The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test Part 16

"Yes," says the Mexican. "We have reports that thees submarines are coming een to sh.o.r.e at night, in thees waters. Have you notice eeny such acteevity?"

"No-tice!" says Babbs. "Well I reckon by Christ we have! You oughta come out here some night! Some nights there's so G.o.dd.a.m.n many of them, you can't go to sleep for the signal lights. Shine right in the windows, blinking something fierce, and it's a tough code. A tough code. But we'll break it yet. We got a lotta good heads working on it. Why, this fella right here"-pointing to Page, and rattling on about the incredible brazen activity of the Russian submarines in these waters-while Ca.s.sady comes across the road, flipping his sledge hammer, singles, doubles, triples, way up in the air looping it, catching it behind his back, and so on, but not looking at them for a second. Ca.s.sady sets a brick up on a fence about fifteen feet from the Mexican, but doesn't say a word or even look, ratcheting his arms and legs this way and that to his private Joe Cuba. Then he heads back across the road.

"Yes," says the Mexican. "Please may I ask you thees. We have a report on one of thees Russian who maybe was landing here from a submarine. He ees about five feet eleven, he ees a ... muscular man ... he looks about thirty years old ... he has ... blond hair, hees hair ees curly and he ees a leetle bald on the top... Have you seen eeny such person?"

"One of these Russians!" says Babbs. "Have you been to Eat Alley?"

"Eat Alley?"

"Yeah! Yeah! Right! Right! Right! The marketplace ace. All you hear in the marketplace is Russian. They're all over the place. This thing is wide open already, man ! "

The guy c.o.c.ks his head and stares at Babbs through his shades as if maybe this will bring him into focus- -just then- FEEOOFEEOOFEEOOFEEOOFEEOOFEEOOFEEOOFEEOO.

WHOP!.

-Ca.s.sady-twenty feet away across the beach road has suddenly wheeled and fired the four-pound sledge hammer end-over-end like a bolo and smashed the brick on top of the fence into obliteration, fifteen feet from the Mexican.

"Yes," says the Mexican. "Thank you, fren." And he wheels and walks off at a good clip, down the road, and gets into a sedan and hauls out of there.

THE NEXT DAY, HOWEVER, THE LITTLE DUDE IS BACK, WALKING along the beach road with a bounce, so Babbs goes out to meet him.

"Amigo!" the guy says. "Have you seen any Russians today!"-this with a big sparkling grin, as if to say it's all been a grand joke among us fellows who are in on it.

So Babbs thinks it over and says, Let's go up to the Polynesian palace and have a talk about the whole thing. Man to man.

So the Mexican says O.K. and they head up toward town toward a Polynesian restaurant up the way. Well, that gets the guy away from la casa grande, at least. Kesey has been primed for this, ready to make a run for it in one of the cars. He could head for the jungle, but the jungle is such a total b.u.mmer. On the other hand the road out is no bargain, either. If they are really closing in, they could have Route 15 bottled up so fast he'd never make it. Well, get out of la casa grande, in any case. So he and Stone get into Stone's car and drive up to the bluff overlooking the ocean and have a couple of tokes to a.s.sess the situation.

They park up on the bluff and look down at the festering red tide. The focking festering red tide. They turn the situation this way and that, and then Kesey decides: it is no use running either into the jungle or up the road. That's their game, the cops-and-robbers game. That's their movie, and they know their movie backward and forward, and they know how that one comes out, and we know how it comes out. Justice triumphs after a merry chase and the Fugitive eats dung dust in the last reel to show the horror of his dope-fiend ways. The only way out is to make it the Prankster movie and imagine this metallic little dude into the Prankster movie. There's no one to run to to say, Mommy, this movie is no fun any more, it's too real, Mommy. Up tight against the professed beliefs, Major, and you better believe! or else draggle your a.s.s inaudible ... They get to talk about Fugitive movies they have seen in which the Fugitive wins out, and they hit upon Casablanca, the Humphrey Bogart picture. Bogart was a fugitive in Casablanca, in the Moroccan desert, operating a restaurant during World War II, aiding and abetting Resistance fighters from Europe, and the n.a.z.i-type or Vichy France-type FBI man, the cop heavy, in any case, comes in to question him.

"Why did you come to Casablanca?" he says.

"For the waters," says Bogart.

"There is no water here," says the cop heavy. "We are in the middle of the desert."

"Oh?" says Bogart. "I was misinformed."

There it is! The Movie! So Stone and Kesey drive back and join Babbs and the Mexican dude in the Polynesian bar.

The Mexican dude and Babbs have been having quite a time. Six or eight beer bottles are on the table, and the Mexican dude is waxing very high and expansive, gesturing grandly, urging them to sit down and carrying on. He wants to know Kesey's name and Kesey says Sol Almande. Babbs has given him a shuck name of his own, and Stone says he is from Esquire magazine. He studies an expense voucher from Esquire that Stone has as if it is a highly suspicious doc.u.ment. Then he whips out his billfold from inside his coat and flips it open, displaying a big badge with the number 1 on it.

"What's that?" says Babbs.

"That! I am Agent numero uno!"

"Se-cret A-gent Num-ber One!" says Babbs.

"Yeah! Yeah! Right! Right! Right!" says Agent Number One, drawing his head back and taking an angle on Babbs. It is like a cross between Zorro and Nero.

Then he goes into a history of his famous cases.

"Eleezabeth Taylor ees coming to Mexico City? Si. That ees my case. I know her very well. Si. I am going around to her hotel, and she has all thees people-Uhhh"-he turns his hands up and pulls his chin down under his collarbone as if to say it is doubtful they could even comprehend how many people she has-"all thees functionaries doing thees and doing that, een the corridor outside even, and one of theem, thees beeg maricon"-meaning queer-"he tells me, 'No one can go een! No one.' "

" No one, ay,' I tell heem. He ees a beeg maricon. I can tell. There ees a look they have, thees maricons. They have cojinas the size of habichuelas, one can see it een the face, een the voice ... they are soft like sheet, thees maricons...

" 'MARICoN!' I say to heem.

"Hees voice, eet jes 'oops!'-you know?-like a leetle theeng of water.

" 'OUT OF MY WAY, MARICoN!' "-Agent Number One half leaps out of his chair with the reenactment, his eyes bouncing off his shades, shooting up like he is galvanized with a thousand volts.

Then he sinks back.

"We-e-e-ellll," he says very softly, and smiles like someone getting ready to drop off to sleep. The way he says it, you can see the maricon collapsing, dissolving, turning into little driblets of jelly and opening the door to Miss Taylor's suite.

There is no stopping Agent Number One now. Exploit after exploit bubbles up in his brain. Cornered like a rat, he faces them down. About to be cut down in fusillades, he whips his revolver and fires one shot, one shot, amigo, and that takes care of that. The sonsabeetches theenk they have him outsmarted, ready to make their move, and he has already made his move and is waiting for them, like a bucket under a faucet, and so on.

The strange thing, however, is that none of these fabulous cases has anything to do with celebrities. They're all marijuana cases, usually involving Americans. Yes.

Finally he takes out his camera and takes a picture of each of them.

Kesey says, "Why don't you come to our party tomorrow night? A lot of people will be there."

"Your party?"

"Yeah, we're having a farewell party tomorrow night."

"Farewell?"

"Yeah. We're leaving Mexico and going back up to California, so we're giving a farewell party."

"Well, thank you, amigo. I weel be there."

So began the first Mexican Acid Test .

AGENT NUMBER ONE WASN'T THE MOST BRILLIANT COP IN THE Americas, but time was obviously running out in old Mexico. It was time to get the Movie going on all projectors. And the bus. The new fantasy was to get on the bus and keep moving; roam through Mexico and give Acid Tests and be on the bus, keeping the Pranksters movie going at top speed at all times.

They held the Manzanillo Test in the courtyard of Babbs's Rat Shack, under the aegis of the Purina Chow. It was a small one, with all random heads in the area welcome. No Grateful Dead, of course, so they gave the Polynesian restaurant latino combo ten bucks to come down the road and play during their intermissions. Between times the Pranksters themselves furnished the music, rolling all the fantastic coils of wire out, with Gretch on the organ, and the movies and lights and all the rest. The night was full of heat lightning, which was nice, and the Prankster musicians screeled their weird Chinese tones, wailing electronically in the Rat netherlands. But no Secret Agent Numero Uno.

Kesey actually hoped the guy would turn up. He was just crazy enough to be adaptable for the Movie. He was a creature of fantasy himself. In any case, better him there gathering more data for his fabulous career than lurking in the cocoa palms working himself up to spring his ultimate cop fantasy on them. Well, if so, they would go out freaking and wailing on the sh.o.r.es of the red tide.

The Polynesian players came down the road again and played. It was nice to get freaked to latino syncopation. Then a lull, and then the s.h.i.t- HOY! p.r.o.nTO!.

-this piping shout from the other side of the Rat Shack. And where have I heard that cry before, Cosmo?

HOY! p.r.o.nTO!.

And all veer stroked out waiting for the pounce. More pounce to the ounce in a Mexican bust. Well, let's have it-let's see the Federales do their fantasy to mariachis, breaking on the high notes and struggling up again and huffing and galomphing with gold b.u.t.ts and stars in their teeth HOY! p.r.o.nTO!.

Come on in, fellas, it's strictly Dutch freak here inside- -and around the corner comes only the owner of the Polynesian palace, p.i.s.sed off because his combo is hung up on the crazies here long past intermission and he has enough problems in the red-tide doldrums without them malingering with the crazies.

"Hoy! p.r.o.nto!" he keeps shouting. Hurry up! Get your a.s.ses back to the store! prodding and herding them out of the Purina Chow palace delirium.

HOY! p.r.o.nTO!.

The heat freak lightning flashes crazy enough and it is a good sign. The Movie is going.

THE PRANKSTERS PULLED OUT OF MANZANILLO THE NEXT DAY without a word or a move from Agent Number One, big as life on the bus, plus a small caravan of cars. They headed to Guadalajara and gave an Acid Test in a restaurant there. The Test went on two nights and each night a well-dressed Mexicano with the gleaming nighttime Mexico white shirt over his staunch midriff turned up with a go-go girl and stayed right through, although they didn't take acid. Smiled and danced and seemed to enjoy themselves. Turned out he was the local jefe of detectives. We are not alone.

The bus tooled into Aguascalientes, 364 miles northwest of Mexico City, loaded for Acid Tests. Aguascalientes is 6,000 feet up in tierras frescas with a paradise climate in late summer, a nicely weird city, built above a vast system of tunnels by ... an unknown race ... Pranksters in the time warp of many millennia ago. Suddenly Sandy was immensely enthusiastic. Sandy had packed his motorcycle onto the bus. He was getting more and more robust day by day, all for this Mexican adventure.

The mineral springs! said Sandy. You got to try them! A warm soothing mineral spring bath soaking late-summer paradise into every bone-Cleanliness is Next. Aguascalientes was what all these tierras del fuego were piled up rock by rock for, this little bit of Heaven in the upper alt.i.tudes.

Mountain Girl listened to all this and she knew, well, that would be that. They would hang around Aguascalientes the rest of the day. If there was one thing Kesey couldn't resist, it was the prospect of a long warm soak. He would stay in a warm tub one hour any time, and the paradisiacal Aguascalientes were good for four or five hours, easy.

So Kesey and many Pranksters went off and immersed up to their chops in the warm springs. Hagen was delegated to stay behind and watch the bus and all the Acid Test equipment inside. Sandy went off to take a spin on his motorcycle.

Presently Sandy turned back up at the bus. He looked most big and bright. He had on an orange jacket gleaming Day-Glo and much orange Day-Glo on his bike and was looking strong. Sandy climbed up in the bus and went back in there and presently he emerged carrying the big Ampex.

"What are you doing with that?" says Hagen.

"I need something heavy to put on the back of my bike for a test run," says Sandy. "I'm going to be carrying a lot of stuff back to New York and I want to find out how much I can maneuver with on this thing."

"Well-I don't know," says Hagen. Man, there's something wrong with this. "Prankster equipment isn't supposed to leave the bus. You know what the Chief says."

"It's not leaving the bus," says Sandy. "I just want to take it down a few blocks to see how the bike handles with a weight on it."

All the time Sandy is tying the huge clump of equipment down on the back rider's seat of the bike. It's so heavy and bulky it doesn't look like he could make ten miles with it.

"I don't think you should," says Hagen.

"I'll be right back," says Sandy-and he guns off, with the bike drooping in the back.

An hour goes by, two hours, and he isn't back. Hagen is worried. Then Kesey shows up, back from the baths. Let's go! says Kesey. He sees the whole thing right away. The fateful Ampex that Sandy had ha.s.sled over a year ago. The somb.i.t.c.h has split.

They jump in a car and take off up the highway north, toward Zacatecas. He has a big start but he won't be getting very far with that back end loaded down like it is. They go barreling through the Coca-Cola and Carta Blanca crossroads of old Mexico, up past Chicalote and Rincon de Romos and San Francisco, everywhere stopping and shouting at the Mex drugstore cowboys on the corner.

"Hey! Have you seen a crazy gringo on a motorcycle-all dressed in orange?"

"No." "No." "No."-the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds, they're too battened down in their huaraches to say so anyway-and they barrel on up through the dung dust but finally give up and trail on back to the bus.

"s.h.i.t," says Mountain Girl, "that Ampex is the guts of the Acid Test."

The whole complicated thing of the instruments, the variable lag, the synchronicity, the taping for the Archives-they can't do it without the Ampex. Sandy has taken the Prankster Ampex-to the Pranksters there was not the slightest doubt in the world that the equipment was the Pranksters'. Not Prankster Sandy Lehmann-Haupt's but the Pranksters'. The Prankster family, the Prankster order, superseded all straight-world ties, contracts and chattel laws and who is my mother or my brethren? And he looked round about on them which sat about him, and said, Behold my mother and my brethren! For whosoever shall do the will of G.o.d, the same is my brother, and my sister, and my mother.

And there was nothing left but the vision of the somb.i.t.c.h tooling up the Mexican National Highway, struggling on his Suzuki to haul.. . possessions back to New York. New York. So this was what he had built up the strength for. Six thousand freaking miles on a 250-pound motorcycle to seek out his electronic chattel and draggle it back, freaking Day-Glo in the sundown toward the border.

ABOUT 4,500 FEET AWAY, SANDY RESTED IN THE SHADOW Behind a big corrugated tin shed. Out in the open sun there-the runway of the Aguascalientes airport with brown Mexicans in coveralls lollygagging around. Sandy had been a man of his word, up to a given point, so to speak. He had gone a couple of blocks, like he said. Then he took a right and rode on over to the city airport and parked behind the shed ... and waited ... and was Kesey really so far into Now, such a master precognition, that he would shoot the Zen arrow ... or let him draw it, rather, and come straight there and ha.s.sle him upside the bus again and in that moment let him know irrevocably who has the Power, the control over his mind forever ...

Strangely, the paranoia lasted only for a twinge as he caught his breath in the shade. In fact, he was strangely calm, as if the chase were now over, rather than begun. He had done it. It had been his movie. He had drawn them into his scenario. Mike Hagen. "We-e-e-e-11," he had said. "I don't kno-o-o-ow. You know what the Chief says." He knew. He had been on the bus for three years. The trip had been liberation and captivity all at the same time, liberation, power, will, the greatest in the world-and whose will? The group mind's? Well, he had never had a dream war with the group mind, he had never been held in thrall by the group mind, he had never been subject to absolute judgment by the group mind, waiting for the one cryptic word that will say, It's O.K., Sandy.

Naturally he could never haul the big Ampex 3,000 miles on a motorcycle. It would be a little pile of gleaming whimsy, like one of Paul Foster's acid-bag transistor radios, by the time he reached the border, from the interminable bouncing. But he had that figured out. There was a Railway Express Agency in Aguas-calientes. He would take the Ampex over there and ship it to New York collect and ride back on the motorcycle free as a bird. Which he did.

A YEAR LATER I TALKED TO SANDY IN CENTRAL PARK, DOWN BY the edge of the lake near Central Park South. He looked good, strong, calm. He was going with a good-looking blonde whom I had met. He had a job as a sound engineer with one of the recording companies. We got to talking for a long time about his adventures with the Pranksters, and dusk came on, and we related what we had each heard of Kesey recently, and it started getting dark, so we got up and left the park. And in all of it Sandy spoke with warmth, about Kesey, about the whole experience, with no traces of rancor. It started getting dark and we got up and walked out of the park. Just before we parted, Sandy turned to me and said, "You know ... I'll always be on the bus."

"LEO! LEO! YOU ARE LEO, AREN'T YOU? DO YOU NOT KNOW ME any more? We were League brothers together and should still be so. We were both travelers on the journey to the East."

THE PRANKSTERS MOVED ON TO MEXICO CITY AND ENVIRONS, giving a couple of Acid Tests, but without any astounding gusto. American heads from the Ajijic-San Miguel de Allende-Mexico City Circuit gathered proudly-Yeah-I ran into Kesey and the Pranksters in Mexico and we all got stoned. A few Indians came and got taciturnly freaked.

Meanwhile, Kesey's lawyers were ha.s.sling with Mexico City immigration legals in Mexico City to see about getting him a proper visa for a long haul, and they blew hot and cool. And then cooler and cooler. They seemed to be followed, the Pranksters and the bus, by carloads of well-dressed Mexican dudes here and there. Stone saw more than anyone else but kept driving. Ca.s.sady hauling the bus over the Mexico tierras frias with his new goal up against now of going the length and breadth of Mexico without using the brakes and without stopping for anything, hauling off onto crumbling scrubroot shoulders rather than stop for carts or cars or animals, smoothing out his stroke, from the Joe Cuba spastokinetic jerk, the sudden straight lines, into a new line-the new line-Kesey can see it happening even in the eternal Ca.s.sady-but of course!-in him first of all-from Fire to Water, from the Stone Age into the Acid Age and in a moment-now- Furthur-

HAUL a.s.s, KESEY! IT WAS NOW TIME TO BRING THE FUTURE back to the U.S.A., back to San Francisco, and brazen it out with the cops and whatever else there. The Mexican legals were hinting at booting him out, maybe in a month, on the technicality of no visa. But the Rat lands were spent anyway. They had junked it through on the fabulous junk of Mexico. They had gorged it up. They had ... in truth, Major, there were no more spas to water at in the Rat lands.

The current fantasy was to take the Outlaw prank to its ultimate, be a Prankster Fugitive Extraordinaire in the Baskin-Robbins bosom of the U.S.A. You have never seen a Prankster Fugitive? Now watch that movie; draws you right in ...

Kesey had a good melodrama for going back in. Paint it big enough and bright enough, and they will never see you. He figured to sneak back in on the purloined-letter principle. If you are gross enough about the whole thing, they will never know it's you.

Kesey picked Brownsville, Texas, for the reentry. It was the easternmost entry point on the Mexican border, practically on the Gulf of Mexico, and the least likely spot for heads to pick to go back in at. Most of the heads used the western end, the Tijuana end, because they were going back to California.

So he put on a cowboy hat and just before the U.S. Customs and Immigration Station at Brownsville raunched into view, he rented a Mexican's swayback white horse and got on with his cowboy hat c.o.c.ked on crazily, playing a guitar and lolling his head around like he was drunk. He came cross the border lurching along on an old white horse as "Singing Jimmy Anglund."

"How long you been in Mexico?"

"Too d.a.m.n long."

"May I see your visa?"

"I don't have it."

"Where is it?"

Visa-how the h.e.l.l did he know. Came down to play a country & western show in that f.u.c.kin Matamoros, and be d.a.m.ned if they didn't get him drunk, them f.u.c.kin Mexes, their f.u.c.kin women and their margaritas, and they rolled his a.s.s in the streets of Matamoros, took his money and his papers, cleaned him out, and he got drunker and he stayed drunker in this G.o.dderned Mexico, bricked up his bowels with terra cotta, and him just a good old boy from Boise, Idaho, and that's where he's going back, no more Mexico, no more Las Vegas- "Have you got any identification?"