jack the

Fluke sits up in bed, namely, a mattress on the floor,

with his back against the wall. .. wearing nothing

except his cabbie's cap and the grizzle on his face and

the grizzle on his Camembert chest... a brown blanket

pulled up to his waist... Take a look at that! if you want

to know about Kesey. A large message tacked up on the

wall on a sheet of drawing paper:

DEAR KEN,

THE BOYS IN THE

TANK SAY HELLO.

THEY WANT TO KNOW

ABOUT THEIR MONEY. SHOULD

THEY ASK YOU OR THE

JUDGE OR WHO?

Sandra, the girl from Bucks County, sits in a

clump at the foot of the mattress. She is a very pale,

tender little teenage clump. A single morsel, gone at

one gulp, sitting under the room's one article of

furniture, a bridge lamp, no longer goofing off the

radio, just sitting in a teenage clump and listening to

Jack tell me about the letter:

"Oh man, there were a lot of good heads hassled

and busted after Kesey told about that."

"You mean the cops—"

"The very ones. It was a bad scene. Like there's a

lot of cats up here who are not enchanted with Ken

Kesey. They sent him this letter."

Well, obviously they haven't, because there it is,

up on the wall. But the thought is there ...

Creaks on the inflammable stairs, and into the

room sidles a dark little guy in a T-shirt and jeans

carrying a round plastic box of cheese spread and a

knife in a scabbard—

"Jack!" he says in this weird whisper

—one of those long knives with a lot of fancy

mother-of-pearl on the handle that you see in a

Chinatown souvenir shop.

"It was a bad scene," Jack the Fluke tells me. He

ignores the guy-

"Jack ... look at this," says the kid.

"That's nice, Frenchy," says Jack.

"Jack ... it's beautiful, " says Frenchy.

"Like there's a lot of cats up here," Jack says to

me again—

"It's beautiful," says Frenchy. "Jack—you know

where there's any morphine?"

"No," says Jack, then resumes: "Like there's a lot

of cats up here—"

"It's a beautiful thing," says Frenchy.

"—

ho are not enchanted with Ken Kesey and

they sent him this letter."

"Jack—"

And Frenchy hunkers down on the floor and

opens the cheese spread and pulls the knife out of the

scabbard and sinks the blade into it. Quite a blade! a

foot long and engraved with Chinese demons. He wipes

gobs of cheese spread onto his tongue with the blade.

Sandra sits silent in a clump, grooving on the full life.

Jack raps on about perfidy in high places . . .

I don't know what the reference to money is—

"they want to know about their money." But the gist of

it is clear enough. Kesey has sold out to keep from

getting a five-year sentence or worse. Next he'll nail it

down by calling all the kids to Winterland and telling

them to stop taking LSD ... Freaking copout ...

It's quite a mess for Kesey, of course. If he had

lectured back at the judges like a Superhero, that would

have been the end of everything, probably, with him

salted away for many years. On the other hand, if he

just stares back Orientally as the current fantasy of

"beyond acid" is put forth, he looks like a cop-out in

Haight-Ashbury ...

All those good-loving heads... they've been

having quite a time for themselves... a summer of

euphoria, the millennium, in fact, LSD and hundreds of

beautiful people already on the scene, and no more

little games. They would just spread out like a wave

over the world and end all the bull-shit, drown it in

love and awareness, and nothing could stop them. I'll

have to hand it to the heads. They really want to end

the little games. Their hearts are pure. I never found

more than one or two cynics or hustlers among them.

But now that the moment is at hand, everyone is

wondering ... Hmmmmmmm ... who is going to lead the

way and hold the light? Then just one little game starts,

known as politics... Hmmmmm ... As I say, their hearts

are pure! Nevertheless, Chet Helms and the Family Dog

have their thing, Bill Graham has his thing, the

Grateful Dead have theirs, the Diggers have theirs, the

Calliope Company have theirs, Bowen has his, even

Gary Goldhill... It's a little like the socialist movement

in New York after World War I—the Revolution is

imminent, as all know and agree, and yet, Christ,

everybody and his brother has a manifesto, the

Lovestonites, the Dubinsky Socialists, the CPUSA

(Bolshevik), the Wobblies, everybody has his own

typewriters and mimeograph machines and they're all

cranking away like mad and fuming over each other's

mistranslations of the Message . . . Not that the heads

in Haight-Ashbury are wrangling with each other yet,

but what do they do about Kesey? Just sit back and let

him and the Pranksters do their thing? Let them try to

turn a lot of impressionable kids off LSD, the way the

newspapers say he intends? Or let him suddenly make a

big power play at Winterland and take over the whole

movement? Politics, in a word ...

And the Pranksters ... by and by ... I find them in

the Calliope garage on Harriet Street, the old garage,

the ex-pie factory in the bottom of the old hotel. I kept

peeking around in the crazy gloom of the place, amid

all the scabid wood and sour corners and ratty blankets

and scaffoldings and beat-up theater seats and the

luminous bus hulking in its own grease and the rotting

mattresses where people stretched out and slept and the

Shell station up the corner where everyone copped

urinations, and I couldn't figure out what they had to be

so exultant about. It beat me. As I look back on it, they

were all trying to tell me ... Hassler with his discourse

on the world full of games and futile oppositioning and

how the Pranksters meant to show the world how to live

... with his toothbrush case shimmering ... He was a

kind man! He was trying to give me the whole picture

at once. It wasn't about cops and robbers in Mexico, it

was about...

Pranksters arriving from far and wide . . . The

old Schism forgotten ... Paul Foster back from India,

looking emaciated, his mustache and mutton chops

gone, his head shaved, but with the great God Rotor

roaring and digging away . . . Page telling me about

huaraches... Mountain Girl, Doris Delay, The Hermit,

Freewheeling Frank the Hell's Angel, Cassady flipping

his sledgehammer, Babbs, Gretch, George Walker ...

Zonker coming in with an Arab headdress as Torrence

of Arabia ... Finally Kesey pulling in, Faye and the

kids coming out... The Flag People, the bus glowing,

the mystic fog rising ...

IN THE STUDIO OF JOHN BARTHOLOMEW

TUCKER'S TELEVISION show, station KPIX, on Van

Ness Avenue, I'm sitting in the studio audience up in

the gloom behind the black backsides of the spotlights,

the cameras, the dollies, the coils of wire ... Well, this

is going to be fun—

THE DANGER OF LSD

—coming on in big letters on the screen of the

monitor sets in the studio, with a drawing of three

sugar cubes under it... the symbol of LSD, of course,

like four X's XXXX, for whiskey,... and the voice-over

saying

"... and author Ken Kesey ..."

Out in the clearing, beyond the jungle of light

stands and wires and the rest of it, in a big pool of

light, there's Kesey in his buckskin shirt and red

Guadalajara boots sitting in one of those milky-white

fiberglass-coated Saarinen swivel chairs that TV in-

terview shows go for ... and Tucker, whose show it is,

looking California Ivy League... and his other guest,

Frankie Randall, looking sort of Las Vegas Yachtsman,

as if any moment he is going to tell a long story about

something very frustrating that happened to his El

Dorado convertible in a parking lot in L.A. You can see

this show has balance, as they say ... It fills up your

head like a daydream ... brain candy ... a little talk with

Randall about the Persian Room and dining at Sardi's

and lying on the sands at Malibu—"Well, where do you

go from here, Frankie!" "Well, I'll be at Lake Tahoe

next week, John!"—and then, gravely, he'll bring on the

elder statesman of psychedelphia, talking about the

dangers of LSD and telling the kids to turn off, as if

Kesey were an ex-Communist, reformed and returned

from the class wars, with a few sizzling stories and

then a moral. Just the ticket! a whiff of the dope dens

and then a cold shower.

"Well, tell me, Ken, could you give some idea of

what an LSD trip is like?"

"Yeah, it blows you out of your gourd."

Tucker stares at him—

"Well—now, you're—going to tell all the people

not to take it any more, is that correct?"

"I'm going to tell them to move on to the next

step."

"The next step?"

"It's time to move on to the next step in the

psychedelic revolution. I don't know what this is going

to be in any way I could just spell out, but I know

we've reached a certain point but we're not moving any

more, we're not creating any more, and that's why

we've got to move on to the next step—"

The next step?... it keeps going that way ... They

can't figure out what in the name of Christ this big

cowboy is saying... What about the danger, man, those

sugar cubes we had up there... and down in front of me,

amid the wires and lights, a technician and a production

assistant are frantically scrawling away on a big cue

board with a marking pencil and they thrust it close to

Tucker and Kesey, just out of camera range—

DON'T FORGET ABOUT DANGER OF LSD! SAY

ABOUT

LSD BEING

DANGEROUS — ESPECIALLY FOR KIDS !

—and Kesey just looks at them and gives them

the biggest, most inscrutable upcountry smile, which on

the screen looks as though he has suddenly gazed off

toward an old buddy who is saying, What a shuck, Kee-

zee ...

Later in the day, rolling across the TV screens of

San Francisco again, Kesey and the Pranksters and the

bus pull up to Winterland to look it over for the ACID

TEST GRADUATION ... TV microphones ... Kesey in Flag

People coveralls and a ten-gallon straw hat. ..

"Ken! Ken!" A TV announcer heaves into

position. "Ken, could you tell us something about the

message you're going to have for the kids at this Acid

Test Graduation?"

Kesey says, "I'm going to tell them, 'Never trust

a—' "

BRAAAAAAAAAAANG A huge glob of feedback

screels into the microphone—

"Could you repeat that, Ken?"

"Braaaaaaaaaaang," says Kesey.

"Ha-ha. No, what you were saying."

"Never trust a Prankster," says Kesey. The scene

breaks up in a covey of Flag People bobbing off the

bus...

Never trust a Prankster!... Shit! ... That shakes

them up all over again in Haight-Ashbury, there's no

getting around that. A whole new inflammation of

paranoia. The lunger heads are slithering up and down

the store fronts on Haight Street. They're hunkered

down gabbling in the India-print living rooms. The

whole thing takes a Stakhanovite left turn. Kesey is not

a right deviationist but a left deviationist. He's not

going to cop out by telling the kids to stop taking LSD,

that's just the cover story. Instead he's going to pull a

monster prank that will wreck the psychedelic

movement once and for all... Well, the acid heads in

Haight-Ashbury are like a tribe in one respect, anyway,

I can see that. It's all jungle drums and gossip with

them, they love it, they swim in it, like fish in a stream

in a cave ... A terrific thought bubbles up in the

universal brain ... The Acid Test Graduation is

scheduled for Winterland on Monday, October 31,

Halloween. The next night the California Democratic

Party is holding a big rally in Winterland for Governor

Brown, who is running against Ronald Reagan. Kesey

and the Pranksters hold their Winterland blast on

Halloween. Right? Far from being an "acid graduation,"

it will be an Acid Test of unbelievable proportions.

Electric Kool-Aid will rain in the air like a typhoon,

swizzle up every vein, 6,000 heads smashed out of their

nuts, ricocheting off the walls like electric golf balls...

The sky falls... But that's not all. They won't stop

there! these maniacs... The Pranksters will smear all

the doors, railings, walls, chairs, the heating system,

the water fountains, with DMSO ... laced with LSD ...

Dig? ... DMSO is close to being an old alchemical

ideal, the universal solvent. Put a drop of DMSO on

your fingertip and thirty seconds later you can taste it

in your mouth. It goes right through your skin and

through your system that fast. DMSO with LSD ...

What a vision! The following night the entire

Democratic Party of California will get turned on,

zonked out of their apples. Eight thousand

emphysematous fatbacked Senators, Assemblymen,

National Committeemen, National Committeewomen,

Congressmen, the Governor himself, wailing like

banshees, flopping around and gurgling and spitting

and frying like a pile of insane pancakes, whereupon

the Deaf Policemen descend on the whole psychedelic

movement with knouts flailing ...

Christ! what a stew... Now the heads don't know

whether Kesey is selling them out or shoving a big

Roman candle up the universal arse. They're fascinated.

They come around the Warehouse and peep into the

gloom. Their eyes shine at the doorway with a hepatic

fever . .. They come into the Warehouse, they stare at

the bus, they stare at Kesey, Mountain Girl, Cassady,

Babbs... A whole platoon of them comes in, beads

rattling, teetering around like gauchos, staring at the

bus and going "Wowwwww! Wowwwwwww!" and

smiling at each other, like, it's so groooovy, and

suddenly all the Pranksters fall silent. "Cops," says

Mountain Girl in total disgust. "How do you know?"

"Look at their shoes." They have on lace-up boots like

telephone linesmen. "You could never git heads to wear

heavy shoes like that," she says. Only a momentary

downer, however. The fact is, the Pranksters are

sailing. They've got the whole town into their movie by

now, cops and all. Kesey is all over TV, radio, and

newspapers. He's a celebrity, the perfect celebrity, the

Good-Bad Guy, reeking all the secret Zea-lot delights

of sin but promising to do good. They were all over

town on the bus, befuddling the communal brain ...

Even into Fillmore, the big Negro section, with the

loudspeakers playing rock 'n' roll and American flags

flying and a big sign on the bus reading

Colored Power

moving through the ghetto in a blur of Day-Glo

swirls. The spades in Fillmore didn't know what the

hell to make of that. Were these white freaks serious,

only they got the term wrong? Or was it a

shuuuuuuuuuuuck—by the time they figured it out, the

bus was long gone, wailing off somewhere else. Then

the big sign

Acid Test Graduation

went up on the bus, and the bus went wheeling

through Haight-Ashbury and downtown San Francisco

and North Beach and Berkeley advertising the world's

biggest convocation of all the heads. Pranksters

flapping from every portal. George Walker up on top on

the drums, Page on the electric guitar. Mountain Girl

hanging out the back of the bus exploding sunballs and

screaming at the nonplused multitudes on the subject of

the race for governor and Kesey's various busts

"Kesey for Governor!"

"A man of convictions!"

"He stands on his record!"

"The idiot's choice!"

"A joint in every stash!"

"No hope without dope!"

They were immune again. The whole freaking

town was into the movie. And after ...

. . . WINTERLAND; YES . . . THE HARDEST PART OF

THE WHOLE fantasy, as usual, has been finding the right

place. Winterland is perfect, the biggest indoor arena in

the city limits, and a tight ship, used for ice shows and

so on. The Winterland management didn't want to deal

directly with Kesey and the Pranksters. Maniacs!

jailbirds ... That was where Bill Graham came in. There

was no love lost between Graham and Kesey, but

Graham agrees to serve as producer, impresario, the

sane hand on the controls, and sign the contract.

Graham's job is to stay up on top of the new wave. But

it's an aesthetic and moral thing with him, too. He's a

believer, underneath it all... Hmmmm ... There's Kesey

... Well... Anyway, Hallinan and Rohan draw up a

contract between Graham and Intrepid Trips, Inc. It's

signed and a deposit is down, all legal and locked up.

Then there's the Grateful Dead. Kesey wants

them for the Acid Test Graduation. They're essential,

he says. But the Dead have a contract to play at an

annual Halloween costume ball at California Hall.

Ironically, the Pranksters' benefactors, the Calliope

Company, were sponsoring it, and they had an

impresario named Bob McKendrick running it. Kesey

and McKendrick and a couple of the Calliope Company,

Paul Hawken, Michael Laton and Bill Tara, are up in an

apartment on the top floors of a rickety building on

Pine Street, all wood slats and bay windows. There are

no furnishings, just a mattress in the living room. The

sun makes a huge glare in here. Kesey sits on the

mattress and everybody else is hunkered down on the

floor. Except Mc-Kendrick. He is standing up in the

middle of the floor like someone dancing on a hot

plate. He has on tight black pants, black shark toe slip-

on shoes, a soft black sweater and open-neck shirt.. .

dressed Main Stem hipster, in short. He's broken up in

the glare, twenty-seven parts, all fidgeting.

"Look, Ken," he's saying, "you're a leader, a

prophet, you might say, and you have an important

message, and I dig that, you know? I respect that. . .

But I have to think of this in other terms. I'm

responsible to a lot of people, and there's a lot of

money involved."

Twenty-seven parts!—all moving, doesn't anyone

see that this is a main chance, this dance at California

Hall, in the impresario game. Kesey just sits there and

keeps working on him like how long is it before he will

see how it's going to be—Hell, man! join forces with

the Pranksters. Move your scene to Winterland, co-

sponsor it. If he doesn't, everybody on ... The Scene

will go to Winterland anyway, and he and his whole

California Hall scene will be wiped out anyway.

McKendrick is beside himself. His black pants shimmy

in the glare. He smells disaster either way. Put me back

together again! Everyone stares. It's all glare and

myopia in here! He comes to a stop. He agrees. He

pulls out of California Hall, freeing the Dead, thrash,

crumble—

—bits and freaking pieces, grumbling. The heads

start grumbling about Kesey's power play. Kesey's

power play. The Grateful Dead ... They've been doing

all right! Since the Acid Tests they have become a

thing, the pioneers of the new sound, acid rock, with

the record companies beginning to sniff around ::::

hmm-mmm :::: the very next thing? Freak that. All and

everyone in one bag now, Winterland.

Friday night and the Pranksters decide to drop in

on the Fillmore. Like, well, it's Friday night. Kesey,

Cassady, Babbs, Page, about a dozen of them, all in the

Flag People coveralls, Cassady flipping his

sledgehammer. The scene around the Fillmore is a freak

show for sure. The dance hall is set down right in the

middle of the Negro slums, at Fillmore and Geary, and

it's Friday night with a lot of young spades with

Stingy-Brim hats on out on the street having the usual

Friday night on the streets and old Negro women doing

the groceries for the weekend, liquor stores, drugstores,

cars inching along, black faces all over the streets.

Right in the middle of them, the white freaks. Kids in

psychedelic dress burbling and gaggling up to the

Fillmore—Colored Power! the kids have that, all right.

Kesey and the Pranksters walk up the stairs to the

dance hall, which is on the second floor. Kesey talks to

the ticket seller and the ticket taker. There's a big

conference. The ticket taker goes upstairs. He comes

back ... like, very bad vibrations... They can't come in

unless they buy tickets. .. Graham ... bad vibrations, a

freaking insult, in fact. The Pranksters go back out on

the street to mull that one over. There's a Cyclone

fence at the rear entrance of the Fillmore with a

freaked-out chomping police dog behind it... Graham ...

Cassady goes off... A few minutes later he's back.

"I ran into Bill Graham," he says. "He was out on

the street checking tire treads to see if they'd picked up

any nickels. I says, 'Bill...' and he says, 'Look, Neal,

we're in two different worlds. You're a hippie and I'm a

square. Square.' He did it like this"—and Cassady

makes a square in the air with his forefingers to show

how he did it—" 'You're a hippie and I'm a square.'

Says, 'I got off the subway in 1955, but you're still on

it. We're in two different worlds. You're a hippie and

I'm a square.' I'm telling you, Chief," he says to Kesey,

"I had some very negative feelings. I remembered what

you said about negative feelings, but I had some very

negative feelings." Kesey laughs, but—

All day Saturday the Pranksters are working like

mad. They're hassling up all sorts of equipment, mikes,

spots, amplifiers, speakers, strobes, even an electronic

music machine, all the stuff they had at the Acid Tests

and more. They can't get into Winterland until Sunday

to start rigging it up because there's some show in there

Saturday night. Anyway, they're working en charrette

Saturday and into Saturday night... At five o'clock in

the morning, Sunday, it hits the fan. Kesey's lawyer,

Rohan, gets wakened up at 5 a.m., at home ... Graham

is on the phone, very excited, explaining a million

things a mile a minute.

They are having quite a little session up in

Graham's office at the Fillmore. All night it's been

going on. Graham has been wrestling with many

negative feelings. He knows that term, too. By heart—

also Chet Helms knows it, and the Grateful Dead, and

the Quicksilver Messenger Service, and more and more

::::: three fourths of The Scene is here, says Graham,

the're all over the place, hanging on the walls...

Everyone is in a terrific sweat. Are we actually going

to let Kesey do this thing? pull off this debacle? Go ::::

beyond acid, whatever that may be, which, whatever it

is, is no good for anyone here .. . They've hauled out

all the versions, the cop-out, the power play, the way

Kesey twisted McKendrick's arm, the DMSO ... the

DMSO! . .. That's it! Christ, Bill, can't you see ...

They're putting pressure on Graham to pull out of the

deal. . . They've got me by each limb, wild tow trucks

heading to the four points of the compass... The more

they talk, the more urgent it is to do something, else,

Christ, why have we been here all night... Hope

incubates in the warm loam of every armpit... Helms

has it figured out. Kesey's mentality is military. He

thinks in terms of power differentials. He's playing the

desert fox—lure the enemy into your own battleground

by doing a turn-face claiming you came back to stop

kids from taking acid, and when you have thousands of

these straight people together, turn them on to acid.

Kesey's playing the tactical deceit and façade game—

and so on ... And the Dead ... Why should we blow our

hard-earned scenes for Kesey? As Ralph Gleason the

columnist says. .. Kesey's going to blow the whole new

San Francisco scene for us. And Graham ... I ran into

Cassady on the street. He's waving this sledgehammer

at me like he's going to knock my head off if I don't

play ball... Many negative feelings. Kesey's an Elmer

Gantry, says Graham ... That's it! Elmer Gantry, the

evangelical demagogue . . . Freaking debacle either

way ... If he blows it, he blows it for us all. If he

succeeds, he takes over the whole psychedelic

movement and leads it into the Elmer Gantry thing,

Father Divine, Daddy Grace, Cagliostro, charlatan

limbo, sledgehammer theocracy, a phosphorescent

fascist fandango, King Herod spavining the Flower

Children, O Fuck & Corruption, G-narl, G-nash, Elmer

Gantry Cagliostro Day-Glo Nero .. . Stop Kesey ...

In short, Graham is pulling out of the deal and

there will be no Acid Test Graduation at Winterland.

LATE IN THE AFTERNOON IN THE

WAREHOUSE — CHRIST, IT'S dismal in here! The

place is always a shambles, of course, but now the funk

of the day's debacle is settling in like a sludge. The

vermin are regaining the upper hand ... The lice! The

pigeon fleas! The roaches! rats! scabies! impetigo!

clap! piles! herpes! all rising up out of the debris like

boils . . . Faye, Mountain Girl, Babbs, Gretch, Black

Maria, Page, Doris Delay, Stewart Brand, Lois, the

Hermit, Roy Seburn, Gut the ex-Hell's Angel, Kesey's

brother Chuck, Zonker—they're all rumbling around in

the gloom, but they're not Flag People any more, the

costumes are off like the war is over ... They're

gathering around in a circle in folding chairs and old

theater seats on one side of the bus. .. Acid Test

Graduation... The sign is still stretched across the

whole side of the bus ... Well, shit.. . Kesey, in his

buckskin shirt again, comes around in the midst of

them carrying a huge easy chair—stuffed with tiny

wings!—over his head—and sets it down with the back

to the bus and sits down in it—a molting chair—and the

Prankster circle rings out from him. Kesey stares at a

spiral notebook he has and then starts talking in a voice

so soft I can hardly hear him at first... about what has

just happened ... about Danny Rifkin and some others

who came by to tell him they were pulling out of the

Winterland fantasy.

"It didn't take long to know they wouldn't change

their minds," he says. "They won't change because they

have too much money involved ... As soon as they left,

I lay down and I thought about it and then I knew we

have everything we want right here . . ."

Right here?

". . . in this warehouse, and this is where we're

going to do it. We're going to have the Graduation here

and it's going to be our scene. We have a certain

number of people we want to get close to us, and

they're going to be here and it's going to be better than

anything we could have done at Winterland ..."

Whistling

".. . Here we're on our own grounds, and we can

do what we want, for our own scene, and we don't have

to do any more politicking or compromising. We'll do it

our own way and we'll be the Bay Area's Superheroes

..."

Last hole in the sapling sky

"... One reason it didn't come off was that it was

too big and too hot and they all got frightened. They all

want to be eagles, but they don't want to act like

eagles, so we're going to have to do it ourselves. We

tried to do it the other way, but they weren't interested

... So we're going to keep it down to those people who

are going to make it as tight a scene as we can get.

They are the kind of people who, if they've got

anything to say, it will spread out from them, and they

can say it straight, and it will spread out from them and

there will be no stopping it. And that's the essential

fantasy. We're moving it all in here, into the Rat

Shack."

Into the Rat Shack

Then Kesey's voice picks up and he starts

assigning tasks: Page in charge of setting up a stage

and chairs. Roy Seburn to decorate the place with a lot

of cloth hangings. Faye and Gretch to get food and

drink. Hermit to seal up all the holes in the walls. Zonk

to draw up and post the guest list...

The few!

The fantasy is to compile an invitation list and

contact them all, far and wide, now, this afternoon and

tonight, by telephone, messenger, whatever it takes,

and everybody starts thinking of those people close in

enough to

THE WHOLE FREAKING ADVENTURE

to invite to this last roundup .. . What a thought!

...

Do YOU REMEMBER

all the Pranksters who have wandered far and

wide, like June the Goon, Marge the Barge, Sensuous

X, Anonymous, Norman Hartweg—

"Hire an ambulance to bring him from Ann

Arbor!" Christ, all the memories... the Perry Lane

people ... Sandy Lehmann-Haupt—

BECAUSE, NEVERTHELESS, HE WAS THERE WHEN

the pudding whipped up creamy-—

"Hugh Romney!"

"Bonnie Jean!"

And Paul Sawyer and Rachel Rightbred ... and all

the wild screwy people who got on the bus on the

golden track wherever and whither—

"Mary Microgram!"

"That little guy who wrote the pot poem!"—and

they write that down—

"That guy with the ears, that weirdo!" says

Babbs—and they write that down—

"That couple in Portland!"—and they write that

down—

"That pretty Indian boy on Haight Street!"—and

they write that down—

"The Mad Chemist!"

Yeah ! Oh shit, do you remember

"Big Nig!"

Gimme the rent

"Culley!"

"Owsley!"

Survival

"That guy in jail!"

"The Who Cares Girl!"

RA-A-A-A-AY

"Ray!"

"Pancho Pillow!"

"J. Edgar Hoover!"—and they write that down—

SEE THE VERY HUNTED COONS

"Gaylord!"

"Jim Fish!"

"Agent Number One!"

¡MARICONES!

Cosmo!

Cos-mo

Oh shit what a flow from eons ago in La Honda

across the length and the breadth and the sleek and the

Rat and it all comes flooding and bubbling back like a

crest if they can just sit up on it and ride and ride and

ride and ride here in the gloom and beat back those

little crab lice in frogmen's suits six little neoprene

rubber armlets for each little crab louse leg creeping

about camouflaged like tiny scars in the brain the

focking debacle infestation, the morose thought

clumped somewhere in every brain until out through the

starveling self-shuck fiesta euphoria Page brings it out

front and out loud in the scabid sinkhole of the

Warehouse, the ancient Shellube voice of please-don't-

shit-me:

"It's great to be a part of the greatest jackoff in

history."

NEVERTHEFREAKINGLESS! THE NEXT

NIGHT, HALLOWEEN, the magic long-awaited hour

... I can hardly believe it, the Pranksters have

transformed the place. You have to hand it to them,

they must have worked like Turks. It's still a pestilence

among buildings, you understand, this Warehouse, but

there's verve in the air, Rat splendor. The most

splendid thing is a huge orange-and-white parachute, an

enormous thing, just the silk, not the strings and all,

hooked to the ceiling at the apex, and billowed out to

the far corners of the ceiling like some majestic canopy

out of a Louis XV lawn revel in the Orangerie at Ver-

sailles. It glistens ! Grand luxe! The very same

parachute, it turns out, that Astronauts use on reentry

for the splashdown ... Hm-mmmm ... Yes... Quite a

sight! The Pranksters have turned into the Flag People

again, in their American Flag coveralls. Mountain Girl

sits at the Sixth Street side in Flag coveralls checking

guests against the invitation list which is posted up on

the door in Paul Foster God Rotor script. Mountain Girl

opens the Can't Bust 'Em coveralls and suckles

Sunshine as the few, the faithful.. . the many! . . . come

flapping by . . . Their faces are painted in Art Nouveau

swirls, their Napoleon hats are painted, masks painted,

hair dyed weird, embroidered Chinese pajamas, dresses

made out of American flags, Flash Gordon diaphanous

polyethylene, supermarket Saran Wrap, India-print

coverlets shawls Cossack coats sleeveless fur coats

piping frogging Bourbon hash embroidery serapes

sarongs saris headbands bows batons vests frock coats

clerical magisterial scholar's robes stripes strips flaps

thongs Hookah boots harem boots Mexicali boots

Durango boots elf boots Knight boots Mod boots Day-

Glo Wellingtons Flagellation boots beads medallions

amulets totems polished bones pigeon skulls bat

skeletons frog thoraxes dog femurs lemur tibia kneecap

of a coyote ... A hell of a circus, in short, a whole

carnival banner, a panopticon. Hell's Angels pulling in,

in their colors, the death's-head jackets, full dress,

beards combed and trimmed, Terry the Tramp, Pete the

Drag Racer, Ralph of Oakland, plus their girls...

miniskirts and raspberry stockings. .. Chocolate George

... Chaos! Shitfire! Chocolate George doesn't see his

name on the list and his girl keeps saying, "What's the

matter, George, can't we get in?" until Mountain Girl

gives a bullshit laugh and waves them in. A kid about

ten pops out of the door onto Sixth Street and yells,

"Who's smoking grass around here?"—in the most

demanding voice you ever heard ... aggressive little

devil. There's even a nursery set up inside the door and

they keep making the Hermit stay the hell out of there.

Kesey is off to one side in a Flag People coverall,

looking around, not saying much, listening to a big

Angel from Oakland who has on a polka-dot shirt and a

polka-dot tie under his Angels' jacket—"I wore a shirt

and tie, Ken, on account of it's Halloween"—rock 'n'

roll playing over the loudspeakers, which are all over

the place, on the sides, on the ceiling, right up in the

summit of the parachute canopy even ... microphones,

cameras, TV cameras... Yes ... The Few and the

Faithful!—all the same, the word of the hoopla in the

scabid old Warehouse is around town like a chic piece

of information. Irresistible, of course ... Three TV

stations have cameramen there, four radio stations with

microphones and tape machines. Herbert Gold the

novelist with an aftershave smile on. Ingrid Bergman's

daughter, Pia Lindstrom ... Oh, sweet adrenal edge!

This is where it's at! what—could this be... the new

wave?... Where? in comes the Women's Wear Daily cor-

respondent in San Francisco, Albert Morch, a brassy

little character with a Rolleiflex around his neck ...

Caterine Milinaire of Vogue with a miniature camera in

a chain-mail evening purse, standing amid Angels,

heads, and the Probation Generation like a Bulfinch

princess . . . Larry Dietz the magazine writer from Los

Angeles... And me ... Kesey looking around and saying

nothing and . .. wondering . .. Hmmmmm ... The Few

and the Faithful and the whole hulking world. It's a

regular beano, all right. But, Mother! These costumes

aren't for a Halloween party but for the liberation of

dead souls... churchly vestiture, in truth ...

Are we blind? ... Oblation ... Consecration ...

Communion ... Well... The Anonymous Artists of

America climbing up onto the stage ... They're like

freaking faeries out of A Midsummer Night's Dream,

dueling shirts and long gowns of phosphorescent

pastels like the world never saw before, Day-Glo death

masks beaming out in front of the instruments. The

music suddenly submerges the room from a million

speakers... a soprano tornado of it... all-electric, plus

the Buchla electronic music machine screaming like a

logical lunatic ...

Out into the middle, under the great parachute

canopy and the spotlights, sailing across the mungery

carpet. . . Doris Delay of the Pranksters in Flag People

coveralls and Terry the Tramp of Hell's Angels in an

Ozark razorback stovepipe hat dark glasses Angel

beard, a huge brown-and-black striped sweater like a

raccoon, the Angels' sleeveless jacket and the death's

head, blue jeans, motorcycle boots ... Christ, here's a

coming-out party for you, Doris Delay and Terry the

Tramp . .. stomping and flailing about in a regular

hoedown ... but formal in a wacky way. They dance for

about a minute and then the others rush out, a storm of

them, couples in acid-head fancy dress, dancing to the

rock 'n' roll, only they're dancing clean out of their

gourds, they leap, they flail their arms up in the air,

they throw their heads back, they gyrate and levitate ...

they're in a state ... they're ecstatic ... Gary Goldhill

looks on from the side. He has on a huge lake-red

Chinese pajama top with a gold dragon embroidered on

it. He's spooked about the Warehouse .. . Musty! . ..

Insane! ... Friends or spirits? Well—Earth can be

Heaven & Hell and he takes the plunge ... and reaches

into his pants pocket and swallows a potion . ..

Already a few enraptured grins breaking out in

the crowd ... Rapt wet-lipped bliss... They glisten, their

eyes are wide open like plastic nodules. The Telepathic

Kid is so high, grinning so wet and glistening, he looks

like one great psychic orgasm getting ready to unfold

exfoliate into ... a calla lily ... and a blond kid with a

white Nehru coat on and a big silver pendant hanging

down over his chest kneeling before the rock 'n' roll

band with his hands brought up like in prayer and a

grin of such pure acid bliss on his face that his teeth

sizzle ... a pot full of boiling pearls ... The Pranksters;

Babbs and Gretch and Page and others, take to the

bandstand, all electrified, and they start beaming out

the most weird loud Chinese science-fiction music and

cranking up the Buchla electronic music machine until

it maneuvers itself into the most incalculable sonic

corner, the last turn in the soldered circuit maze, and

lets out a pure topologically measured scream. Ultima-

time, with heavy-duty wiring, the works. Kesey stands

off to one side still, in the shadows, at... Control

Central, only now he has the Flag People coveralls off

and is bare chested, wearing only white leotards, a

white satin cape tied at the neck, and a red, white, and

blue sash running diagonally across his chest. It's ...

Captain America! The Flash! Captain Marvel! the

Superhero, in a word ...

At the height of the frenzy suddenly the lights go

out, the sound goes out, all replaced by a single

spotlight hitting the center of the floor. Kesey's brother

Chuck is up in the rafters working the lights. You can

hear Babbs's and Hassler's voices over microphones in

the dark, rapping back and forth in a shuck manner:

"Do you think they'd clear out of the center if we asked

them, Hassler?" ... "Sure, they're gonna clear out the

center faster than you can say clear out the center" ...

But everyone just mills around, caught in the blackout.

Babbs says: "If they don't clear out the center, then

they're a bunch of assholes" ... Well, let's try the direct

approach! They clear out of the ellipse where the spot

beams down, and Kesey comes in out of the darkness.

He's taken the cape and the sash off, however. Too

freaking much, I guess. He's just wearing the white

ballet tights and his wrestler's build. A pair of jockey

shorts show faintly under the leotards—just the right

touch ... here in the Rat Shack ... He has a hand

microphone up to his mouth.... Kesey in the leotards

with the pool of light in front of him and the heads all

packed in around the loop of light in the darkness....

It's good and theatrical ... in a weird weird way ...

Some of the heads get the point immediately. Without a

sound, they start tossing things into the pool of light,

sugar cubes, capsules, cigarette papers, a couple of

joints, beads, amulets, headbands, all the charms and

totems of psychedelphia into the pool of light. It's ... an

altar ... Kesey starts talking over the microphone in the

upcountry drawl...

"When we were down in Mexico, we learned a lot

about waves. We spent six months down there learning

about waves. Even in the dark you can feel the

waves..."

It's a wrench, that voice, what is it? up to now—a

party, a frenzy. All of a sudden it's on a whole other

level... of some sort... we can't figure it out. The TV

crews are trying to edge up close and jockey for

position. Is this where he tells the kids to turn off

LSD? ... Which is what—we came for... Waves?

"I believe that man is changing ... in a radical

basic way ... The waves are building, and every time

they build, they're stronger. Our concept of reality is

changing. It's been happening here in San Francisco ...

I believe there's a whole new generation of kids. They

walk different... I can hear it in the music ... It used to

go ... life—death, life—death ... but now it's ... death—

life . . . death—life

The TV crewmen are trying to hand their

microphones to heads near Kesey. They want them to

hold them near him to pick up the words better. They

implore the heads, they half order them in stage

whispers. The heads are disgusted. They just stare at

them. Kesey shoots a few whammies their way ... These

bastards and their... positioning... they only want to use

you for a little while ... They're punctures in the

dirigible, flatulent murmurs in the heart, they're—the

TV crews are pissed, too. Snotty dope-head kids! ...

Coverage is a pain in the ass here in Edge City. Can't

do with it, can't do without it—a grand hassle in the

making—

"... For a year we've been in the Garden of Eden.

Acid opened the door to it. It was the Garden of Eden

and Innocence and a ball. Acid opens that door and you

enter and you stay awhile ..."

At which precise point—mysteries of the synch!

yes—four policemen great dark-blue figures come

walking in through the door on the Sixth Street side.

The word starts firing around the crowd in the dark:

Cops! Cops! ... One last monster raid to finish off the

debacle! There is a hell of a scurrying in the darkness,

bodies hitting the walls of the garage, like gigantic

fancy-dress rats looking for holes ... Get the hell out of

here! ... It's the Probation Generation, of course, all the

kids who are out on probation under firm admonition

not to associate with known dope users... they're

practically digging through the concrete floor ... The

four policemen keep walking in at a slow gait, looking

this way and that. Cassady is on a microphone way be-

hind Kesey now, up on the stage, in fact, beginning to

rap about the cops coming in: "Four custom-tailored

constables, you understand, looking for pearl heads

among the swineherds..."

"The cops are here?" says Kesey. He sounds

startled.

"The constabulary cops ..."

"They come in waves, too," says Kesey, "they're

a pattern that repeats" ... Yah! ...

By now the cops have just stopped on the edge of

the crowd in the darkness, just looking around.

"There's cops and there's policemen," Kesey

says. "The cop says, 'Don't do that. That's forbidden

and that's all there is to that.' The policeman says, 'You

can do that, but if you go too far, you're going to hurt

yourself The policeman is the double line in the middle

of the road. I'm talking about inside of us."

A spot suddenly comes on, hitting Cassady in a

little cone of light. "It's like Ken once said," says

Cassady. "If you ignore a cop for twenty years, then

he's not there any more ..."

"Haw!—Haw!—Haw!"—Hell's Angels in the

corner—the four cops just survey the camp meeting,

then start turning around to leave. Cassady keeps on

rapping:

"Yes! Violence, you understand .. . There's not

going to be any violence here. If we wanted some

violence we have some fellows here who could furnish

it. .."

"Haw!—Haw!—Yah!—Yagggggh!—A good cop

is a dead cop!"

"A good cop is a dead cop!"

But the cops just walk on out, rocking at the

same slow gait, brushing through a clump of Hell's

Angels like they weren't there. The cops are gone, but

they punctured the atmosphere again. Kesey tries to

build it up, in the same soft tones, but it's tough going.

He plunges in with the vision, the vision of Beyond

Acid, how he saw the lines of light across the

bay in Manzanillo, the line of grass . . .

"... and I'd smoked some grass, some Acapulco

Gold, as a matter of fact. . ."

Cheers go up in the dark, Acapulco Gold! Oh shit

we're esoteric heads and we know the creamiest of all

the marijuana. But it's a freaking puncture. Kesey

plunges through the whole vision: the line of acid, the

circle demanding completion, the little lights across the

bay ... It's metaphorical, allegorical, brains are getting

messed up left and right... The rock 'n' roll, the frenzy,

the TV cameras, the darkness, the cops, and now...

this... It keeps ricocheting from level to level. Shit!

what is Kesey... doing... Finally the line with the hook

on it—completing the circle without going all the way.

He's telling them the whole thing, but—what is . ..

"We've been going through that door and staying

awhile and then going back out through that same door.

But until we start going that far . . . and then going

beyond . . . we're not going to get anywhere, we're not

going to experience anything new . .."

They're uncomfortable, they're stuffing their

shirts in and pulling them out, too many rips in the

balloon, and brains messed up.. . and the freaking TV

jackals stabbing microphones around like tape-

recording the hanging of Lenny Bruce—

"Let's find out where we are. Let's move it

around. Let's dance on it."

The lights come back on, the music starts back

up, the color is back, everything starts spinning like a

top again. Goldhill is zonked by now. The music flows

through his neural ganglia like a flood of relief... Love!

Bless, bless! bright lights! The Hell's Angels are

stomping around again, everybody dancing. But that

doesn't last long. Kesey is out in the middle of the

crowd. People close in around him. The music stops.

Kesey looks slightly glazed over but plunging on, like

he is determined to seize the whole debacle by the

shoulders and shake it into place. He has a chunk of

ice. He kisses it, he puts a big chunk in his mouth, he

breaks off a chunk and gives it to Cassady. Cassady

kisses a chunk and then rubs it all over his bare chest.

An ice thing ... The TV cameramen and radio reporters

are trying to edge in. They're buffeted back. Everything

is pitching and rolling. Kesey and Cassady are sitting

on the floor communing over the ice. Pranksters and

some other heads are getting into a circle on the floor

with Kesey and Cassady ... the lotus position ... Gary

Goldhill sits down with them. He's ready. The kid with

the sizzling teeth sits down among them, zonked ... the

lotus position ... His back is arched back stiff in the

Nehru coat. He's rapt. The pot of pearls boils and boils.

They all join hands and close their eyes—a communal

circle ... They close their eyes tighter and tighter,

waiting for... the energy. It's coming! It's coming! A

high-pitched keening noise rises up from the circle ...

Do you hear it! ... It's weird ... Half the people looking

on are nonplused, they're embarrassed. What is this a

Halloween party or a seance and the Holy Rollers?

Christ... Albert Morch of Women's Wear Daily says to

Caterine Millinaire: "Say! when! met you last night—I

didn't know you were the Duke of Bedford's daughter!"

... Got religion! The Angels are restless. They're

standing around the edge of the circle. "Hey! Start the

music!" ... In the circle, Kesey, Cassady, and the rest—

they're starting to rap back and forth. The kid with the

boiling teeth hears the voice. His eyes are still tight

shut. He grins and glistens. "A dead towhee," he says,

"a rumpled road and a dead towhee." His voice is on

the edge of delirium and tears ... or else any moment he

is going to break into an insane cackling laugh... "A

dead towhee and a rumpled road and lying in the dust, a

mistake... a mistake, but it's not important... Making a

mistake is not important... it's the context in which the

mistake is made ... A rumpled road and a dead towhee

and four gasoline stations, white and sterile, refueling

tailfins in mid-air for fat men in sunglasses who do not

see the rumpled road and the dead towhee ..."

Goldhill sits rapt... Energy waves emanating

from everywhere ... Like ... black spirits! ... Kesey &

Cassady—what are they trying to do with his mind ...

Got me, trapped me into the Big Wait—for what? an

idea? a revelation? love? feeling? breakthrough—into

what? or

PUT-ON

They're putting him on! Sucking him in! But—

the idea we're waiting for—he can feel it, physically,

it's surging through ... He looks deep down inside, to

describe it.

PRESQUE vu!

Mass daemonic hallucination it is! He looks

around ... All pitches and rolls...

A CIRCUS OR HELL

The tortured and the damned are all around him,

the dead-for-good souls ... He gets up radiating Chinese

firecrackers from his dragon pajamas and heads for the

Sixth Street door but... the Dead and the Damned!

Faces!

HELL'S ANGELS

Hell's Angels are packed into the corridor

leading to the door ready for

MASSACRE

He turns back into the crowd, sinks into a time

warp ... Like his life is an endless tape loop ... Black

spirits keep bubbling up out of the most ancient pits of

licorice detergent

TRAP

That! Hare Krishna Hare Krishna Krishna

Krishna Hare Hare Hare Rama Hare Rama Rama Rama

Hare Hare and as he chants he becomes... Krishna! ...

Christ! ... God ... And he pops out of the time warp into

the silver haze of... The Universal Mind ...

"We almost had it," says Kesey, opening his eyes

for the first time. "We would have had it. There's too

much noise ..." But it's like the cloud has passed.

People are milling around, starting to leave.

They're befuddled and embarrassed. What the hell kind

of party ... The Angels are beginning to leave, the TV

crews, Herbert Gold has had enough ... Albert Morch ...

It's getting toward three o'clock ... People stare at the

stage, but there's no sign of music. Is it over? Are you

on the bus? ... in the pudding?

Kesey plunges on. The lights go out again. The

wrench is total now. It's a whole other .. . thing ...

Kesey moves to the other side of the floor and sits

down. The spot hits him. The Pranksters start gathering

from all over the garage: Mountain Girl, The Hermit,

Babbs, Gretch, Doris Delay, Page, The Hassler,

Cassady, Black Maria, Zonker, Gut, George Walker,

Ram Rod, Stewart Brand, Lois Jennings, all heading

toward Kesey. Hassler has a hand mike and he starts

saying in the dark:

"Everybody who's with us, everybody who's with

us in this thing, move in close. If you're not part of this

thing, if you're not with us, then it's time to leave. You

can move in close and get into this thing or you can

leave, because ... that's what time it is..."

Shitfire! that's it—those who were a little

spooked by the turn the night is taking are now totally

spooked. People heading for the Sixth Street door,

flapping and burbling. The Pranksters, meantime, draw

in close to Kesey, stepping by people, over people, then

settling down, nestling in a circle around Kesey. Others

pulling in, through the darkness, toward the cone of

light lighting up Kesey's head and back. Kesey looks

distraught. He looks up into the light. He has a hand

mike. He makes a gesture as if to say, Let them

through—

"I know these people," he says. "I've been with

these people!"

The whole Allegory ... A tableau of the Plains

of... The tightest inner circle is packed in around him,

then the Prankster outer circle. Then a few of the old

Perry Lane crowd. Then various heads who are deep

into the pudding, like Goldhill and the Kid with the

Boiling Teeth, then rings and rings, the grades of faith

. . . plus a few clumps up against the wall, of people

with no faith at all, just too stroked out or curious to

leave. Finally Cassady stepping over the hunkered-

down, lotused, sitting bodies, heading toward the inner

circle ... Kesey looks up at him, then he seems to grow

dizzy and sink ... His head rolls...

"Goodbye, Neal!" he says. He looks like he might

pass out. Cassady pulls closer. Kesey hunches over the

microphone.

"They're saying, 'Look at him—the promising

novelist... once surrounded by thousands... and now

only these few'... But I can—"

—he drops the thought, however. The whole

place is quiet and dark, just one small spotlight on

Kesey ...

"Get Faye and the kids." Silence. Then a rustle of

Faye coming through the clump of people, leading the

little girl, Shannon, and the oldest boy, Zane, and

carrying the youngest, Jed. They've all been in the

nursery section up by the Sixth Street door. One of

them is crying, only it is like a scream. That's all you

hear in here, it's eerie ... Faye and the kids and

Mountain Girl and Sunshine and all the Pranksters in a

tight circle with Kesey. They all hold hands and close

their eyes. Silence. Then the scream again

ARCHETYPICAL! MIND POWER!

Then a voice from one of the clumps of people by

the wall, some girl, with a spondee voice like a Ouija

medium:

"The—child—is—cry-ing—Do—some-thing—

for—the— child—first—"

Kesey says nothing. His eyes are shut tight. The

high keening sound rises from the circle with the kid's

scream weaving through it. Fantastic mind power

crackle—Goldhill registers the energy

THEY'RE ALMOST

But the girl on the other side doesn't let up:

"See—a-bout— the—child—A—Child—is—cry-ing—

That's—all—that's— hap-pening—A—child—is—cry-

ing—and—no—one—is— do-ing—any-thing—a-bout—

it—"

ALMOST HAVE IT—PRESQUE vu!

"—Why—is—the—child—cry-ing—Doesn't—an-

y-bo-dy— care?—"

FEEL IT! THE VIBRATION LEVEL!

Kesey looks up. The spot hits him in the face.

The Pranksters release hands. The music starts up. The

Anonymous Artists of runenca play a rock 'n' roll

version of Pomp and Circumstance with drum

flourishes...

THE ACID TEST GRADUATION

By now the crowd is down to about fifty. The

lights come up a little around the stage, but the rest of

the garage is dark. Cassady is up on the stage in front

of a microphone. He has on nothing but a pair of khakis

hung down on his hips and a mortarboard hat on his

head, the kind you graduate in. In one hand he has a

whole stack of diplomas. He's wound up like a

motorcycle, kicking and twitching and ticking and

jerking at the knees, the elbows, the head ... He's off on

a dazzling run of words. The Anonymous Artists of

America keep rolling away behind him. Every time the

little blond girl on the drums gives the drums a good

swat, Cassady stiffens, a spasmodic jerk, as if

somebody just kicked him in the small of the back. He's

rapping away, he's handing out the diplomas for the

Acid Test Graduation. It's coming off after all... now ...

when? what the hell time is it? Five o'clock in the

morning or ... who the hell knows... Kesey is in the

dimness sunk into the great easy chair. Some of the...

graduates are here, Pranksters mainly. They put on

black caps and gowns and come bouncing up to the

stage and get a diploma from Cassady ... scrolly

convoluted things done by Paul Foster and the God

Rotor....

Gut the Hell's Angel lets out a whoop and does a

little dance as his name is called. Many of the

graduates aren't there. The Who Cares Girl...

"The Who Cares Girl," says Cassady. "Now, the

Who Cares Girl couldn't be with us this evening, you

understand, had to check in for choir practice in the oat

bin two hundred fine voices tuned to a split hair

screaming the name of the cowboy known as Ray, you

understand, couldn't be with us either—ahem—lost in a

Band-Aid factory swabbing the jake seats with A-200

..."

... and the drums roll and Cassady stiffens and

jerks and twitches and the Pranksters hasten forward,

Hassler, Babbs, Zonker, The Hermit, Mountain Girl,

Gretch, Paul Foster, Black Maria, Page, Walker, Hagen,

Doris Delay, Roy Seburn, flying up and back in black

robes... graduate— into what on the horizon ... as the

light of dawn breaks through the crack in the garage

door behind the bandstand. Those cold goddamn silver

slivers... and the light rises in the garage, a cockroach

orange dimness, and there is perfect silence, the world

stroked out this way and that as in ... Lucite . .. And

the heat of the day creeps in, and rising out of the funk

and the musk and the Rat grease smears—now come the

cinches, mites, crab lice, fleas, fruit flies, grubs,

weevils, all the microbes and larval ooze—and start

writhing and crawling and festering and frying and

wriggling and sizzling. The straight world breathes in,

coughs, gags, spaghetti trapped in every glottis and

flapping in panic ...

Back among the acid heads of San Francisco

there were two or three days of post mortems after the

collapse of the Prankster Winterland fantasy and the

strange night in the garage. A little breast-beating here

and there ... Oh, did we give in to Fear and Doubts,

which a good head cannot afford, and thereby stop a

brave cat from doing his thing... But just as many said,

Kesey was out to freak us out or cop out on us, and it

was just as well. And then the communal mind, not

willing to be anti-freak-out, settled on the cop-out

theory of it. Kesey had been just copping out all along,

to keep from going to jail. That settled something else,

too, the troublesome... souped-up thing the Pranksters

were always into, this 400-horsepower takeoff game,

this American flag-flying game, this Day-Glo game,

this yea-saying game, this dread neon game, this...

superhero game, all wired-up and wound up and

amplified in the electropastel chrome game gleam. It

wasn't the Buddha, not for a moment. Life is shit, said

the Buddha, a duress of bad karmas, and satori is

passive, just lying back and grooving and grokking on

the Overmind and leave Teddy Roosevelt out of it.

Grace is in a/far country, India by name .. . Oh, the art

of living in India, brothers... And so what if there is no

plumbing and the streets are dirty, they have mastered

the art of living . . .

The Pranksters had cleared all their debris out of

the garage before the Calliope Company had moved

back in, and they had piled it up in the vacant lot next

door and then they headed off to Babbs's old place, the

spread, in Santa Cruz. The Prankster debris lay there in

the lot, a vast weird junkhead of bits and pieces of

costumes and masks and pieces of wood with Day-Glo

paint all over them and weird signs painted in Day-Glo

on swaths of butcher paper and it lay there writhing

like a maniac all day, and at night... it glowed ... A blot

on the escutcheon of Harriet Street. The neighbors

there, industrious Japanese and others, were

disadvantaged souls, but they had their pride and they

formed a delegation to City Hall to insist on keeping

their neighborhood clean. The Mayor's Office saw it as

an example of the kind of neighborhood pride that

regenerates the City, for if they could instill the good

burgher spirit in even so lowly a neighborhood as the

Tenderloin ... So the Mayor announced utmost co-

operation and it became a regular ceremony, with

officials showing up along with the Sanitmen, and the

TV crews. And the City pitched in, joining forces with

the good neighbors of Harriet Street, in the ceremonial

destruction of the weird junk heap—Christ only knew

what insane degenerate wino generations had combined

to nearly take over this poor forgotten street like jungle

rot. The Day-Glo paint sputtered and sizzled to the end

. ..

The Calliope Company held an Acid Test in the

garage, and Cassady, wheeling around San Francisco in

his latest car, heard about it somehow and showed up

that night. He came in the doorway on the Harriet

Street side, now marked 69 Harriet Street, after the

humor of the times, and he was jerking and kicking at

top speed to the unseen Joe Cuba ... He was sailing on

speed, as the thirty or forty heads there could tell by

the way his eyes jumped around, going tic tac tok tok

tok tak toc tac tok tik tik tik tik tik tac tok tac tok tik

tik tik tik tik toc tac toc tac toc tac—either that or he

was amazed at this Acid Test through and through.

There were no lights except the slowest and most fluid

light projections, no noise except the most mellifluous

hi-fi playing. .. what the fock... sitar? sitar? sitar? ...

The garage was scrubbed and chaste and pure with wall

hangings of the most meticulous sort, India-print

coverlets, delicate and intricate of pure vegetable

macrobiotic dyes. A few crystals in the air picked up

rays of light one by one like ... jewels... And all the

good heads were stroked out most silently, propped up

sitting against the walls or stretched out, each grooving

on his own private inward thing, receptacles of the

Buddha, the All-one invited guest, and the Buddha

could have walked in at any moment and felt right at

home, 485 B.C. or right now, the ...

.. . dead-ass little gook ... Cassady can't believe

it... He is rapping a mile a minute, but nobody picks

him up on it. They just stare at him through great

amethyst eyes, full of tolerance and pity as his own

eyes sprocket and his shoulders bob and weave...

"Hey ! Don't you want to do anything-—get it

started, you understand—slide it around—"

They just stare at him, peaceful luminescent

violet jewel children, smiling like a bunch of freaking

nuns, full of peace and tolerance and pity ... as he turns

around shaking his head and his shoulders and kicking

and flailing disappearing out onto Harriet Street again.

OH CHRIST ANOTHER LITTLE BUD IN

THE HEAVES AND GASSES of the discovery

pangs. Her eyes are opened up like morning-glories,

her lips are wet and glistening, she smiles like an en-

tranced nun, her teeth are beginning to sizzle ... hold

on to the thoracic box. She has her face right up in

yours, everybody's, and she is saying, ecstatic with the

discovery—

"I'm—I'm—I'm—I'm—getting the picture!

We're—all here—right? We're all here! We're—he-e-e-

e-e-e-ere!" and her hand pans around to take in the

Fantasia in-the-beginning cosmos... which is, in fact,

only a place known as The Barn, in Scotts Valley, ten

miles from Santa Cruz. The Barn is Scotts Valley's first

psychedelic nightspot, a great barn, truly, once

converted into a theater and now into a psychedelic

nightspot run by Leon Taboory, Scotts Valley's first,

and last, to hear the grousing from the church down the

way and the local constables and townfolk and the local

paper, but ne'mind all that. To the little girl it's her

first glimpse of Heaven itself, zonked as she is on LSD,

her first capsule—

"I'm—getting the picture! We're all he-e-e-e-e-

ere and we can do anything we want!"

—revealing all this to Doris Delay and Zonker,

Doris, like a good old helpful hand, says, "That's right.

We're all here and everything's all right and you're

fine."

The little bud sinks into a folding chair beside

Doris's and gives her a look. "I should be suspicious of

you . .."

"The paranoia stage," Doris says to Zonker. I

love to tell the story—

"... because I'm stoned."

"I know," says Doris. To tell the old, old story—

love and glory now playing in your neighborhood for

the first run, in Scotts Valley ...

About eighty of the local heads and hipfolk and

jazz buffs, etc., in here listening to a jazz trio called

The New Dimensions, Dave Molinari, Andrew

Shushkoff, and a stocky little guy playing the bass. The

little guy has on a sporty-type hat, wears it while he

plays, his signature, you understand, and a pair of

Cuban wrap-around sunglasses, although it is dark and

appropriately nightclubby, except for some light

projections, which makes it... psychedelic ... ah

ummmmmm ... and he is kneading and slapping and

flummoxing the bass like the creamy days of Siam

Stewart. The New Dimensions—now that's very funny,

you know. Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters have to

smile over that. Kesey and the Pranksters are off to one

side of the Barn waiting for their turn to go on, setting

up their instruments, the electric guitars and basses,

Gretch's Hammond organ, Walker's drums, and the

goddamnedest gleaming heap of wires, dials, am-

plifiers, speakers, headsets, mikes—testing, testing—

The New Dimensions. .. Yeah. The trio is like a

throwback to the late 1940s and the early 1950s when

jazz was, like, the final form, funky and so fine.

Molinari—or is it Shushkoff?—goes into a hell of a

riff-—Oh Christ, remember?—on the piano, with his

head dug down deep into the profound soul funky

depths of this thing. It's so . . . well, nostalgic . . .

Scotts Valley troops into post-World War II hip

America . . .

The Pranksters have their own speakers set up all

over the barn and Babbs is trying to test the

microphones, watching for the needle to jump over the

dials... Babbs has on his Day-Glo spirit mask and it

glows in the dark, also a Shazam shirt and pants of

many stripes and colors and he blows into the micro-

phones, then hums a bit and watches the needles, then

keens a bit, then croons a bit, and that's nice, so he

tries a little ululation, and that's nicer, and pretty soon

he is keening and gooning along with the New

Dimensions and his voice sails through their sound like

a stoned ghost on the airwaves. Kesey sits on a folding

chair in the Control Center testing the headsets.

Cassady has the Rat-tar, now painted an infinite

number of colors and totally without strings. Doris

Delay plays kindly aunt with the zonked-out little girl

who's getting the picture . . .

The New Dimensions finish their set and they're

mad as hell, of course. What. . . cube was doing that

screaming bit, f'r chrissake . . . The three of them come

stomping up to the likely suspects, the Pranksters, led

by the stocky guy with the hat and sunglasses. He

walks up to Babbs and says,

"Like, I mean, who's doing all that—"

"Doing what?" says Babbs.

"Like, later, man, don't give me the doing-what

bit. You know doing-what, man. I mean like—"

"Was somebody doing something?"

"Like, I mean, that's... later! You know! I mean,

it... grates!"

"Oh, you mean that funny noise! I'd say

feedback."

"Sure! Feedback!"

"Yeah! Yeah! Right! Right! Right!" Just a parlor

sport, this is . . . fella could do it with his left hand.

The little guy is furious. He tries to find the words to

express his utter loathing.

"Like, man, this fuck-up bit on somebody else's

set—it's so — SQUARE!"

There! he said it! the worst insult he knows!

Next, the fire next time—Kesey steps in as the

peacemaker: "He wasn't working against you—he was

trying to play with you."

The little guy stares at Kesey but doesn't say

anything. He just screams it again into the void: "Like,

it's so — SQUARE!"

"Yeah! Yeah! Right! Right! Right!" says Babbs.

"And there's the guy who did it!" and he points at Cool

Breeze, who is sitting at a little table with a candle on

it, hunched over a piece of paper, doing some kind of

intense meth-like drawing. "There he goes!" says

Cassady, picking up on the thing. "Takes a phantom

heart to catch a Cool Breeze, you understand—" and so

forth and so on, a shuck, in a word, never trust a

Prankster ... And the New Dimensions walk off,

disgusted ...

They refuse to play any more and start packing

up their instruments, which leaves Taboory, The Barn's

manager, in a bind. He can't figure out who the hell to

alienate. Kesey is a giant... on the other hand, the New

Dimensions can play ... But too late for all that. The

New Dimensions stomp out, thumbing their noses at the

whole scene. The Pranksters wind up for their set. They

clamp on their headsets. The headsets are wired up to a

variable-lag system. So the Pranksters don't hear what

they are playing right now but what they were playing a

second ago. They harmonize off themselves, break up

all learned progressions, and only they can hear the

full... orchestration, a symphony in their cortices, the

music of the Prankster ... ah ummmm ... Only the kids

in The Barn, can't figure out what's going on... It's like,

weird... The Pranksters put on their headsets and pick

up their instruments, Kesey on an electric guitar, Page

on an electric guitar, also Hassler, Babbs on an electric

bass, Gretch on the electric organ, George Walker on

the drums. They look all ready to go, but nothing

happens. They're waiting ... for the... energy ... to build

up, to come crackling over the headsets ... the

spontaneous burst... but nothing works. Somebody

starts and nobody else can pick it up and soon it's

obvious that none of these crazy-looking people is

going to play the instruments, except for the drummer ..

. and they're not playing songs, they make it up as they

go along . . . the leader, the muscular guy, Kesey,

singing:

"It's a .. . road map! .. . that ought to have been

issued, about how to reach the edge of time ... on a

horse who flies in tungsten red . .."

And the guy in the mask on the bass singing: ". .

. floods of screams on the beach in bomby raids of

bloody rainbows ... It's dark and I lose my vision ..."

Well... the kids start leaving ... what the hell...

Babbs belches over a microphone. That gets a

laugh. But is it art? Kesey barks like a dog. George

Walker says over his microphone: "Where'd that dog

go? I heard a... dog!... under my very feet!"

They slough to a halt. Hassler starts chanting

into his microphone, which is wired in only to the

headsets... Only Pranksters can hear:

"Begin it like we began ... at the beginning... Do

it like we did... at the beginning ... In the beginning...

in the beginning ..." Chanting over the inner space

network.

But the slump and the slough are total.. /The kids

all going in droves now ... Just the Pranksters left... An

atmosphere of total tedium ... It's ... all... too ... much

... for mortal—

Even Pranksters drifting off... leaving the main

floor, going downstairs... Hagen shakes his head. "It's

like a wake .. ." It's that burnt-out husk of the dark

hours of the morning ... Black Maria finds a mattress in

a utility room and lies down .. .Cassady, not high at

all—low, in fact—offers to drive a girl home ... Now

it's just Kesey on the electric guitar and Babbs on the

electric bass, them and their head-sets picking up the

sound of their instruments and their song in variable

lag . . . Taboory himself, the manager, can't take it any

more ... "Just shut the door tight when you leave," he

tells Kesey, and he takes off... All the lights are out

now, just a little glow from the dials of Prankster

Control Center ... Kesey and Babbs have their eyes

closed, strumming slowly ... alone in the center of the

vast gloom of the barn ... The whole world contracts,

draws closer and deeper and crawls inside the headsets,

ricocheting in variable lag in the small hours, and

Kesey sings over his guitar, which twangs and wobbles:

"... and every now and then you can hear her

blowing smoke rings around a cloud and trying to lace

up her shoe .. ."

And Babbs: "... and the message goes out and it

breaks out just a little bit but—stops—"

And Kesey: "It's kind of hard, playing cello on a

hypodermic needle and using a petrified bat as a bow

..."

And Babbs: "Yes, it's hard working with these

materials, without the grins falling off your knees . .."

And Kesey: ".. . and the soldiers think of the

lowly fleas..."

And— "... the latrines wade back up around my

knees..."

"So let's set here in this dilapidated people hutch

and think about the things we've done ..."

"... Yes... down in Mississippi, that bitch girl we

diddled in the cotton fields . . ."

"Still. .. you want to catch the first subway to

Heaven ..."

"If I can get myself a new set of scales, I'll get

my ass off this third rail.. . and so saying, he stood up

and retched and looked down on the rail on sparks and

long and hairy slavers of various flavors of dark

intestinal brown ...".

"... and his teeth fell out by the dozen and Hitler

and his infested cousins began to grow in the cellar like

a new hybrid corn and the crows wouldn't touch him

..."

"... and up the rail, old True Blue wiped his nose

on his uncle's clothes ..."

"I took some pseulobin and one long diddle ..."

"WE BLEW IT!"

"... Ten thousand times or more ..."

"WE BLEW IT!"

". .. so much we can't keep score ..."

"WE BLEW IT!"

"... just when you're beginning to think, 'I'm

going to score'..."

"WE BLEW IT!"

". . . but there's more in store .. ."

"WE BLEW IT!"

"... if we can get rid of these trading stamps that

get in the way of the merchandise ..."

"WE BLEW IT!"

"... Ten million times or more! ..."

"WE BLEW IT!"

"... it was perfect, so what do you do? ..."

"WE BLEW IT!"

". . . perfect! . . ."

"WE BLEW IT!"

Epilogue

THREE WEEKS LATER, NOVEMBER 30,

KESEY WENT ON TRIAL IN San Francisco for

possession of marijuana—the bust on the rooftop. It

ended with a hung jury, split 8 to 4 against him. Ke-

sey's retrial, in April, ended with another hung jury, 11

to 1 against him this time. Rather than try him again,

however, the state let him plead nolo contendere to a

lesser charge, "knowingly being in a place where

marijuana was kept." He got 90 days. In May he lost in

his appeal of the original San Mateo County conviction

for possession of marijuana—the La Honda bust. The

sentence was six months on a county work farm, a

$1,500 fine and three years' probation. He was allowed

to serve the other sentence, the 90 days, concurrently.

Before he started serving time, Kesey took the

bus and headed for his home town, Springfield, Oregon,

with just Faye and the kids and Ram Rod on board. The

Pranksters pretty much scattered. George Walker and

Cassady were off in Mexico. Mountain Girl, with her

baby, Sunshine, had already joined the Grateful Dead's

group. Black Maria and Paul Foster went to the Hog

Farm, Hugh Romney's commune near Los Angeles.

Babbs and Gretch went to San Francisco. So did the

Hermit...

In June, Kesey began his stretch on the work

farm, which was just a few miles from his old place in

La Honda. He worked in the tailor shop. He was let out

last November, after serving five months. He went back

to Oregon, and he and Faye set up house in a shed on

his brother Chuck's farm, up a gravel road south of

Springfield. The shed was called the Space Heater

House, after a gas heater inside that gave off a jet

flame when it lit up.

In February, Neal Cassady's body was found

beside a railroad tract outside the town of San Miguel

de Allende, in Mexico. Some local Americans said he

had been going at top speed for two weeks and had

headed off down the railroad track one night and his

heart just gave out. Others said he had been despon-

dent, and felt that he was growing old, and had been on

a long downer and had made the mistake of drinking

alcohol on top of barbiturates. His body was cremated.

In the spring, various Pranksters. . . Babbs and

Gretch, George Walker, Mike Hagen, Hassler, Black

Maria ... began finding their way to Oregon from time

to time. Kesey was writing again, working on a novel.

The bus was there, parked beside the Space Heater

House.

Author's Note

A NOTE ON THE WRITING OF THIS BOOK ... I

HAVE TRIED NOT ONLY TO tell what the Pranksters

did but to re-create the mental atmosphere or

subjective reality of it. I don't think their adventure

can be understood without that. All the events, details

and dialogue I have recorded are either what I saw and

heard myself or were told to me by people who were

there themselves or were recorded on tapes or film or

in writing. I was fortunate to get the help of many

unusually talented and articulate people; most notably,

Ken Kesey himself. The Pranksters recorded much of

their own history in the Prankster Archives in the form

of tapes, diaries, letters, photographs and the 40-hour

movie of the bus trip. Kesey was also generous enough

to allow me to draw from his letters to Larry McMurtry

in the chapters on his flight to Mexico. Much of the

dialogue and italicized material in Chapters XXI and

XXIII is quoted from these letters.

For all the Pranksters, as I have tried to show,

the events described in this book were both a group

adventure and a personal exploration. Many achieved

great insight on both levels. I can think back especially

to my talks with Mountain Girl, Hassler, Black Maria,

Stewart Brand, Ken Babbs, Page Browning, Mike

Hagen, Doris Delay, Hugh Romney, Zonker, George

Walker, and Neal Cassady. Sandy Lehmann-Haupt told

me about his Prankster days in especially full and

penetrating detail.

There were several excellent writers, in addition

to Kesey, who were involved in the Prankster saga.

Playwright Norman Hartweg recounted his experiences

for me in a series of tapes. Ed McClanahan provided

me with information about several phases of the

Prankster adventure, and Robert Stone told me a great

deal about Kesey's fugitive days in Mexico.

Hunter Thompson made available to me several

tapes he had made while working on his book. Hell's

Angels, and parts of the book it self dealing with the

Pranksters and the Angels were also helpful.

I was also fortunate to find people like Clair

Brush, who wrote for me a 3,000-word description of

her experience at the Watts Acid Test, much of which I

quote in describing the Test. Of the many other people

I talked to or corresponded with, I particularly want to

mention Vic Lovell, Paul Sawyer, Paul Krassner, Pat

Hallinan, Brian Rohan, Paul Robertson, Jerry Garcia,

Gary Goldhill, Michael Bowen, Anne Severson, Paul

Hawken, Bill Tara, Michael Laton, Jack the Fluke, Bill

Graham, John Bartholomew Tucker, Roger Grimsby,

Marshall Efron, Robin White, Larry McMurtry, Larry

Schiller, Donovan Bess, Carl Lehmann-Haupt, and Mr.

and Mrs. Fred Kesey.

About the Author

TOM WOLFE is the author of a dozen books,

among them such contemporary classics as The Electric

Kool-Aid Acid Test, The Right Stuff, The Bonfire of the

Vanities, and A Man in Full. A native of Richmond,

Virginia, he earned his B.A. at Washington and Lee

University and a Ph.D. in American studies at Yale. He

lives in New York City.