The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test Part 6

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-cla.s.s backgrounds, but not upper bourgeois, more pet.i.t 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 nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two or so and not starting out helpless at the bottom of the ladder, at all, because the h.e.l.l 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 n.o.body 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, Mazatlan, 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, b.u.ms, spades-dope.

AT KESEY'S THE DAYS BEGAN - WHEN? THERE WERE NO clocks around and n.o.body 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 G.o.d 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 mult.i.tudes, 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 establis.h.i.+ng 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 bulls.h.i.+t. 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 s.p.a.ce 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, s.e.x, and money. No one who once shares water and partakes of life in the Nest ever cares about such ba.n.a.l compet.i.tions 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 n.o.body here but us G.o.ds'-so how could anyone be offended? Baccha.n.a.lia, 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 b.u.t.terflies 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 d.a.m.ned 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 redwoods!-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 Ca.s.sady'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 b.u.t.terflies 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 ma.s.s 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 ma.s.sive 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 s.p.a.ce equals time, hmmmmmm ... All the while, however, many men get an occasional glimpse of another fingernail from another finger flas.h.i.+ng 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 a.n.a.lyze 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 compet.i.tion 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 att.i.tude 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 naive 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 pa.s.sages. 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 partic.i.p.ant 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 uncla.s.sifiable 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 s.p.a.ce about like scenes in a theater. And as we League brothers traveled throughout the world without motor-cars or s.h.i.+ps, as we conquered the war-shattered world by our faith and transformed it into Paradise, we creatively brought the past, the future and the fict.i.tious 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 s.h.i.+t. On the other hand, the smell of new-mown gra.s.s 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, Ca.s.sady 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 n.o.body 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- Ca.s.sady 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 Ca.s.sady, 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- Ca.s.sady's disciple, Bradley, says: "G.o.d is red"-and even he stops right there. The sonofab.i.t.c.h is on for once-it is all compacted into those three words, even shorter than Ca.s.sady's line, like Bradley didn't even have to think it out, it just came out, a play on the phrase G.o.d is dead, only saying, for those of us on to the a.n.a.logical thing, G.o.d is not dead, G.o.d is red, G.o.d 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 gra.s.s, 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 b.a.s.t.a.r.d 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 n.o.body says it out loud, because n.o.body 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 mora.s.s 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 f.u.c.king world's-in this very moment-Ca.s.sady 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, G.o.dd.a.m.n 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 siecle Poughkeepsie, N.Y., oh Va.s.sar 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 gra.s.s Poughkeepsie, a big girl who's got to break out and she gets good and loud and bra.s.sy 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 f.u.c.k 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 gra.s.s, 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-a.s.sed mulatto wenches, doing all the forbidden things, led on, encouraged, onward, upward, by the burning s.h.i.+ny 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 G.o.d came over us?-what came over this town?-well--s.h.i.+t!-it wasn't us, it was him, he infected and inflamed our brains, that d.a.m.ned snake, Zea-lot-and they charge down the street alternately beating their b.r.e.a.s.t.s 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 a.s.s 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 deada.s.s snug harbor. There's a h.e.l.l 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- G.o.d-d.a.m.n Wild West ob-scene Crazies and dope fiends And putrescent beatniks Paint the treetrunks phosph.o.r.escent; 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 b.i.t.c.h e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.n.g. 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 h.e.l.l accounted for the crazy life at Kesey's place, they apparently a.s.sumed 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 eyeb.a.l.l.s. 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 d.a.m.nedest, 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 G.o.d, 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 opera 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, Ca.s.sady, 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. n.o.body 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 ent.i.tled-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 Kesey'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, California 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. h.e.l.l, 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 h.e.l.l'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 d.a.m.nedest 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-a.s.sembled 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 h.e.l.l 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-fas.h.i.+oned 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-s.h.i.+rt. He walks very erect and his huge muscled arms swing loose. The redwoods soar all around.

Norman says, "h.e.l.lo-"

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, PARTIc.i.p.aNT-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 subst.i.tute for living; yes. They don't even use the usual intellectual words here-mostly it is just thing.

Ca.s.sady's thing is-christalmighty, Ca.s.sady-and it is with Ca.s.sady 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 Ca.s.sady's Gestalt Driving-but that is your term ... Whenever there is any driving to be done, Ca.s.sady does it. That is Ca.s.sady'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 Ca.s.sady is driving. They start hauling down the mountain, faster and faster, the trees snapping by like in some kind of amus.e.m.e.nt park ride, only Ca.s.sady 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 Ca.s.sady 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 Ca.s.sady is doing all the talking, an incredible oral fibrillation of words, nutty nostalgia-"a '46 Plymouth, you understand, gear s.h.i.+ft 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 Ca.s.sady 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-Ca.s.sady 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 Ca.s.sady, 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-"Ca.s.sady doesn't have to think any more"-then he walks away. It is as if for some reason he is furnis.h.i.+ng 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 p.r.o.nouncement or a judgment. Half the time he quotes the wisdom of some local sage-Page says, Ca.s.sady 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 b.a.l.l.s 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 G.o.dd.a.m.n book at everybody, waiting for somebody to tell him to go f.u.c.k 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 f.u.c.king blow your mind!" and he sticks the book in Kesey's face.

Kesey just looks down at the picture of the Isfahan or the s.h.i.+raz 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 weaknesses. 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-"