The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test Part 13

"HARDLY HAD LEO LEFT US, WHEN FAITH AND CONCORD amongst us was at an end; it was as if the life-blood of our group flowed away from an invisible wound."

One day Paul Foster cranked up the great G.o.d Rotor and sat down and worked on a very intricate illuminated billhead. When he got through, there was an ornate black border, and in the middle the words

IN MEMORIAM.

in florid Old English lettering, and at the bottom: January 23, 1966, the day Kesey disappeared. Nothing else, just In Memoriam and the date. He hung it up on the wall.

chapter.

XXI.

The Fugitive

HAUL a.s.s, KESEY. MOVE. SCRAM. SPLIT FLEE HIDE VANISH DISINTE-grate. Like run.

Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrevrevrevrevrevrevrevrevrevrev or are we gonna have just a late Mexican re-run of the scene on the rooftop in San Francisco and sit here with the motor spinning and watch with fascination while the cops they climb up once again to come git you- THEY JUST OPENED THE DOOR DOWN BELOW, ROTOR ROOTER, so YOU HAVE MAYBE 45 SECONDS a.s.sUMING THEY BE SLOW AND SNEAKY AND SURE ABOUT IT.

Kesey sits in a little upper room in the last house down the beach, $80 a month, on paradise-blue Bandarias Bay, in Puerto Vallarta, on the west coast of Mexico, state of Jalisco, one step from the floppy green fronds of the jungle, wherein flourish lush steamy baboon l.u.s.ts of paranoia-Kesey sits in this little rickety upper room with his elbow on a table and his forearm standing up perpendicular and in the palm of his hand a little mirror, so that his forearm and the mirror are like a big rear-view mirror stanchion on the side of a truck and thus he can look out the window and see them but they can't see him- COME ON, MAN, DO YOU NEED A COPY OF THE SCRIPT TO SEE HOW THIS MOVIE GOES? YOU HAVE MAYBE 40 SECONDS LEFT BEFORE THEY COME GET YOU.

-a Volkswagen has been cruising up and down the street for no earthly reason at all, except that they are obviously working with the fake telephone linesmen outside the window who whistle- THERE THEY GO AGAIN.

-whistle in the slow-brain brown Mexican huarache day-laborer way, for no earthly reason except that they are obviously synched in, finked in, with the Volkswagen. Now a tan sedan comes along the street, minus a license plate but plus a stenciled white number-exactly like a prison stencil-police and two coat-less guys inside, both in white shirts so they're not prisoners- ONE TURNED LOOKED BACK !.

IF YOU WERE WATCHING ALL THIS ON A MOVIE SCREEN YOU KNOW WHAT YOUR REACTION WOULD BE THROUGH A MOUTHFUL OF POPCORN FROM THE THIRD ROW: "WHAT MORE DO YOU NEED, YOU DOLT! SCREAM OUTTA THERE ...".

-But he has just hooked down five dexedrines and the old motor is spinning and rushing most nice and euphorically in fascination and a man can't depart this nice $80-a-month snug harbor on paradise-blue Bandarias Bay just yet with a cool creek of speed rush in his veins. It is such a tiny little fink scene as he sees it in the hand mirror. He can tilt it and see his own face entropied with the strain and then tilt it-a sign!-a sparrow, fat and sleek, dives through the dwindling sun into a hole in one of the lampposts; home.

More telefono trucks! Two loud whistles this time-for no earthly reason except to come git you. You have maybe 35 seconds left -Kesey has Cornel Wilde Running Jacket ready hanging on the wall, a jungle-jim corduroy jacket stashed with fishing line, a knife, money, DDT, tablet, ball-points, flashlight, and gra.s.s. Has it timed by test runs that he can be out the window, down through a hole in the roof below, down a drain pipe, over a wall and into thickest jungle in 45 seconds-well, only 35 seconds left, but head start is all that's needed, with the element of surprise. Besides, it's so fascinating to be here in subastral projection with the cool rushing dex, synched into their minds and his own, in all its surges and tributaries and convolutions, turning it this way and that and rationalizing the situation for the 100th time in split seconds, such as: If they have that many men already here, the phony telephone men, the cops in the tan car, the cops in the Volkswagen, what are they waiting for? why haven't they crashed right in through the rotten doors of this Rat building- But he gets the signal even before he finishes the question: WAITING! THEY KNOW THEY'VE GOT YOU, FOOL, HAVE KNOWN FOR WEEKS. BUT THEY'RE CERTAIN YOU'RE CONNECTED WITH ALL THE LSD BEING SMUGGLED UP FROM MEXICO AND THEY WANT TO TAKE IN AS BIG A HAUL AS POSSIBLE WHEN THEY FINALLY SLAM IT. LIKE LEARY; THEY MUST HAVE BEEN WATCHING A DREADFUL LONG TIME BEFORE THEY WERE CONTENT THEY HAD SOMETHING WORTH HIS SIZE. THIRTY YEARS. FOR A HARVARD DOCTOR WITH GRa.s.s. THAT'S HOW BAD THEY WANTED THE WHOLE BUSINESS LOCKED AWAY. THAT'S HOW DANGEROUS THEY CONSIDER THE WHOLE BUSINESS. AND THEY WERE COMPLETELY CORRECT - IF NOT IN THEIR FANTASY, THEN AT LEAST IN THEIR EVALUATION OF THE PRESENT AND EVER-GROWING PSYCHEDELIC THREAT.

A NOISE DOWN BELOW.

THEM?.

30 SEGUNDOS LEFT?.

-maybe it's Black Maria, come back with good things for eating and stuff for the new disguise, Steve Lamb, mild-mannered reporter and all-around creep- RUN, FOOL!.

-Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Such a quiet secret m.u.f.fled smile will be on Black Maria's face.

Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrevrevrevrevrevrevrevrevrevrev It could have been all so quiet, just him and Zonker and the smoldering Black Maria in this $80-a-month paradise-blue Bandarias Bay in Puerto Vallarta. If the suicide ruse and the rest of the main Fugitive fantasy had but worked.

The trip into Mexico was easy, because everything with Boise was easy. Boise always knew. They picked up Zonker in L.A., and then Jim Fish, and they coasted on over the line at Tijuana. No ha.s.sle to cross over into Mexico. The border at Tijuana is like a huge superhighway toll station, a huge concrete ap.r.o.n and ten or fifteen customs booths in a row for all the cars pouring over into Tijuana from San Diego and points north, all plastic green and concrete like part of suburban superhighway America. So they rolled on over the line with Kesey hidden in the back of Boise's old panel truck and heart don't even thump too bad. Spirits up, a little of the Prankster elan back in the cosmos. In true Prankster fashion they spent one third their money stash on a Madman Muntz autostereo rig to go along with all the other valuables, like tape recorders and many tapes.

The next likely ha.s.sle is visas, because this shapes up as a long stay. Might be hot to try to get Kesey one in Tijuana, because Tijuana is just a California annex, really, the slums of San Diego, and they just might very well know about the case.

"We'll do it in Sonoita, man," says Boise. "They don't give a s.h.i.t there. Put down a couple of bucks and they can't see anything else."

Sonoita is almost due east of Tijuana, just south of the Arizona border. Kesey uses his good shuck ID there and all is jake in Sonoita. Fugitive!-real-life and for sure now.

Then south down so-called Route 2 and so-called Route 15, bouncing and grinding along through the brown dust and scrawny chickens and animal dung brown dust fumes of western Mexico, towns of Coyote, Caborca, Santa Ana, Querobabi, Cornelio, El Oasis, hee, Hermosillo, hah, Pocitos Casas, Cieneguito, Guaymas, Camaxtli, Mixcoatl, Tlazolteotl, Quetzalcoatl, Huitzilopochtli, Tezcatlipoca haunting the Dairy Queen Rat Queen crossroads in the guise of a Rat, a Popoluactli-screeing rat, Tetzcotl, Yaotl, t.i.tlacahuan he whose slaves we are, Ochpaniiztl priesty Angel-freaked out in a motorcycle made from the vaseline skin of Gang Bang Girl Meets White Trash ... A confetti of skulls and death in western Mexico, the Rat lands. Not one inch of it is picturesque burros and shawls or nova Zapata hats or color-TV pink chunks of watermelon or water lilies or gold feathers or long eyelashes or high combs or tortillas and tacos and chili powder or fluty camote vendors or muletas or toreros or oles or mariachi bands or water lilies or blood of the dahlia or tinny cantinas or serapes or movie black marias with shiny black hair and steaming little high round p.u.b.escent bottoms. None of the old Mexico we know and love on the 21-day excursion fare. Just the boogering brown dust and bloated rat corpses by the road, goats, cows, chickens with all four feet up in the air at the Tezcatlipocan skull rot crossroads of Mexico.

To Kesey it was a hopeless flea-bitten desert he was fleeing into. But Boise made it bearable. Boise always knew. Boise was wizened and thin-faced and he had the awfulest New England high flat whine, and he didn't belong anywhere near here, but he was here, now, and he knew. The truck breaks down for the fourteenth time- "No ha.s.sle, man. We just back it up on a rock, man ... Then we just take the tire off and fix it."

More flat, Rat country, mosquito and flea, into total nothing, like the lines of perspective in a surrealist painting, but Boise makes you realize it is all the same, here as anywhere. Boise lecherously scanning the streets as they bounce through the dead chicken towns just like it was only Sat.u.r.day night on Broadway in North Beach, spotting a good looking gringa muchacha padding along the side of the road with honest calves, 25 SECONDS LEFT, FOOL!.

and he says, "Shall we get her over and ball her, man?" all in the same New England whine, as if he were saying, Wanna c.o.ke, or not? Kesey looks at Boise's lined face and his thin lips, looks ancient, only a glitter comes out of the eyes, nice and lecherous, dead certain and crazy alive at the same time. And Boise in that moment is in the tiny knot of Perfect Pranksters, the inner circle, ascending into the sangha for good.

In Guaymas, on the gulf, Jim Fish wants out. An early attack of paranoia, Jim Fish? and catches a bus back to the U.S., leaving Kesey, Boise and Zonker and the equipment. But was it not ever so? You're either on the bus or off the bus. Kesey's spirits were picking up. Boise was pulling everything together ::: this crazy New Englander is here in these Rat lands.

"Hey, man ..." Boise points at a construction scene they're going by. "... see that?" as if to say, There's the whole thing, right there.

A whole gang of workmen are trying to put the stucco on the ceiling of a building they're finishing up. One fat man is mixing up the stucco in a washtub. One skinny one is scooping the stucco up out of the tub with a little trowel and pitching it up underhanded at the ceiling. A little of it sticks-and three or four guys stand on a plank scaffolding taking stabs at smoothing it out-but most of it falls down on the floor and three or four more are hunkered down there sc.r.a.ping it up off the floor and shoveling it back in the tub and the skinny guy skinnies up another little gob with his skinny trowel and they all stare again to see what happens. They are all hunkering around in huaraches, worthless flat Rat woven sandals, up on the scaffolding, down on the floor, waiting to see what happens, how fate brings it off with this little gob of nothing pitched up at the Rat expanse .. .

And it's all there-the whole Mexico Trip- "They have a saying, 'Hay tiemp-' " Boise hooks the steering wheel to get around an ice-cream vendor in the middle of the road " '-o,' 'There is time.' "

20 SECONDS, IDIOT!.

Huaraches, which are the Rat shoe. It all synches. Mexico is the Rat paradise. But of course! It is not worthless-it is perfection. It is as if the Rat things of all the Rat lands of America, all the drive-ins, mobile-home parks, Dairy Queens, superettes, Sunset Strips, auto-accessory stores, septic-tank developments, souvenir shops, snack bars, lay-away furniture stores, Daveniter living rooms, hot-plate hotels, bus-station paperback racks, luncheonette in-the-booth jukebox slots, raw-concrete service-station toilets with a head of urine in the bowl, Greyhound bus toilettes with paper towels and vomit hanging over the hockey-puckblack rim, Army-Navy stores with Bikini Kodpiece Briefs for men, Super Giant racks with matching green twill shirts and balloon-bottom pants for honest toilers, $8,000 bungalows with plastic accordion-folding part.i.tions and the baby asleep in there in a foldaway crib of plastic net, picnic tables with the benches built onto them used in the dining room, Jonni-Trot Bar-B-Q sandwiches with a carbonated fruit drink, aluminum slat awnings, aluminum sidings, lukewarm coffee-"with" in a china mug with a pale brown pool in the saucer and a few ashes, a spade counter chef sc.r.a.ping a short-order grill with a chalky Kitchy-Brik and he won't take your order till he's through, a first-come-first-serve doctor's waiting room with modest charwomen with their dresses stuck on the seats of shiny vinyl chairs and they won't move to get loose for fear you'll look Up their dress, plaid car coats from Sears and a canvas cap with a bill, synthetic dresses for waitresses looking like milky cellophane, Rat cones, Rat sodas, Rat meat-salad sandwiches, Rat cheezis, Rat-burgers-it is as if the Rat things of all the Rat lands of America had been looking for their country, their Canaan, their Is-ra-el, and they found it in Mexico. It has its own Rat aesthetic. It's hulking beautiful...

Then they reached Mazatlan, the first full-fledged resort you reach on the west coast of Mexico, coming down from the States. Everybody's trip was fishing in Mazatlan. Along the old Avenida del Mar and the Paseo Claussen, white walls with nice artistic Rat fishing scenes and hotel archways with great shiny blue martins hanging inside the arches and gringos with duckbill caps here to catch some marlin. Mariachi music at last, with the trumpets always breaking and dropping off the note and then struggling up again. Zonker has the bright idea of going to O'Brien's Bar, on the beach front, place he got beat up out back of once by thirteen Mexican f.a.gs. Zonker enjoys revisiting scenes of previous debacles. Like also spends hours on the beach telling them how his true and fiercest fear is of being attacked by a shark while swimming . . . as he picks flea-bite scabs until his legs stream blood to the luscious world. . . then goes swimming.

O'Brien's brings on the paranoia right away. It is a break in the Rat movie. It is dark and a Mexican band plays-signaling to the Rat sensibility that it will cost too much. Rat souls everywhere fear dark, picturesque restaurant, knowing instinctively they will pay dearly for the bulls.h.i.t ambiance, dollar a drink probably. O'Brien's was crowded, and then through the c.o.c.ktail gloom: heads. A bunch of kids with the jesuschrist hair, the temple bells and donkey beads, serape vests, mandalas; in short, American heads. Zonker recognizes them immediately. They're not only American heads, but from San Jose, and some had been to the Acid Tests. Just what the Fugitive needs to blow the whole suicide ruse. "Guess who I saw in Mexico..." Naturally, Zonk, with his zest for debacle, hails them over. Kesey is introduced as "Joe," and n.o.body pays him much mind except for one dark little girl, Mexican-looking, with long black hair.

"When were you born?" she says to Kesey. She doesn't sound Mexican. She sounds like Lauren Bacall speaking through a tube.

"I'm a Virgo." No sense hitting a ball three bits you can see coming if you can cut across the fourth.

"I thought so. I'm a Scorpio."

"Beautiful."

The black Scorpio obviously knows Zonk best. She knows him when. But Zonk belongs to the ages and it comes to pa.s.s that Zonk or no Zonk, she and Kesey relax out in the open air on the pier one night down by a Mazatlan Rat beach, all dirt and scrabble, but the waves and the wind and the harbor lights do it up right and the moon hits some kind of concrete shaft there, putting her in the dark, in the shadow, and him in the light, lit up by the moon, as if some designer drew a line precisely between their bodies. Blacky Maria, he decides.

So Black Maria joins the Fugitive band and they go off to Puerto Vallarta. Puerto Vallarta is out of the Rat lands. All picture-book Mexico. Paradise-blue Bandarias Bay and a pure white beach and white latino collages right up against the jungle, which is a deep raw green, and clean. Fat green fronds lapping up against the back of the houses on the beach. Macaw sounds, or very near it. Secret poisonous orchid and orange pops and petals winking out when the foliage moves. A nice romantic Gothic jungle. Zonker ha.s.sles with an oily little real-estate man and gets the last house on the edge of town for $80 a month. The rent is low because the jungle is too close for the tourists, the jungle and too many Mexican kids and chickens and the rural dung dust. Boise heads back to the U.S. and Kesey, Zonker and Black Maria move in. They have the upper half of the house, one floor and a spiral staircase up to the roof. Up on the roof is a kind of thatched hut, the highest perch around, a perfect lookout post and a snug harbor. Kesey decides to risk a phone call to the States to let Faye and everybody know he's O.K. He goes into town and calls Peter Demma in the Hip Pocket Book Store in Santa Cruz. A little metallic clanking about by the telefonista senoritas down at central. And then, "Peter?"

From many Rat miles away: "Ken!" Very surprised, naturally ...

So Kesey whiled the time sitting in the snug hacienda on the edge of Puerto Vallarta sipping beer and smoking many joints and writing in a notebook occasionally. He wanted to get a little of all this down and send ii to Larry McMurtry.

"Larry: "Phone calls to the states eight bucks apiece besides was ever a good board to bound my favorite ball of bulls.h.i.t prose offen, it was you ..."

Like all about Black Maria. In many ways she was so great. She is quiet and has a kind of broody beauty. She cooks. She looks Mex and speaks Mex. She can even ha.s.sle Mex. She sounds out the Mayor of Puerto Vallarta as to how safe Kesey will be here in town. Hay tiempo, he says. The extradition takes forever. Very nice to know . ..

And yet Black Maria is not completely a Prankster. She wants to be a part of all this, she wants to do this thing, but she does it without belief. It is like the Mexican part of her Black Maria thing. She has all the trappings of Mexican-she looks it, she speaks it, her grandfather was even Mexican-but she is not Mexican. She is Carolyn Hannah of San Jose, California, under everything else, even the blood. He wrote in the notebook::Meving the dark Indian

10 SECONDS LEFT, YOU FREAKING EE-JOT! ! ! !.

body out of the Indian land weakened the Indian blood with chicken soup and matzoh b.a.l.l.s. So much of the fire concealed by the dark and broody beauty lies just that deep. Because she does it without belief. And yet it is very nice up here in this thatched perch atop the last house. A car heads up the street-Zonker and Black Maria coming back to the house. He peers over the edge at the car kicking up the dust, then writes in the notebook, it is a perfect lookout, allowing me to see them, without them seeing me. Many things. .. synch.

ZONKER AND BLACK MARIA DROVE DOWN THE ROAD, Scattering up the kids and the chickens and the dust, and Black Maria pointed up to the top of the house and said to Zonker: "Look, there's Kesey." Then she looked out the window and stared at the jungle. "I bet he thinks we can't see him."

THE JIG IS UP. ZONKER BRINGS A TELEGRAM FROM PAUL Robertson back in San Jose and it is a bear. It is not even a warning, it

5 SECONDS - 5 SECONDS LEFT - YOU REALLY JES GON' SIT THERE FOR THE SQUASH?.

is final. THE JIG IS UP, is says. Meaning, it turned out, that the suicide ruse had been exposed and the cops knew he was in Puerto Vallarta. Exposed?-h.e.l.l, the suicide prank had turned into a G.o.dd.a.m.n comic opera. For a start, Dee had pulled a sort of Dee-out, as Mountain Girl feared. Dee had driven up looking for a cliff near Humboldt Bay, about 250 miles north of San Francisco, up near Eureka, California, not far from the Oregon border in redwoods country. He got up to the last hill going up there and the panel truck wouldn't pull the hill. So he called into town for a tow truck and the garage man and the tow truck pulled the suicide vehicle up the last mile. Hired and paid for and thanks a lot. Always nice to hire some help to commit suicide. Next Dee dropped Kesey's distinctive sky-blue boots down to the sh.o.r.e below-but they hit the water instead and sank without a bubble. Next, the G.o.dd.a.m.ned romantic suicide desolate foaming cliff was so G.o.dd.a.m.ned desolate, n.o.body noticed the truck for about two weeks, despite the Ira Sandperl for President sign on the rear b.u.mper. Apparently people figured the old heap had been abandoned. The Humboldt county police finally checked it out on February 11. Next, the suicide note, which seemed so ineluctably convincing as Kesey and Mountain Girl smoked a few joints and soared into pa.s.sages of Sh.e.l.leyan Weltschmerz-it gave off a giddy scent of put-on, even to the straight cops of the Humboldt. There were certain inconsistencies. Like the part about the truck smashing into a redwood. Well-even in a Dee-out, Dee couldn't exactly ask the tow-truck man, Well, now that you've towed it up here, how about jamming it into a tree for me. Demma had really been bowled over to hear from Kesey. A lot of people, a lot of people who liked him, had really been worried that he was dead. And now here was Kesey calling him-alive-with a message for Faye and the whole thing. That was Sat.u.r.day. The next night, Sunday, February 13, Demma dropped into Manuel's Mexican Restaurant in Santa Cruz, and there was his old friend Bob Levy. By way of making conversation, Levy says, "What have you heard from Ken?"

"I just got a call from him!" says Demma. "From Puerto Vallarta!"

That's interesting.

Levy happened to be a reporter for the Watsonville Register-Pajaronian, Watsonville being a town near Santa Cruz. The next afternoon, Monday, the lead story in the Watsonville Register-Pajaronian carried a five-column headline reading:

MISSING NOVELIST TURNS UP IN MEXICO.

The next day, Tuesday, the San Jose Mercury picked up the story and put a little more spin on it with a story headlined:

KESEY'S CORPSE HAVING A BALL IN PUERTO VALLARTA.

2 SECONDS, OH CORPSE OF MINE!.

THAT'S NO BLACK MARIA SHHHHHHHHUFFLING UP THE STAIRS.

OUTSIDE.

THE DOOR, DOLT, IT'S A COP CLUMP UP THE STAIRS NO EARTHLY SOUND LIKE IT.

SHARP WHISTLE FROM THE TELEFONISTAS.

VW BACKING DOWN THE STREET.

THIS IS TRULY IT, TRULY IT.

GRAB THE CORNEL WILDE RUNNING JACKET, FOOL! MAKE THE BRAIN CATCH HOLD! RRRRRRRRRRRRRRREVREVREVREV SPINNING AND IN THE GIANT PYRAMIDAL CELLS OF BETZ OF PRE-CENTRAL CEREBRAL CORTEX RISE AND HEAVE AND SLIP GANGLIONIC LAYER SHUDDERS AND GIGGLES SYNAPSES LIGHT LIKE RANDOM BEATLE FLASHBULBS KHEEWWW BLASTING OUT SILLY FROM MOTOR HO-MUNCULUS YOU MISSED YR FLASH OH MIGHTY MASTICATOR, SALIVATOR, VOCALIZER, SWALLOWER, LICKER, BITER SUCKER BROW-KNITTER LOOKER BLINKER RUBBERNECKER THUMBER PRODDER UP-YOURS FINGERER RINGWEARER NOSEPICKER WAVER DRINKER ARMLIFTER BODYBENDER HIPSWIVELER KNEER SPRINGER RUNNER ZERO::::::::OOOOOOOOO:::::::: RUN!.

Sonb.i.t.c.h! The gears catch at last, he springs up, grabs Cornel Wilde jacket, leaps through the back window, down through the hole, down the drainpipe-now vault the wall, you mother, into the jungle floppy- AWWRRRRRAMMMMANNNNNNN.

WHAZZAT?.

His head is down but he can see it WHAZZAT !.

Up there in the window he just jumped out of BROWN !.

He can feel it. There is a vibration on the parasympathetic efferent fibres behind the eyeb.a.l.l.s and it hums HRRRRRRRRRMANNNNNNNNNNN.

TWO of them one brown dumpy Mex with gold-handle b.u.t.t gun one crewcut American FBI body-s.n.a.t.c.her watching him flying like a monkey over the wall into the jungle the brown Mex holds gold gun but the brain behind that face too brown moldering Mex earth to worry about couldn't hit a peeing dog PLUNGE.

into the lapping P.V. fronds bursting orchid and orange the motor homunculus working perfect now powerful gallop into the picturebook jungles of Mexico-

A MOMENT LATER BLACK MARIA WALKED INTO THE Apartment. She found Kesey gone and the Cornel Wilde jungle running jacket gone. That trip again. Well, he'll come back when he's ready to, worn out, and things will be cool for a while. Kesey had gotten paranoid as h.e.l.l, but that wasn't the only thing. He liked this Fugitive game. Man, he'd scram out in the jungle and hide out there for two or three days and smoke a lot of gra.s.s and finally straggle in. That started before the telegram even. There was a whole signal they worked out. Or he worked out. When the coast was clear, she was supposed to hang up a yellow shirt of Zonk's on the line outside the back window, facing the jungle. It was a yellow shirt with a black and brown print on it, on the f.a.ggy side, if you asked Black Maria. The flag would go up and finally Kesey would straggle back home beat, having run himself about to death in the jungle or along the beach.

And yet it was nice. It was crazy but nice. Kesey was the most magnetic person she had ever met. He radiated something, a kind of power. His thoughts, the things he talked about, were very complex and metaphysical and cryptic but his manner was back-home, almost back-country. Even while he was reeking with paranoia, he seemed to have total confidence. That was very strange. He could make you feel like part of something very ... He had even given her a new name, Black Maria. She was. .. Black Maria.

As a girl in San Jose, California, she had felt like everything she really was had been smothered under layers and layers of games she couldn't control. Externally there was nothing wrong. Her father and mother were both teachers and life in San Jose was comfortable and serene in the California suburban manner. But half the time n.o.body ever understands about growing up in this country. Little Penguin Islands full of kids playing Lord of the Flies, a world of pygmy tribes, invisible to the Isfahan adult eye, these little devils, tribes of studs, tribes of rakes, tribes of IntelFinks even, tribes of greasers, and an amorphous ma.s.s of hopeless cases left over. Until-psychedelics started around there, mainly gra.s.s and acid. The new scene started and suddenly all sorts of. . . well, beautiful people blossomed forth from out of the polyglot, people who really had a lot to them, only it had been smothered by all the eternal social games that had been set up. Suddenly they found each other.

One night she was high and experienced the unity, the All-one. A light was behind her in the room and hit her body from behind and broke up into beams and shone out before her, hitting the floor and the walls in spokes of light with shadows in between. The room broke up before her eyes and separated in just that pattern with bars of light vibrating. Suddenly it became very clear, the way the room was put together, the way the parts fit, the way the parts of everything fit, as if someone had taken an Indian puzzle ring apart for her. It was clear how everything fit together and it wasn't really a world split up into pointless games and cliques. That was merely the way it looked before you knew the key. And now there were beautiful people who knew the key and this experience could be shared.

Her mother gave her money for the second semester at San Jose State, and although it would hurt her mother at first, she knew what she had to do. She took the money and headed off to Mexico with some beautiful kids. It was a little more complicated than that. She knew Zonk at San Jose State and she knew he was heading for Mexico, for Mazatlan, although she didn't know about the Kesey prank, and so she was following Zonk, for if there were beautiful people, Zonk was one of them.