The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test Part 4

"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 flus.h.i.+ng, 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 G.o.dd.a.m.n 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 ap.r.o.n 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 h.e.l.l 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 d.a.m.n." And n.o.body 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s, 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, h.e.l.l, big deal, but she is now waxing extremely freaking ESP. She keeps coming up to somebody who isn't saying a G.o.dd.a.m.n 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"-finis.h.i.+ng off in a sailing tremulo laugh as if she has just read your brain and !t is the weirdest of the weird s.h.i.+t 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 byLARGE 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, n.o.body denied her, and she could wail, n.o.body tried to cool that inflamed brain that was now seeping out Stark Naked into the bouncing G.o.dd.a.m.n-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 pa.s.sed 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 G.o.dd.a.m.n 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 s.h.i.+fting, 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 Ca.s.sady 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 s.h.i.+vering, 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 Ca.s.sady 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 h.e.l.l 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 b.a.l.l.s-out plunge into the unknown, and it was a.s.sumed 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 G.o.d 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 compet.i.tion 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-gla.s.s 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-gla.s.s 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 h.e.l.l 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 rus.h.i.+ng 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, n.o.body slept, and it was like all you could do to cut through the lava with speed and gra.s.s 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 s.h.i.+rts 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. Ha.s.sler 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 verite 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 s.h.i.+rts 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 s.h.i.+rley Ellis, all that old stuff pounding away. Lake Pontchartrain is like a great big beautiful s.p.a.cious-s.p.a.ce!-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 h.e.l.l of a build, puts on a pair of red, yellow, and black trunks, and Kesey, who has a h.e.l.l of a build, puts on a pair of blue and white trunks, and Zonker, who has a h.e.l.l 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 gra.s.s 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 flas.h.i.+ng out at him in the sun-cheeeakkk-in time with his heartbeat which is getting faster all the time, these G.o.dd.a.m.n 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 s.h.i.+ttin', man," says another one of them.

"Lotta f.u.c.kin' 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 b.a.l.l.s 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 sh.o.r.e.

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 ma.s.s 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 b.u.mmer. Even Kesey, who isn't afraid of anything, looks worried. "We better get out of here," Kesey says. But squeezed out?-in b.u.mmer 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 d.a.m.ned 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, Ca.s.sady!... but there are two Ca.s.sadys. One minute Ca.s.sady looks 58 and crazy-speed!-and the next, 28 and peaceful-acid-and Sandy can tell the peaceful Ca.s.sady in an instant, because his nose becomes... long and smooth and almost patrician, whereas the wild Ca.s.sady 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 sungla.s.ses 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 pa.s.sing 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 b.a.l.l.s 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 Ca.s.sady in the driver's seat and shakes his head and says: "No wonder you're so n.i.g.g.e.r-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-intersubjectivity!-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 n.o.body, 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 gla.s.s, and then tin, a tin piano. The earphones seem to get bigger and bigger, huge padded sh.e.l.ls 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 s.h.i.+rts. Babbs has the power and is directing the movie and is trying to shoot something-Acid Piper. Sandy looks about. n.o.body he can tell it to, that he has taken acid by himself and it is turning into a b.u.mmer, he can't bring this out front... He runs into the house, the walls keep jumping up so G.o.dd.a.m.n 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 rus.h.i.+ng up then sinking way back like a t.i.tian 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 somebody-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 s.h.i.+rt, 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 s.h.i.+rt starts flas.h.i.+ng 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 eyeb.a.l.l.s 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 n.o.body 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 gra.s.s 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 gra.s.s spills all over this silty brown dirt. Everybody is upset and Hagen gets down to try to separate the gra.s.s 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 gra.s.s, 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 gra.s.s, on down into the ground, and Hagen says, "Hey! What the h.e.l.l'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 pa.s.s 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 Kesey's arm in the most dedicated, cool way, and Kesey says: "Hey! What the h.e.l.l'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 s.h.i.+ft and his arms move and Gretch's legs s.h.i.+ft, 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 ma.s.sed 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 Mult.i.tudes

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 rus.h.i.+ng 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 rus.h.i.+ng 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 b.a.l.l.s they were always throwing around when they got out of the bus. The idea of the red rubber b.a.l.l.s 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 Ca.s.sady. They highballed on up the Eastern seaboard to New York, and highballing was about it. Ca.s.sady had never been in better form. By this time everybody who had any reservations about Ca.s.sady had forgotten it. Ca.s.sady had been a rock on this trip, the totally dependable person. When everybody else was stroked out with fatigue or the various pressures, Ca.s.sady 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, Ca.s.sady 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, Ca.s.sady 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 Ca.s.sady, however. It was as if, if he were panicked, Ca.s.sady 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 Ca.s.sady, but it was more than faith. It was as if Ca.s.sady, 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 s.h.i.+rts 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 p.i.s.sed 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 s.h.i.+t-kicking their way down the sidewalks. A s.h.i.+t 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 horses.h.i.+t out of the way saying oh that this should happen to me. The s.h.i.+t kickers gave them many resentful looks, which was the Pranksters' gift to the s.h.i.+t kickers. They could look up at the bus and say those are the bastids who are causing it, all the s.h.i.+t. 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. Ca.s.sady 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 Ca.s.sady 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 Ca.s.sady. 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 a.s.sault upon New York: stop the Huns...

But the h.e.l.l with it. Kesey was already talking about how writing was an old-fas.h.i.+oned 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 n.o.body really comprehended 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 Ca.s.sady wheeled the bus around the high curves like Super Hud and the U.S. nation streamed across the winds.h.i.+eld like one of those G.o.dd.a.m.ned 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 smoking gra.s.s as if it were all just coming out of Cosmo the Prankster G.o.d's own local-option gumball machines- Cosmo!

Furthur.

chapter.

IX.

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 Discovery, 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 Hitchc.o.c.ks. So the bus headed for Millbrook.

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 s.h.i.+ngles, 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 !