The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test Part 7

-which is ridiculous, Pancho's poems are so bad. In fact, it is so ridiculous Bradley breaks into a smile over it. Nevertheless, the point has been made. Which is that Norman is lazy, "personal." Reading is something that just gives pleasure to the reader. It is not for the group. Also smoking-a thing that begets nothing but itself. So he is telling Norman that he is lazy and not contributing. Which is true. He is right. But he wants to start a fight over it or something. This amuses Norman and he laughs at Bradley-Bradley-and yet even though it is only Bradley, it seems like an indication of how the rest feel. Otherwise Bradley probably never would have said anything. Norman becomes quieter and quieter, like a clam. And it seemed as if they laughed at him- "Not at you-with you," Kesey kept telling him, trying to josh him out of all his hangups and inferiorities.

But the only thing that really helped was having Paul Foster turn up.

Foster was a tall, curly-headed guy in his late twenties with a terrible stutter. He was a mathematician and had been working in Palo Alto as a computer programmer, making a lot of money, apparently. Then he started hanging out with some musicians and they turned him on to a few ... mind-expanders, and now Foster's life seemed to alternate between stretches of good straight computer programming, during which he wore a necktie and an iridescent teal-green suit of Zirconpolyesterethylene and was a formidable fellow in the straight world, and stretches of life with ... Speed, the Great G.o.d Rotor, during which he wore his Importancy Coat. This was a jacket he had turned into a collage. It had layers and layers of ribbons and slogan b.u.t.tons and reflectors and Cracker Jack favors all over it, piled up and flapping in the breeze until it looked like a lunatic billowsleeve coat from out of the court of Louis XV. He moved into the tree. Sandy had built a house in the tree, a platform with a tent on it. Paul built one under it; O.K., a duplex tree house. Paul Foster came in with just an enormous amount of stuff, all this stuff. He brought it all in and he set up housekeeping in the tree. He put a window up in the tree, and a gate, and bookshelves. He had strange books. An encyclopedia, only it was an 1893 encyclopedia, and books on the strangest languages, Tagalog, Urdu, and apparently he knew something about all these languages ... and more and more stuff. He had a huge sack of googaws that he would carry around, of the weirdest stuff, bits of glittering gla.s.s and tin and transistor-radio sh.e.l.ls, just the sh.e.l.ls, and nails and screws and tops and tubes, and inside his sack of weird junk was a little sack that was a miniature of the big sack and contained tiny weird junk ... and you got the idea that somehow, somewhere in there was a very tiny little sack that contained very tiny weird junk, and that it went on that way into infinity ... He also had a lot of pens, some of them felt-nib pens with colors, and he sat up in the tree house while the old restless Roto-rooter, the good G.o.d Speed, scoured puns, puns, puns, puns, puns from out of the walls of his skull and he fas.h.i.+oned signs like one he put at the entrance of the place, where the driveway turned in to the bridge from Route 84, a sign reading: "No Left Turn Unstoned." Then people would come and he'd entertain them up in his tree house, and at night you would see it lit up like some mad thing, gleaming with Dali-Day-Glo swoops, and he would be up there drawing, drawing, drawing, drawing, or working on a huge mad sc.r.a.pbook he had ...

Norman and Paul Foster had a lot in common. They were both fairly good artists, they both had a certain fund of erudition erudition erudition. Foster, with his terrible stutter, valued privacy in the midst of it all, just as Norman did. Of course, Foster was proving himself a Prankster far faster than Norman was. It was a strange thing about that. There were no rules. There was no official period of probation, and no vote on is he or isn't he one of us, no blackballing, no tap on the shoulders. And yet there was a period of proving yourself, and everyone knew it was going on and no one ever said a word about it. In any case, Norman could talk to Foster, and that made all the difference. He didn't feel so desperately lonely any more. Also he suddenly saw that it wasn't just him-the Pranksters probed everybody, to make them bring their hangups out front to the point where they could act totally out front, live in the moment, spontaneously, and if needling was what it took to bring you that far- Foster is coming on, in the house, with these wild logical conundrums he had, only stuttering something awful: -Sup-puh-puh-puh-pose that that everything you per-per-per-perceive is only a . . ."-some long involved thing, and Mountain Girl breaks in: -B-b-b-b-b-but, P-P-P-P-P-P-Paul, I don't git the p-p-p-p-p-point about all this per-per-per-per-per-per-ception. I try to git it, b-b-b-b-b-b-b-but all I git is the w-w-w-w-w-w-words. How 'bout goin' over it ag-gih-gih-gih-gih-gih-gih-gih-gih-gih-gih-gih-gih-gih -gih-gihn!"

Foster can't believe this performance. He stands there frozen with his eyes bugging out, bugging out, bugging out, bugging out bigger and bigger until he explodes: "Is that supposed to be funny! You've got a worse hangup than stuttering, Mountain Girl ! You've got a fat mouth and you don't know what to use it for! Ugly-that's your trip, the ugly trip! Well, all I know is-"

"Yuh see!" Mountain Girl says. She is grinning, triumphant practically laughing and clapping her hands, she is so pleased with the results. "When you git mad, you don't stutter!"

Foster freezes again. He stares at her. Then he wheels around and walks out the door without saying another word.

The funny part is, she's right .

WHAT WAS IT? ... IT WAS LIKE . . . WELL, YES! GROUP THERAPY, like a marathon encounter in group therapy, in which everybody is together for days, probing everybody's weaknesses, bringing everything out front. Only this was group therapy not for the middle-aged and f.u.c.ked-up but for the Young! and Immune!-as if they were not patching up wrecks but tooling up the living for some incredible breakthrough, beyond catastrophe. Since time was, the serious concerns of man have always been fights against catastrophe, against sickness, war, poverty, enslavement, always the hors.e.m.e.n of the Apocalypse riding. But what to do in that scary void beyond catastrophe, where all, supposedly, will be possible-and Norman happens upon another of those strange, prophetic books on Kesey's shelf, Arthur Clarke's Childhood's End, in which . .. the Total Breakthrough generation is born on Earth and as mere infants they show powers of mind far beyond their parents' and they go off into a colony by themselves, not as individuals, however, but as one great colonial being, in the biological sense of the colonial animal, until, at last, the Earth, its mission complete, convulses, starts coming apart, and they, the children: "Something's starting to happen. The stars are becoming dimmer. It's as if a great cloud is coming up, very swiftly, all over over all the sky. But it isn't really a cloud. It seems to have some sort of structure-I can glimpse a hazy network of lines and bands that keep changing their position. It's almost as if the stars are tangled in a ghostly spider's web. The whole network is beginning to glow, to pulse with light, exactly as if it were alive . . . There's a great burning column, like a tree of fire, reaching above the western horizon. It's a long way off right around the world. I know where it springs from: they're on their way at last, to become part of the Overmind. Their probation is ended: they're leaving the last remnants of matter behind ... The whole landscape is lit up-it's brighter than day-reds and golds and greens are chasing each other across the sky-oh, it's beyond words, it doesn't seem fair that I'm the only one to see it-I never thought such colors-"

In short, zonked out of their ever-loving gourds, man, and heading out toward... Edge City, absolutely, and we're truly synched tonight.

-but no water spouts of Academie Francaise cherubim and water babies here, and no reverent toga-linen-flapping Gautama Buddha Orientals breathing out the spent Roquefort breath of spiritual detachment. Instead, somehow they're going to try it right down the main highway, eight lanes wide, heron-neck arc lamps rising up as far as the eye can see, and they will broadcast on all frequencies, waving American flags, turning up the Day-Glo and the neon of 1960s electro-pastel America, wired up and amplified, 327,000 horsepower, a fantasy bus in a science-fiction movie, welcoming all on board, no matter how unbelievably Truck Stop Low Rent or raunchy-

chapter.

XIII.

The h.e.l.l's Angels

I DOUBT IF ANY OF THE PRANKSTERS TRULY UNDERSTOOD Mountain Girl, except for Kesey. Most of the time she was so 100 percent out front, coming on loud and clear and candid as a Mack truck, it never occurred to anybody that a whole side of her was hidden. Except for Kesey, as I say. Sometimes Kesey and Mountain Girl would disappear into the backhouse and lie on mattresses and just talk, Kesey rapping on about how he felt about all sorts of things, life, fate, Now-while Mountain Girl-one thought of hers making sorties through the soft word flow coming from Kesey on the mattress there-yes, well, and she told Kesey as frankly as she could about the last four or five years of her life. Kesey didn't understand completely. Namely, she was sometimes lonely as h.e.l.l.

Lonely? Why, for chrissake, Mountain Girl came swinging into every situation like on a vine, like Sheena, Queen of the Jungle. She was high in the Prankster hierarchy already. n.o.body was closer to Kesey than Mountain Girl, not even Faye, it often seemed. But there it was: Kesey .. . Kesey was essential to Mountain Girl's whole life with the Pranksters. Without him, and Ha.s.sler, a weird loneliness could take over ... Ha.s.sler was the only other person she could talk to. Without Ha.s.sler- But it can be tense underneath in a commune, beautiful on one level, but you have to be willing to force it a little to keep it that way.

It is really funny. This afternoon the sprinklers are ratcheting away all sprinkly and starchy on the lawns of Poughkeepsie. In August the sun causes such brown spots where the trees don't shade it, you understand. Well, freak that. The solution, Doctor, happens to be named Kesey. This sound now, Doctor, rising above the ratcheting, would probably throw your poor little thready heart into fibrillation. It's like a locomotive coming through the redwood trees around the bends down Route 84 from Skylonda. The h.e.l.l's Angels in running formation, to be exact, scores of the monsters, on Harley-Davidson 74s. Miss Carolyn Adams of Poughkeepsie, N.Y., is about to look this primordial menace in the face and bark bulls.h.i.+t commands at the h.e.l.l's Angels, which they obey, since the sunspots exploding in their eyes bedazzle the monsters. The energy flows from Kesey, Doctor, and there is not one G.o.dd.a.m.n thing to git your little heart scared of.

KESEY MET THE h.e.l.l'S ANGELS ONE AFTERNOON IN SAN Francisco through Hunter Thompson, who was writing a book about them. It turned out to be a remarkable book, as a matter of fact, called h.e.l.l's Angels, a Strange and Terrible Saga. Anyway, Kesey and Thompson were having a few beers and Thompson said he had to go over to a garage called the Box Shop to see a few of the Angels, and Kesey went along. A h.e.l.l's Angel named Frenchy and four or five others were over there working on their motorcycles and they took to Kesey right away. Kesey was a stud who was just as tough as they were. He had just been busted for marijuana, which certified him as Good People in the Angels' eyes. They told him you can't trust a man who hasn't done time, and Kesey was on the way to doing time, in any case. Kesey said later that the marijuana bust impressed them but they couldn't have cared less that he was a novelist. But they knew about that, too, and here was a big name who was friendly and interested in them, even though he wasn't a queer or a reporter or any of those other creep suck-ups who were coming around that summer.

And a great many were coming around in the summer of 1965. The summer of 1965 had made the h.e.l.l's Angels infamous celebrities in California. Their reputation was at its absolutely most notorious all-time highest. A series of incidents-followed by an amazing series of newspaper and magazine articles, Life and the Sat.u.r.day Evening Post among them-had the people of the Far West looking to each weekend in the Angels' life as an invasion by baby-raping Huns. Intellectuals around San Francisco, particularly at Berkeley, at the University of California, were beginning to romanticize about the Angels in terms of "alienation" and "a generation in revolt," that kind of thing. People were beginning to get in touch with Thompson to see if he couldn't arrange for them to meet the Angels-not the whole bunch, Hunter, maybe one or two at a time. Well, Kesey didn't need any one or two at a time. He and the boys took a few tokes on a joint, and the h.e.l.l's Angels were on the bus.

The next thing the citizens of La Honda knew, there was a huge sign at the Kesey place-15 feet long, three feet high, in red white and blue.

THE MERRY PRANKSTERS.

WELCOME THE h.e.l.l'S ANGELS.

Sat.u.r.day, August 7, 1965, was a bright clear radiant limelit summer day amid G.o.d's handiwork in La Honda, California. The citizens were getting ready for the day by nailing shut their doors. The cops were getting ready by revving up a squad of ten patrol cars with flas.h.i.+ng lights and ammunition. The Pranksters were getting ready by getting bombed. They were down there in the greeny gorge, in the cabin and around it, under the redwoods, getting bombed out of their gourds. They had some good heavy surges of G.o.d-given adrenaline going for them, too. n.o.body ever came right out front and said it, but this happened to be the real-life h.e.l.l's Angels coming, about forty of them, on a full-fledged Angels' "run," the sort of outing on which the Angels did their thing, their whole freaking thing, en mangy raunchy head-breaking fire-p.i.s.sing rough-G.o.dd.a.m.n-housing ma.s.se. The Pranksters had a lot of company for the occasion. It was practically like an audience, all waiting for the stars to appear. A lot of the old Perry Lane crowd was there, Vic Lovell, Ed McClanahan, and the others. Allen Ginsberg was there and so was Richard Alpert and a lot of San Francisco and Berkeley intellectuals. Tachycardia, you all-but Kesey was calm and even laughing a little, looking strong as an ox in his buckskin s.h.i.+rt, the Mountain Man, and he made it all seem right and inevitable, an inevitable part of the flow and right now in this moment. h.e.l.l, if the straight world of San Mateo County, California, had decided to declare them all outlaws over an innocuous thing like marijuana, then they could freaking well go with the flow and show them what the saga called Outlaw was really like. The Angels brought a lot of things into synch. Outlaws, by definition, were people who had moved off of dead center and were out in some kind of Edge City. The beauty of it was, the Angels had done it like the Pranksters, by choice. They had become outlaws first- to explore, muvva-and then got busted for it. The Angels' trip was the motorcycle and the Pranksters' was LSD, but both were in an incredible entry into an o.r.g.a.s.mic moment, now, and within forty-eight hours the Angels would be taking acid on board, too. The Pranksters would be taking on . .. Ahor, the ancient horror, the middle-cla.s.s boy fear of h.e.l.l's Angels. h.e.l.l's Angels, in the dirty flesh, and if they could bring that dark deep-down thing into their orbit- Kesey ! What in the freaking-tachycardia, you all...

Bob Dylan's voice is raunching and rheuming in the old jack-legged chants in huge volume from out the speakers up in the redwood tops up on the dirt cliff across the highway-He-e-e-ey Mis-ter Tam-bou-rine Man-as part of Sandy Lehmann-Haupt's Non-Station KLSD program, the indomitable disco-freak-jockey Lord Byron Styrofoam himself, Sandy, broadcasting over a microphone in a cabin and spinning them for you-Ca.s.sady revved up so tight it's like mechanical speed man sprocket-Mountain Girl ready-Hey, Kesey!-Hermit grin- Page ablaze-men, women, children, painted and in costume- ricochet around the limelit dell-Argggggghhhhh-about 3 P.M. they started hearing it.

It was like a locomotive about ten miles away. It was the h.e.l.l's Angels in "running formation" coming over the mountain on Harley-Davidson 74s. The Angels were up there somewhere weaving down the curves on Route 84, gearing down- thragggggggggh-and winding up, and the locomotive sound got louder and louder until you couldn't hear yourself talk any more or Bob Dylan rheumy and-thraaaaaaaggggghhh-here they came around the last curve, the h.e.l.l's Angels, with the bikes, the beards, the long hair, the sleeveless denim jackets with the death's head insignia and all the rest, looking their most royal rotten, and then one by one they came barreling in over the wooden bridge up to the front of the house, skidding to a stop in explosions of dust, and it was like a movie or something-each one of the outlaws bouncing and gunning across the bridge with his arms spread out in a tough curve to the handlebars and then skidding to a stop, one after another after another.

The Angels, for their part, didn't know what to expect. n.o.body had ever invited them anywhere before, at least not as a gang. They weren't on many people's invitation lists. They figured they would see what was there and what it was all about, and they would probably get in a h.e.l.l of a fight before it was all over, and heads would break, but that was about par for the course anyway. The Angels always came into alien situations black and wary, sniffing out the adversary, but that didn't even register at this place. So many people were already so high, on something, it practically dissolved you on the spot. The Pranksters had what looked like about a million doses of the Angels' favorite drug-beer-and LSD for all who wanted to try it. The beer made the Angels very happy and the LSD made them strangely peaceful and sometimes catatonic, in contrast to the Pranksters and other intellectuals around, who soared on the stuff.

June the Goon gave a h.e.l.l's Angel named Freewheeling Frank some LSD, which he thought was some kind of souped-up speed or something-and he had the most wondrous experience of his life. By nightfall he had climbed a redwood and was nestled up against a loudspeaker in a tree grooving off the sounds and vibrations of Bob Dylan singing "The Subterranean Homesick Blues."

Pete, the drag racer, from the San Francisco h.e.l.l's Angels, grinned and rummaged through a beer tub and said, "Man, this is nothing but a G.o.dd.a.m.n wonderful scene. We didn't know what to expect when we came, but it turned out just fine. This time it's all ha-ha, not thump-thump." Soon the gorge was booming with the Angels' distinctive good-time lots-a-beer belly laugh, which goes: Haw!-Haw!-Haw!-Haw!-Haw!- Haw!

Sandy Lehmann-Haupt, Lord Byron Styrofoam, had hold of the microphone and his disco-freak-jockey rapping blared out of the redwoods and back across the highway: "This is Non-Station KLSD, 800 micrograms in your head, the station designed to blow your mind and undo your bind, from up here atop the redwoods on Venus!" Then he went into a long talking blues song about the h.e.l.l's Angels, about fifty stanzas worth, some of it obscure acid talk, some of it wild legends, about squas.h.i.+ng turtles on the highway, nutty stuff like that, and every stanza ending with the refrain:

Oh, but it's great to be an Angel, And be dirty all the time!

What the h.e.l.l-here was some wild-looking kid with the temerity to broadcast out over the highways of California that Angels were dirty all the time-but how the h.e.l.l could you resist, it was too freaking madly manic-and pretty soon the Angels and everybody else were joining in the chorus:

Oh, but it's great to be an Angel, And be dirty all the time!

Then Allen Ginsberg was in front of the microphone with finger cymbals on each hand, dancing around with a beard down to his belly and chanting Hindu chants into the microphone booming out over California, U.S.A., Hare Krishna hare Krishna hare Krishna hare krishna-what the mollyfock is hairy krishna-who is this hairy freak-but you can't help yourself, you got to groove with this cat in spite of yourself. Ginsberg really bowled the Angels over. He was a lot of things the Angels hated, a Jew, an intellectual, a New Yorker, but he was too much, the greatest straightest unstraight guy they ever met.

And be dirty all the time!

The filthy kooks-by nightfall the cops were lined up along the highway, car after car, just across the creek, outside the gate, wondering what the fock. The scene was really getting weird. The Pranksters had everything in their electronic a.r.s.enal going, rock 'n' roll blazing through the treetops, light projections streaming through the gorge, Station KLSD blazing and screaming over the cops' heads, people in Day-Glo regalia blazing and lurching in the gloom, the Angels going Haw-Haw-Haw- Haw, Ca.s.sady down to just his h.e.l.l of a build, nothing else, just his h.e.l.l of a build, jerking his arms out and sprocketing around under a spotlight on the porch of the log manse, flailing a beer bottle around in one hand and shaking his other one at the cops: "You sneaky motherf.u.c.kers! What the f.u.c.k's wrong with you! Come on over here and see what you get... G.o.dd.a.m.n your s.h.i.+t-filled souls anyway!"-laughing and jerking and sprocketing-"Don't f.u.c.k with me, you sons of s.h.i.+t-lovers. Come on over. You'll get every f.u.c.king thing you deserve."

The h.e.l.l of it, men, is here is a huge obscene clot of degradation, depradation and derogation proceeding loose and crazed on the hoof before our very eyes, complete with the very h.e.l.l's Angels, and there is nothing we can do but contain it. Technically, they might have been able to move in on the grounds of Ca.s.sady's exposing himself or something of the sort, but no real laws were being broken, except every law of G.o.d and man-but sheer containment was looking like the best policy. Moving in on those crazies even with ten carloads of armed cops for a misdemeanor like lewd display-the explosion was too grotesque to think of. And the cops' turret lights revolved and splashed against the dirt cliff in a red strobe light effect and their car-to-headquarters radios were wide open and cracking out with sulphurous 220-volt electric thorn baritones and staticky sibilants-He-e-e-ey Mis-ter Tam-bou-rine Man-just to render the La Honda gorge totally delirious.

Meanwhile, the Angels were discovering the G.o.dd.a.m.nedest thing. Usually, most places they headed into on their runs, they tested people's cool. What are you looking at, mother. As soon as the shock or naked terror registered, they would be happy. Or if there was no shock and terror but instead somebody tried some brave little shove back, then it was time to break heads and tear everybody a new a.s.shole. But these mollyfocking Pranksters were test-proof. The Angels didn't know what permissive was until they got to Kesey's. Go with the flow! The biggest baddest toughest most awfulest-looking h.e.l.l's Angel of them all was a big monster named Tiny. The second biggest baddest toughest most-awfulest-looking h.e.l.l's Angel was a big raw-boned guy named Buzzard, dark-looking, with all this dark hair and a beard, all s.h.a.ggy and matted and his nose came out like a beak and his Adam's apple hung down about a foot, and he was just like an enormous buzzard. Tiny and Buzzard had a thing of coming up to each other when they were around non-Angels and sticking out their tongues and then licking each other's tongues, a big sloppy lap it up, just to shake up the squares, it really jolted them-so they came up right in front of this tall broad of Kesey's, Mountain Girl, and la-a-a-a-a-ap-and they couldn't believe it. She just looked right at them and grinned and exploded sunb.a.l.l.s out of her eyes and started laughing at them, Haw-Haw-Haw, as if to say in plain language: What a bulls.h.i.+t thing. It was freaking incredible. Then some of them pa.s.sed a joint around and they pa.s.sed it to Mountain Girl and she boomed out: "h.e.l.l, no! What the h.e.l.l you doing putting your dirty mouth on this clean joint for! This is a clean joint and you're putting your dirty mouths on it!" n.o.body in living memory had ever refused a toke from a joint pa.s.sed by Angels, at least not on grounds of sanitation, except this crazy girl who was just bulls.h.i.+tting them blind, and they loved it.

It even got to the point where Mountain Girl saw Tiny heading into the mad bathroom with a couple of beer cans like he is going to hole up in there and drink a couple of cans in peace, but this is the bathroom all the girls around here are using, and Mountain Girl yells out to Sonny Barger, the maximum leader of the h.e.l.l's Angels, "Hey, Sonny! Tell this big piece of trash to stay out of our clean bathroom!"-in a bulls.h.i.+t tone, of course-and Sonny picks it up, "Yeah, you big piece of tras.h.!.+ Stay out of the clean bathroom! They don't want you in there!"-and Tiny slinks out the door, outside, in a bulls.h.i.+t slink, but he does it- And that's it! It's happening. The h.e.l.l's Angels are in our movie, we've got 'em in. Mountain Girl and a lot of the Pranksters had hit on the perfect combination with the Angels. They were friendly toward them, maybe friendlier than anybody had been in their lives, but they weren't craven about it, and they took no s.h.i.+t. It was the perfect combination, but the Pranksters didn't even have to think of it as a combination. They just did their thing and that was the way it worked out. All these principles they had been working on and talking about in the isolation of La Honda-they freaking well worked.

Go with the flow-and what a flow-these cats, these Pranksters-at big routs like this the Angels often had a second feature going ent.i.tled Who Gets f.u.c.ked?-and it hadn't even gotten to that before some blonde from out of town, one of the guests from way out there, just one nice soft honey hormone squash, she made it clear to three Angels that she was ready to go, so they all trooped out to the backhouse and they had a happy round out there. Pretty soon all the Angels knew about the "new mamma" out in the backhouse and a lot of them piled in there, hooking down beers, laughing, taking their turns, making various critiques. The girl had her red and white dress pushed up around her chest, and two or three would be on her at once, between her legs, sitting on her face in the sick ochre light of the shack with much lapping and leering and bubbling and gulping through furzes of pubic hair while sweat and s.e.m.e.n glistened on the highlights of her belly and thighs and she twitched and moaned, not in protest, however, in a kind of drunken bout of G.o.d knew what and men with no pants on were standing around, cheering, chiding, waiting for their turn, or their second turn, or the third until she had been fenestrated in various places at least fifty times. Some of the Angels went out and got her ex-husband. He was weaving and veering around, bombed, they led him in there under glare and leer and l.u.s.t musk suffocate the rut hut they told him to go to it. All silent-s.h.i.+t, this is going too far-but the girl rises up in a blear and asks him to kiss her, which he does, glistening secretions, then he lurches and mounts her and slides it in, and the Angels cheer Haw Haw- -but that is her movie, it truly is, and we have gone with the flow.

So much beer-which is like an exotic binge for the Pranksters, beer. Mountain Girl and Kesey are up in the limelit bower and the full moon comes down through the treetop silhouettes. They are just rapping in the moonlight, and then Sandy wanders on up there and sits with them, high on acid, and he looks down and the floor of the forest is rippling with moonlight, the ground s.h.i.+mmers and rolls like a stream in the magic bower and they just sit there-a buzzard! Buzzard is wandering up the slope toward them and there in the moonlight in the dark in the magic bower he... is a buzzard, the biggest ever made, the beak, the deathly black, the dopply glottal neck, the sh.e.l.led back and dangling wings, stringy nodule legs-Kaaawwwwwww!-and Kesey jumps up and starts throwing his arms up at him, like the way you would scare away a buzzard, and says, "Aaaaagh! a buzzard! Hey! Get away, you're a buzzard! Get this buzzard out of here!"

It's a bulls.h.i.+t gesture, of course-and Buzzard laughs-Haw! Haw! Haw!-it is not real, but it is... real, real buzzard, you can see the whole thing with two minds-Kaw Kaw Kaaawwwww-and Buzzard jumps and flaps his arms-and the whole ... connection, the synch, between the name, the man, the bird, flows together right there, and it doesn't matter whether he is buzzard or man because it has all come together, and they all see it...

They all see so much. Buzzard goes, and Sandy goes, and Kesey and Mountain Girl are in the moonlight ripply bower. By and by-where?-Kesey and Mountain Girl-and so much flows together from the lights and the delirium and the staticky sibilants down below, so much is clear, so much flows in Tightness, that night, under the full moon, up above the flails and bellows down below-

THE h.e.l.l'S ANGELS PARTY WENT ON FOR TWO DAYS AND THE cops never moved in. Everybody, Angels and Pranksters, had a righteous time and no heads were broken. There had been one gang-bang, but the girl was a volunteer. It was her movie. In fact, for the next six or seven weeks, it was one long party with the Angels. The news spread around intellectual-hip circles in the San Francis...o...b..rkeley area like a legend. In these circles, anyway, it once and for all put Kesey and the Pranksters up above the category of just another weirdo intellectual group. They had broken through the worst hangup that intellectuals know-the real-life hangup. Intellectuals were always hung up with the feeling that they weren't coming to grips with real life. Real life belonged to all those funky spades and prize fighters and bullfighters and dock workers and grape pickers and wetbacks. Nostalgie de la boue. Well, the h.e.l.l's Angels were real life. It didn't get any realer than that, and Kesey had pulled it off. People from San Francisco and Berkeley started coming by La Honda more than ever. It was practically like an intellectual tourist attraction. Kesey would talk about the Angels.

"I asked Sonny Barger how he picks new members, new Angels, and he told me, 'We don't pick 'em. We recognize 'em.' "

And everybody grokked over that.

Likely as not, people would find h.e.l.l's Angels on the place. The Angels were adding LSD to the already elaborate list of highs and lows they liked, beer, wine, marijuana, benzedrine, Seconal, Amytal, Nembutal, Tuinal. Some of them had terrible b.u.mmers-b.u.mmer was the Angels' term for a bad trip on a motorcycle and very quickly it became the hip world's term for a bad trip on LSD. The only bad moment at Kesey's came one day when an Angel went berserk during the first rush of the drug and tried to strangle his old lady on Kesey's front steps. But he was too wasted at that point to really do much.

So it was wonderful and marvelous, an unholy alliance, the Merry Pranksters and the h.e.l.l's Angels, and all hours of the day or night you could hear the h.e.l.l's Angels gearing and winding down Route 84 to Kesey's, and the people of La Honda felt like the plague had come, and wasn't there anything that could be done. More than one of the Pranksters had his reservations, too. The Angels were like a time bomb. So far, so good-one day the Angels even swept and cleaned up the place-but they were capable of busting loose into carnage at any moment. It brought the adrenaline into your throat. The potential was there, too, because if the truth were known, there were just a few of the Pranksters who could really talk to the Angels-chiefly Kesey and Mountain Girl. Mainly it was Kesey. Kesey was the magnet and the strength, the man in both worlds. The Angels respected him and they weren't about to screw him around. He was one of the coolest guys they had ever come across. One day, finally, Kesey's cool came to the test with the Angels and it was a strange moment.

Kesey and the Pranksters and the Angels had taken to going out to the backhouse and sitting in a big circle and doing the Prankster thing, a lot of rapping back and forth and singing, high on gra.s.s, and you never knew where it was going to go. Usually it went great. The Angels took to the Prankster thing right away. They seemed to have an immediate intuitive grasp of where it was going, and one time Kesey started playing a regular guitar and Babbs started playing a four-string amplified guitar and Kesey got into a song, off the top of his head, about "the vibrations," a bluesy song, and the Angels joined in, and it got downright religious in there for a while, with everybody singing, "Oh, the vi-bra-tions ... Oh, the vi-bra-tions .. ."

And then Kesey and a few of the Pranksters and a lot of the Angels, including Sonny Barger of the Oakland Chapter, the maximum leader of all the Angels, were sitting around in the backhouse pa.s.sing around joints and rapping. The subject was "people who are bulls.h.i.+t."

There are certain people who are bulls.h.i.+t and you can always recognize them, Kesey was saying, and the Angels were nodding yeah, that certainly is right.

"Now you take-," said Kesey, mentioning one of the Angels who was not present. "He's a bulls.h.i.+t person."

A bulls.h.i.+t person-and man- "Listen, Kesey," says Barger, 100 percent h.e.l.l's Angel, "-is an Angel, and n.o.body-n.o.body-calls an Angel a bulls.h.i.+t person."

-the freaking gauntlet is down. It's like forever and every eye in the place pins on Kesey's face and you can hear the blood squirt in your veins. But Kesey doesn't even blink and his voice doesn't even change one halftone, just the old Oregon drawl: "But I know him, Sonny. If I didn't know him, I wouldn't call him a bulls.h.i.+t person."

Yeah-we-e-e-elll-everybody, Angels and Pranksters- well-Kesey knows him-there is nothing to do but grok over this statement, and everybody sits there, still, trying to grok over it, and after a second, the moment where heads get broken and fire gets p.i.s.sed is over-We-e-ell, ye-ah- Two or three days later it occurs to some of the Pranksters that they still don't know what the h.e.l.l Kesey meant when he said that. He knows the guy. It doesn't make any sense. It's a concept with no bottom to it-but so what! At the moment he said it, it was the one perfect thing he could have said. Kesey was so totally into the moment, he could come up with it, he could break up that old historic push me, shove you, yeah-sez-who sequence and in an instant the moment, that bada.s.s moment, was over.

THE PRANKSTERS GOT PRETTY CLOSE TO SEVERAL OF THE Angels as individuals. Particularly Gut and Freewheeling Frank and Terry the Tramp. Every now and then somebody would take one or another of the Angels up into the tree house and give them a real initiation into psychedelics. They had a huge supply of DMT. As somebody once put it, LSD is a long strange journey; DMT is like being shot out of a cannon. There in the tree house, amid the winking googaws, they would give the Angels DMT, and Mountain Girl saw some of them, like Freewheeling Frank, after they came down. They would walk around in no particular direction, listing slightly, the eyes bugged wide open, glazed.

"They were as naked as an Angel is ever gonna git," she told Kesey.

chapter.

XIV.

A Miracle in Seven Days

Oh, the vi-bra-tions...

Oh, the Unitarians ...

Apostate seminarians.. .

Grok the groovy Pranksters and h.e.l.l's Angels...

Whose Angels?-

Why the consternation?

Arise ye antediluvians, Groove on The Pranksters and h.e.l.l's Angels ...

Noah's destination Is where it's at: Now showing at the Mount Ararat, Apis the Bull in Apres le deluge, Groovy movie with a thousand castoffs:

Whose Angels?- h.e.l.l's Angels...

Dear Lord, prepare to blast off Into the Angel blue.

Oh, the vi-bra-tions ...

Among those who began to wonder about the mysteries of La Honda Were some Unitarian ministers known as the Young Turks; Bob Kimball, d.i.c.k Weston and Paul Sawyer said freak our cerebral cloisters and Emerge! See how the alleged gra.s.s-smoking Kesey's magic works.

The Young Turks saw Unitarians becoming ghostly seminarians, Desiccated Kantians cut off from Early Christianity.

Oh, a century ago we were the vangard, routing the redneck blackguards Of Fundamentalism-and today?-the Youth yawn at our inanity.