The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test Part 5

The Pranksters expected the Learyites to come rolling out of the house like the survivors of the siege of Khartoum. Instead-a couple of figures there on the lawn dart back into the house. The Pranksters stop in front and there is just the big house sitting there sepulchral and Gothic-and them jumping off the bus still yahooing and going like h.e.l.l. Finally a few souls materialize. Peggy Hitchc.o.c.k and Richard Alpert and Susan Metzner, the wife of Dr. Ralph Metzner, another leading figure in the Leary group. Alpert looks the bus up and down and shakes his head and says, "Ke-n-n-n Ke-e-e-esey ..." as if to say I might have known that you would be the author of this collegiate prank. They are friendly, but it is a mite ... cool here, friends. Maynard Ferguson, the jazz trumpet player, and his wife, Flo, are there, and they groove over the bus, but the others . . . there is a general. . . vibration ... of: We have something rather deep and meditative going on here, and you California crazies are a sour note.

Finally, Peggy Hitchc.o.c.k invites some of them over to her house, a big modern house, known as The Bungalow, off from the gingerbread manse. Babbs is one of them. Babbs and the Pranksters are not ready for a lazy afternoon in the country, meditative or not. Inside The Bungalow, Babbs came upon a big framed photograph on the wall, looking like a Yale cla.s.s picture from the year '03, a lot of young fellers seated, in tiers, in a clump and staring full-face at the camera.

"There's Ca.s.sady!" says Babbs.

"There's Ha.s.sler!"

"There's Kesey!"

"There's Sandy!"

They found every single man on the bus in the picture, while the Learyites looked on, tolerantly, and Babbs got the idea of "The Pranksters' Ancestral Mansion."

The Learyites were going to take them on a tour of the great gingerbread mansion, but it became Babbs's tour. He started leading it.

"Now ladies and gentlemen," he said, "we are embarked upon the first annual tour of the Pranksters' Ancestral Mansion. Now over here you may regard"-he points to a big lugubrious oil portrait, or something of the sort, up on the wall-"one of the Pranksters' great forefathers, sire and scion of the fabulous line, the fabulous lion, Sir Edward the Freak. Sir Edward the Freak, a joke in his own time. I've heard if he got aroused, he would freak a whole block of city, Sir Edward the Freak-"

-and so on, while the Learyites tagged along, looking more and more dour, as if they sensed disaster, Babbs looking more and more animated, rapping off everything, the ancestral staircase, the ancestral paneling, the ancestral fireplace, his rheostat eyes turning up to 300 watts- -then down to one of the four "meditation centers," little sanctums where the Learyites retreated for the serious business of meditation upon inner things- "-and now, for this part of our tour, the Crypt Trip-" And the Pranksters started rapping off the Crypt Trip, while Babbs entered into a parody rendition of The Tibetan Book of the Dead. This was one of the Learyites' most revered texts. "This is where we take our followers to hang them up when they're high," says Babbs, "the Crypt Trip." The clear message was f.u.c.k you, Mill-brook, for your freaking frostiness.

Other Pranksters were out playing under a little waterfall in the woods. Zonker's girl friend Kathy, whom he had picked up in New York, sat under the waterfall and the water pasted her bikini, or her bra and panties, or whatever it was she had on, pasted it most nicely to her body and Hagen filmed it. She became Sensuous X in the great movie.

Where was Leary? Everyone was waiting for the great meeting of Leary and Kesey.

Well, word came down that Leary was upstairs in the mansion engaged in a very serious experiment, a three-day trip, and could not be disturbed.

Kesey wasn't angry, but he was very disappointed, even hurt. It was unbelievable-this was Millbrook, one big piece of uptight constipation, after all this.

The Pranksters made a few more stabs at getting things going around Millbrook, but it seemed like everybody in the place was retreating to some corner or other. Finally they pulled out. Before they left, Kesey asked Alpert if he could get them some more acid. He said he couldn't, but he could give them some morning-glory seeds. Morning-glory seeds. The idea of morning-glory seeds sloshing around in your belly like a ptomaine bean bag while the bus bounced and shook and swayed and leaned out on the curves was more than a body could bear. So thanks anyway, and sayonara, you all, League for Spiritual Discovery.

chapter.

X.

Dream Wars

ON THE TRIP BACK WEST THEY TOOK THE NORTHERN ROUTE, through Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, South Dakota- South Dakota! 191 miles in South Dakota ...

-which made it all cooler, for a start... In fact, the trip back was a psychic Cadillac, a creamy groove machine, and they soon found themselves grooving in a group mind. Now they could leave behind all the mind-blown freaky binds and just keep going Furthur! on the bus. For example, Zonker meant to stay in New York but he went back with them. He couldn't break off from the group mind takeoff that had begun, the Unspoken Thing, the all-in-one ... He brought with him his gorgeous blond telepathic girl friend Kathy, who felt at once the careening, crazydreaming, creamy bobbing rhythm of the bus and became at once recklessly and infectiously and insenescibly and ultra-infra-s.e.xily one of them: most sinuous Prankstress in their ranks. The Pranksters named her Sensuous X, glowing girl friend resolutely going ... Furthur ... Kesey laid eyes on the Sensuous horizon-loved it! On the bus. Next, she became Zonker's sensuous ex-lost her! On the bus. At first Zonker's mad, feels he's been had-affront! But then thanks to his feeling for the Prankster experiment, he sees nothing to resent. There can be no hard feelings when one is dealing totally out front on the bus.

There was very little LSD left, so they were taking mostly speed and gra.s.s, soaring through the Northlands, on Speed. For Sandy-at Millbrook a Main Guru had taken Sandy and Jane aside and confided: It would be good if you took the Millbrook trip alone ... meaning, probably, without your obstreperous companions, i.e., off the bus, and Sandy had... Dis-Mounted again and returned to Millbrook, with Jane, and the Main Guru turned him on to DMT, a 30-minute trip like LSD but with a fierce roan-mad intensity-fragments! Sandy had a mad sense of the world torn apart into stained-gla.s.s shards behind his eyelids. No matter what he did, eyes open, eyes shut, the world erupted into electric splinters and the Main Guru said, "I wish to enter your metaphysical soul." But to Sandy-paranoia!-he seemed like a randy-painted lulu bent on his rectococcygeal shoals, a randy boy-enjoyer, while the world exploded and there was no antidote for this rocketing, rocketing, rocketing, rocketing... They returned to New York and Jane disembarked from the bus, stayed behind, but Sandy felt impelled to ride it out on the bus with the rest of the Pranksters, heading west, rocketing, rocketing, rocketing, rocketing Furthur ... And now in the Midwest it ' was as if the DMT trip at Millbrook had been the last stage of a rocket and his whole psyche was now committed to speed and motion, and it was necessary to keep soaring through the Northlands. Certain vibrations of the bus would trip his brain somehow and suddenly bring back the sensation of the rocketing DMT trip and it would be necessary to speed up and keep moving. The sweet wheatfields and dairy lands of America would be sailing by beauty rural green and curving, and Sandy is watching the serene beauty of it... and then he happens to look into the big rear-view mirror outside the bus and-the fields are-in flames :::::::: curve and curdle straight up in hideous orange flames ::::: So he whips his head around and looks way back as far as he can see and over over to the horizon and it is nothing but flat and sweet and green again, sailing by serene. Then he looks back into the mirror-and the flames shoot up again, soaring, corn and lespedeza turning brown like burning color film when the projector is too hot and bursting into flames, corn, wheat, lespedeza turning into brown scouring rush, death cama.s.s, bloodwort, wild iris, blue flag, grease wood, poison sucklyea, monkshood mandrake, moonseed, fitweed, locoweed, tumble mustard, spurge nettle, coyote tobacco, crab's eye bursting into flames-a sea of flames-a mirror with a sea of flames, Narcissus, Moon, twins, thesis and anti-thesis, infirmity of life, as if he is forced to endure at any moment the visual revelation of a pa-leopsychic mystery-and Sandy looks away and forces himself not to look toward the rearview mirror and once again just sun and the green belly of America sailing by . ..

... serene. Certain things worked smoothly on every level. They knew how to run the bus better, for one thing, even though Ca.s.sady had had to go back ahead of time by car with Ha.s.sler, who had to report back to Fort Ord. The Pranksters took turns driving. Getting food, copping urinations, shooting the movie, making tapes-they managed it all like a team. Once a few minor personal ha.s.sles were worked out-out front-and the bus crossed the Mississippi, and they were way out West-then it all merged into the Group Mind and became very psychic . . .

Intersubjectivity!

.. . Sandy himself wheeling the bus through dour Roosian South Dakota with cold shadows sweeping over the green and golden gra.s.slands. No sea of flames now, just a green and gold sea, serene, coming from out of the stream of the Northlands themselves-and sleep means nothing, because there is no time, only Now, a perfect experience in the perfect momentum set perfectly by his foot on the accelerator-for 191 miles he drove, by the speedometer. Then he goes to the back of the bus and there up on the ceiling is a map of the U.S. pasted up there, and-see!-there is a red line on the map, leaping out on, and it is exactly those 191 miles he drove, glowing on the ceiling of the bus. He looks around, starts asking, very excited-and Sensuous X said she made the line- "Why!"

Sensuous doesn't know. No why to it. She just had the crayon and that was where the line went- -but no need to explain. Telepathic Kathy ! Just one line, one current, running through the entire bus. Group Mind, and Cosmic Control, on the bus ...

Then the bus heads up into Canada, to Calgary, to catch the Calgary Stampede. The unquenchable Hagen of the Screw Shack prowls the Stampede for ginch ahoof and comes back to the bus with nice little girl with lips as raunchy as a swig of grape soda, tender in age but ne'mind, ready to go, and she is on the bus, christened Anonymous, down to her bra and panties, which she prefers. The call goes out to the Canadian Royal Mounties for the runaway, or stowaway, the little girl from the Stampede, and they stop the bus in the road check- -Why, come right on in, officers, take a look around- -while Hagen grinds the camera at them- -while the Head Mountie rereads the long description, five feet two, dark hair, etc., and checks out Sensuous X and Gretch and Anonymous in the window- -Anonymous reads the description over the Mountie's shoulder, perched up at the window, and laughs merrily at such a funny-sounding girl-she by now having her face all painted up in Prankster designs and half her grape-soda body as well so that she doesn't look too much like the pretty helpless waif Grandma described to the Mounties, and the Mounties wave them by and peer on down the road for the next.

Next down to Boise, Idaho, and everywhere Kesey and Babbs up top the bus with flutes, mercilessly tootling the people of America as they crowd around the bus and getting pretty good at it even. Winces here and there as some little cringing sh.e.l.l in the population pinioned in his crispy black shiny shoes knows, no mistake, that it is him they have singled out-they are playing my song, the desperate sound track from my movie-and Kesey and Babbs score again and again, like the legendary Zen archers, for they no longer play their music at people but inside them. They play inside them, oh merciless flow. And many things are clear in the flow. They are above the mult.i.tudes, looking down from the Furthur heights of the bus, and the billion eyes of America glisten at them like electric kernels, and yet the Pranksters are grooving with this whole wide-screen America and going with its flow with American flags flying from the bus and taking energy, as in solar heat, from its horsepower and its neon and there is no limit to the American trip. Bango!-that's it!-the trouble with Leary and his group is that they have turned back. But of course! They have turned back into that old ancient New York intellectual thing, ducked back into the romantic past, copped out of the American trip. New York intellectuals have always looked for . .. another country, a fatherland of the mind, where it is all better and more philosophic and purer, gadget-free, and simpler and pedigreed: France or England, usually-oh, the art of living, in France, boys. The Learyites have done the same thing, only with them it's-India-the East-with all the ancient flap-doodle of Gautama Buddha or the Rig-Veda blowing in like mildew, and Leary calls for blue gra.s.s growing in the streets of New York, and he decrees that everyone should have such a dwelling place of such pristine antique decor, with everyone hunkered down amid straw rugs and Paisley wall hangings, that the Gautama Buddha himself from 485 B.C. could walk in and feel at home instantly. Above all, keep quiet, for G.o.d's sake, hold it down, whisper, moan, mumble, meditate, and for chris-sake, no gadgets-no tapes, video tapes, TV, movies, Hagstrom electric ba.s.ses, variable lags, American flags, no neon, Buick Electras, mad moonstone-faced Servicenters, and no manic buses, f r chrissake, soaring, doubledyclutch doubledyclutch, to the Westernmost edge- And in Boise they cut through a funeral or wedding or something, so many dressed-up people in the sun gawking at Pranksters gathered at a fountain and all cutting up in the sunspots, and a kid-they have tootled his song, and he likes it, and he runs for the bus and they all pile on and pull out, just ahead of him, and he keeps running for the bus, and Kesey keeps slowing down and then pulling out just out of his reach, six or eight blocks this way, and then they speed up for good, and they can still see him floating away in the background, his legs still running, like a preview- -allegory of life!- -of the mult.i.tudes who very shortly will want to get on the bus . . . themselves . . .

Back at Kesey's in La Honda, Deep into the rusky-dusky neon dusty, More synched in than They had ever been, Deep into the Unspoken Thing, The Pranksters now aligned Along a sheerly dividing line: Before the bus and After the bus, On the bus or Off the bus, A sheerly Diluvial divide: Did you take the Epoch Ride?

One-way ticket into the nirvana thickets Of the ex redwood cathedra Unspoken Thing.

Most peaceful synching in, Serene baccha.n.a.l For all...

... except Sandy. For Sandy, the bus had stopped but he hadn't. It was as if the bus had hit a wall and he had shot out the window and was living in the suspended interminable moment before he hit-what? He didn't know. All he knew was that there would be a crash unless the momentum of the Pranksters suddenly resumed and caught up with him the way the Flash, in the Pranksters' ubiquitous comic books, caught speeding bullets by streaking at precisely their speed and reaching out and picking them up like eggs...

Sandy went about wide-eyed and nervous, an endless ratchet of activity that no one quite comprehended at first. The bus was parked out in front of the log house and Kesey would be inside the bus doing something and Sandy, outside the door, would suddenly begin arguing with him over some esoteric point of the sound system. Kesey was keeping the tapes on a hick level, he was saying. Kesey was, like, rustling cellophane in front of a microphone for "fire," and so forth and so on. So many complaints! Until Kesey puts his arms up on the walls of the bus in the Christ on the Cross gesture-which is precisely what one of Sandy's brothers used to do when he started complaining-and this drives Sandy into a rage and he yells f.u.c.k you! and gives Kesey the finger. Kesey streaks out of the door of the bus and pins Sandy up against the side of the bus-and it is all over as fast as that. Sandy is overwhelmed. He has never seen Kesey use his tremendous strength against anyone before, and it is overwhelming, the idea of it even. But it is all over in no time. Kesey is suddenly calm again and asks Sandy to come with him to the backhouse, the shack by the creek. He wants to talk to him.

So they go out there and Kesey talks to Sandy about Sandy's att.i.tude. Sandy is still Dis-mount, still getting off the bus continually, and why? You don't understand, says Sandy. You don't understand my dis-mounting. It's like climbing a mountain. Would you rather climb the mountain or have a helicopter deposit you on the top? The continual climb, the continual remounting, makes it a richer experience, and so on. Kesey nods in a somewhat abstracted way and says O.K., Sandy ...

But Sandy feels paranoid . .. what do they really think of him? What are they planning? What insidious prank? He can't get it out of his mind that they are building up to some prank of enormous proportions, at his expense. A Monstrous Prank ... He can't sleep, his brain keeps going at the furious speed of the bus on the road, like an eternal trip on speed.

Then Kesey devised a game called "Power." He took a dart-board and covered it with Masonite and put a spinner in the middle and marked off spoke lines forming one section for each Prankster. Each person's Prankster name was written in his section, Intrepid Traveler for Babbs, Mai Function for Hagen, Speed Limit for Ca.s.sady, Ha.s.sler for Ron Bevirt, Gretchen Fetchin for Paula-in truth, her old name and persona were gone entirely and she was now a new person known as Gretchen Fetchin or Gretch. Sandy looked and in his section it said: "dis-MOUNT," with the heavy accent on Mount, even as he had explained it to Kesey in the backhouse. He was overwhelmed with relief and grat.i.tude. Kesey knew! Kesey understood! He was back in the bus.

Everybody was to write out some "tasks" on slips of paper and they would all be put in a big pile. Then the spinner was spun, and if it landed on you, you reached into the pile and pulled out a "task," which you then had to do, and the others gave you points according to how well you had done the task, on a scale of one to five points, five being the best. A lot of the tasks were very pranked-up, like "put on an article of somebody else's clothing." There was a scoreboard and everybody moved his counter up the scoreboard as he picked up points. Everybody made his own counter. Sandy was making his out of Sculpt Metal. He stretched it to a long spidery length, then suddenly compressed it into an ugly wad, because that was the way he was beginning to feel. So Page picked it up and made a nice little form out of it, like a bridge, and everybody said that's the way it should be done-and Sandy feels the paranoia coming back ...

The prize for winning was: Power. Thirty minutes of absolute power in which your word was law and everyone had to do whatever you wanted. Very allegorical, this game. By and by Babbs won a game and he ordered everybody to bring everything they possessed into the living room. Everybody went forth and hauled in all their stuff, out to the bedrooms, tents, Kampers, sleeping bags, the bus, and brought in a ragam.u.f.fin mountain of clothes, shoes, boots, toys, paint pots, toothbrushes, books, boxes, capsules, stashes, letters, litter, junk. It was all piled up in the center of the room, a marvelous Rat mountain of junk. "Now," said Babbs, "we redistribute the wealth." And he would hold up some piece of it and say, "Who wants one 1964 Gretchen Fetchin toothbrush?" and somebody would hold up his hand and it would go to him and somebody else would catalogue it all solemnly on a legal pad.

Then the pointer hits Sandy and he picks up a task, a slip of paper. It is in Gretch's handwriting, and it says: "Go out and build a fire." He reads it out loud and just keeps staring at it. Then they all stare at him, waiting for him to get up and go out and build a fire, and he feels them staring and then he knows-it is a very clever plot to get him out of the house, get him outside in the dark, and then pull the Monstrous Prank- And he starts blurting it all out. / can't do it. Can't you see how it is? It's getting awful-/ can't sleep and everything is like this: He lays the fingers of one hand over the fingers of the other, forming a trellis pattern, and peers through the s.p.a.ces in between to show how everything keeps breaking up, fragmenting, his whole field of vision, ever since the DMT trip at Millbrook, and the sea of flames and the paranoia, the everlasting paranoia, he blurts it all out, everything that is hanging him up and rocketing him toward-what?

And suddenly it is very quiet in the log house. Every Prankster eye is upon him, absorbed, giving him total... Attention, He has come all the way out front. The furious motion stops, and he suddenly feels :::: peace.

"How many points do we give him?" says Kesey.

And around the circle everyone says "Five!" "Five!" "Five!" "Five!" "Five!"- "Three," says Gretch, who had written the task in the first place-and Sandy-a small microgram of paranoia creeps back in like a mite...

THE PRANKSTERS NOW REALIZED THAT SANDY WAS IN A BAD way. Kesey had a saying, "Feed the hungry bee." So the Pranksters set about showering . . . Attention on Sandy, to try to give him a feeling of being at the cool center of the whole thing. But he kept misinterpreting their gestures. Why are they staring? His insomnia became more and more severe. One night he walked down the road to the housing development, Redwood Terrace, to try to borrow some Sominex. He was just going to walk up to a door in the middle of the night and knock and ask for some Sominex. Somehow he had the old New York apartment-house idea that you walk down the hall and borrow a cup of sugar, even if you don't know the people. So he starts knocking on doors and asking for Sominex. Of course, they all either panic and shut the door or tell him to f.u.c.k off. The people of Redwood Terrace were a little paranoid themselves by this time about the crazies down the road at Kesey's.

By day it was no better. As his insomnia got worse, he started having more fragmented vision and finally ... he looks at the wild-painted bus and the lurid chaos of the swirls changes into ... the tunnel ! A tunnel they had gone through, a long tunnel, in which he had been possessed by intense claustrophobia and the paranoid certainty that they would never emerge from the tunnel, and now the tunnel appears on the side of the bus in horrifying detail. He turns away ... there is the cool limelit bower, cathedral in the redwoods, serenity... he turns back to the bus slowly :::::::: IT IS STILL THERE! THE TUNNEL! ::::: THE BUS! ::::: Now PAINTED AS IF BY A MASTER, A VERY t.i.tIAN :::: AN HIERONYMUS BOSCH :::: A MATTHIAS GRuNEWALD :::: WITH THE MOST HORRIFYING SCENES OF MY LIFE.

SALVATION? KESEY ANNOUNCES THEY ARE GETTING BACK ON the bus-moving again-and going up to Esalen Inst.i.tute up in Big Sur, four hours drive to the south. Esalen was an "experiment in living," as they say, a sort of Roughin-it resort perched on a cliff about 1,000 feet above the Pacific. A very dramatic piece of Nature, in the nineteenth-century seascape fashion. Waves crashing way down below and sparkling air way up here and a view of half the world, mountains, ocean, sky, the whole show, in a word, for which Big Sur is famous. There was a lodge and a swimming pool and a stretch of greensward out to the edge of the cliff and some hot sulphur springs about 100 yards away, also perched on the side of a cliff, in which one could bathe and gaze out over the eternal ocean. Behind the lodge were rows of tiny cabins and a few trailers. These were for the clientele. The clients-well, to put it simply, Esalen was a place where educated middle-cla.s.s adults came in the summer to try to get out of The Rut and wiggle their fannies a bit.

The main theoretician at Esalen was a Gestalt psychologist named Fritz Perls. Perls was a great goateed man in his seventies who went about in a jump suit made of blue terrycloth. He had the air of a very learned, dignified, and authoritative blue bear. Perls was the father of the Now Trip. His theory was that most people live fantasy lives. They live totally in the past or in terms of what they expect in the future, which amounts to fear, generally. Perls tried to teach his patients, pupils, and the clients at Esalen to live Now for a change, in the present, to become aware of their bodies and all the information their senses brought them, to shelve their fears and seize the moment. They went through "marathon encounters," in which a group stayed together for days and brought everything out front, no longer hiding behind custom, saying what they really felt-shouts, accusations, embraces, tears-a perfect delight, of course: "You want to know what I really think of you ..." One of the exercises at Esalen was the Now Trip exercise, in which you try to catalogue the information your senses are bringing you in the present moment. You make a rapid series of statements beginning with the word "Now": "Now I feel the wind cooling the perspiration on my forehead ... Now I hear a bus coming up the drive in low gear ... Now I hear a Beatles record playing over a loudspeaker ..."

A bus? A Beatles record? The Pranksters are here, Now Trippers. Kesey had been invited to Esalen to conduct a seminar ent.i.tled "A Trip with Ken Kesey." n.o.body had quite counted on the entire fully wired and wailing Prankster ensemble, however. The clientele at Esalen had come a long way in a few weeks and many were beginning to peek over the edge of The Rut. And what they saw ... it could be scary out there in Freedomland. The Pranksters were friendly, but they glowed in the dark. They pranked about like maniacs in the serene Hot Springs. Precious few signed up for a trip with Ken Kesey, even in seminar form. Sandy, meanwhile, was swinging wildly from feelings of paranoia to feelings of G.o.dly . . . Power. And the trip was always the bus. One moment it was covered with the Hieronymus Bosch scenes of his most private h.e.l.l. The next-he controls the bus. One night he discovers he can unpaint the bus just by staring at it. He has psychokinetic powers. His stare bears the power of life or death. The waves crash below the Esalen cliff-and he stares at the bus and... unpaints it. He strips one whole side down to its original sunny school-bus yellow. The whole Prankster overlay is gone. A trick of the mind? He looks away, out over the Pacific and at the stars-then swings back suddenly toward the bus ::::: IT IS STILL UNPAINTED :::: STILL VIRGIN SCHOOL-BUS YELLOW.

He has the power-but can it ward off the Monstrous Prank ? The Pranksters take the bus into Monterey to see a movie, The Night of the Iguana. He sits in the back of the bus, so he can watch them. If any of them tries anything, with one stare he can ... They go into the theater and he lags behind, then sits several rows behind them. To keep an eye out... There is a Tom and Jerry cartoon on the screen. The mouse, Jerry, tricks the cat, Tom, and the cat goes off a cliff and hits, flattened in an explosion of eyeb.a.l.l.s, thousands of eyeb.a.l.l.s. Everyone is laughing, but to Sandy it is sickening, incredibly brutal. He jumps up and runs out of the theater and wanders around Monterey for an hour and a half or so. Then he wanders back to the theater, and Hagen is standing outside.

"Where the h.e.l.l have you been? Kesey is looking all over for you.

Sandy runs back into the theater. Kesey! He looks up on the screen-and the mouse, Jerry, tricks the cat, Tom, and the cat goes off a cliff and hits, flattened in an explosion of eyeb.a.l.l.s, thousands of eyeb.a.l.l.s... Sandy flees again. Kesey is now waiting outside. He coaxes Sandy on to the bus and they head back to Esalen.

Back in Esalen, in his cabin, Sandy falls half asleep into ... DREAM WARS! It is his Power vs. Kesey's, like Dr. Strange vs. Aggamon, and one of them will kill the other in the Dream War ... He exerts the utmost psychic energy ... opens his eyes and makes out a machine in the cabin-a heater? It looks like a heater but it is Kesey's death instrument, and in that moment the thermostat turns on the machine and a tiny red light comes on--Kesey's ray gun-has triumphed, filled him, and Sandy falls off the bed, dead, lying on the floor, and he leaves his body in astral projection and sails out over the Pacific, out from the Esalen cliff, out for 40 or 50 miles, soaring, and the wind goes in gusts, huhhhh-hhnnnhh, huhhhhhhhhhnnnh, huhhhhhhhhhnnnh, and he is the wind, not even a compact spirit flying but a totally diffuse being, dissolved in the upper ethers, and he can see the whole moonlit ocean and Esalen way back there. Then he comes to, and he is on the floor of the cabin, breathing hard, huhhhhhhhhnnnh, huhhhh-hhhhhnnh, huhhhhhhhnnnh.

"San-dy! San-dy! San-dy!"-daylight, and they're outside the cabin, calling him, the Pranksters... what Monstrous Prank?- In fact, Kesey had instructed the Pranksters to give Sandy total Attention to try to bring him around, to put him at the center of everything. Sandy comes out, sees them staring but takes it for glowers and aggression . .. Nevertheless-on to the bus, and they ride out along Big Sur in the sunlight. Kesey and the Pranksters have prepared a long Sandy doc.u.ment, twelve pages of text and drawings, very fanciful, like a psychic brief, bringing all of Sandy's fears out front and dispelling them in camaraderie-and it begins to work. Then as they roll along the cliff highway Kesey takes Sandy up on top of the bus for a Now Trip. They sit up there in the sun with the wind streaming by and Kesey is grooving off the designs on the hood of the bus: "Now I see the green snake form going into the red and the edge of it melts into ..." and so forth, and Sandy grooves off Kesey's Now Trip-Kesey!-Total Attention!-and it is like he is coming around at last, he feels on the bus again. And then he decides to take Kesey on a Now Trip, sailing along the cliff highway. "Now," says Sandy, "I see the ocean like a sheet of ice slanting in toward the sh.o.r.e . .. Now I see three suns..."-in truth! the vibration of the bus has thrown him into the DMT reaction. He gets a triple image from the vibration and shaking of the bus, but instead of refocusing on one sun, he keeps seeing three. Kesey looks up at the sky, and says, "Yeah, yeah," grooving with it, which makes Sandy feel very good . . .

But then nighttime. "San-dy! San-dy!" They're trying to coax him out of the cabin again. For-what? Why, the Monstrous Prank, naturally, but... he has Power. Outside-they have candles, the Pranksters do, and they're beginning a candlelight march down a path in a ravine that cuts down through the cliff, all the way to the water's edge. For-what? Why, the Monst-But then Kesey's wife, Faye, comes up very silent and smiling and loving and gives him a candle and lights it, and Faye is like complete honesty and love, so he starts off, following them down the path, holding candles, while the surf booms up the ravine from below. Why do they want him to join this spooky procession? Why, for the most Monstrous Prank of all-to kill him at the water's edge, but he has the power-the candle dims in the wind, and then comes back up, burning full-but it is not the wind, it is Sandy-he can make it shrink and dim down just by staring at it, psychokinesis, then draw it back up, all with his mind, he can control the flame utterly, and it can control him, for they are one and the same, G.o.d, and he trudges down the ravine, becoming more and more powerful-but a girl named Lola has stopped ahead of him. He draws closer and she has a candle and is tilting it so that the wax drips on her fingers and she is grooving over the wax dripping over her fingers and grinning, and her hand, in wax, turns white and dead, a skeleton, and her grin, lit from beneath by the candle, turns waxy and zombie - THE DEATH STARTS HERE - and Sandy bolts, charging back up the ravine- -not knowing that the whole procession had been set up as a ceremony of love, a love trip, for him, to bring him around, a candlelit celebration of Sandy down by the water- -but he is long gone, running down the cliff highway now, toward Monterey, running until his lungs give out, then walking, then running up to the lights in the houses on the cliffs over the water, Big Sur summer places, and knocking on the door, screaming incoherently about jumping off the cliffs; until the police come. Gotcha! Which is a joke, because he can annihilate them any moment he chooses, with a psychokinetic ray- They put him in the back seat, streaking down Route 1 toward Monterey, wheeling around the curves, faster and faster- "Don't go so fast!" Sandy says.

"What?"

"Don't go so fast!"

"Listen," the cop says. "I'll slow down if you stop staring at the back of my head."

"Ahhhhhh."

"Look out the window or something. Look at the scenery. Stop staring at the back of my head."

So he takes his eyes out of the back of the cop's skull. Two fever hole depressions. Another moment-

THE MONTEREY POLICE HELD HIM IN THE JAIL IN MONTEREY until his brother Chris could get there from New York. Chris ran into Kesey at the jail. We've got to get him out of here, said Kesey. What do you mean? We've got to get him back where he belongs, with the Pranksters. Chris took Sandy back to New York for treatment. It was a long time before Chris knew what in the h.e.l.l Kesey had been talking about.

chapter.

XI.

The Unspoken Thing

HOW TO TELL IT! . . . THE CURRENT FANTASY ... I NEVER heard any of the Pranksters use the word religious to describe the mental atmosphere they shared after the bus trip and the strange days in Big Sur. In fact, they avoided putting it into words. And yet- They got on the bus and headed back to La Honda in the old Big Sur summertime, all frozen sunshine up here, and no one had to say it: they were all deep into some weird s.h.i.t now, as they would just as soon call it by way of taking the curse . . . off the Unspoken Thing. Things were getting very psychic. It was like when Sandy drove 191 miles in South Dakota and then he had looked up at the map on the ceiling of the bus and precisely those 191 miles were marked in red ... Sandy : : : : : back in Brain Scan country the White Smocks would never in a million years comprehend where he had actually been ... which was where they all were now, also known as Edge City ... Back in Kesey's log house in La Honda, all sitting around in the evening in the main room, it's getting cool outside, and Page Browning: I think I'll close the window-and in that very moment another Prankster gets up and closes it for him and smi-i-i-i-les and says nothing . .. The Unspoken Thing-and these things keep happening over and over. They take a trip up into the High Sierras and Ca.s.sady pulls the bus off the main road and starts driving up a little mountain road-see where she goes. The road is so old and deserted the pavement is half broken up and they keep climbing and twisting up into nowhere, but the air is nice, and up at the top of the grade the bus begins bucking and gulping and won't pull any more. It just stops. It turns out they're out of gas, which is a nice situation because it's nightfall and they're stranded totally h.e.l.l west of nowhere with not a gas station within thirty, maybe fifty miles. Nothing to do but stroke themselves out on the bus and go to sleep ... hmmmmmm ... scorpions with boots on red TWA Royal Amba.s.sador slumber slippers on his big Stinger Howard Hughes in a sleeping bag on the floor in a marble penthouse in the desert DAWN.

All wake up to a considerable fetching and hauling and grinding up the grade below them and over the crest comes a CHEVRON.

gasoline tanker, a huge monster of a tanker. Which just stops like they all met somewhere before and gives them a tankful of gas and without a word heads on into the Sierras toward absolutely NOTHING.

Babbs-Cosmic control, eh Ha.s.sler!

And Kesey-Where does it go? I don't think man has ever been there. We're under cosmic control and have been for a long long time, and each time it builds, it's bigger, and it's stronger. And then you find out... about Cosmo, and you discover that he's running the show. ..

The Unspoken Thing; Kesey's role and the whole direction the Pranksters were taking-all the Pranksters were conscious of it, but none of them put it into words, as I say. They made a point of not putting it into words. That in itself was one of the unspoken rules. If you label it this, then it can't be that... Kesey took great pains not to make his role explicit. He wasn't the authority, somebody else was: "Babbs says..." "Page says..." He wasn't the leader, he was the "non-navigator." He was also the non-teacher. "Do you realize that you're a teacher here?" Kesey says, "Too much, too much," and walks away... Kesey's explicit teachings were all cryptic, metaphorical; parables, aphorisms: "You're either on the bus or off the bus." "Feed the hungry bee," "Nothing lasts," "See with your ears and hear with your eyes," "Put your good where it will do the most," "What did the mirror say? It's done with people." To that extent it was like Zen Buddhism, with the inscrutable koans, in which the novice says, "What is the secret of Zen?" and Hui-neng the master says, "What did your face look like before your parents begat you?" To put it into so many words, to define it, was to limit it. If it's this, then it can't be that... Yet there it was! Everyone had his own thing he was working out, but it all fit into the group thing, which was-"the Unspoken Thing," said Page Browning, and that was as far as anyone wanted to go with words.

For that matter, there was no theology to it, no philosophy, at least not in the sense of an ism. There was no goal of an improved moral order in the world or an improved social order, nothing about salvation and certainly nothing about immortality or the life hereafter. Hereafter! That was a laugh. If there was ever a group devoted totally to the here and now it was the Pranksters. I remember puzzling over this. There was something so... religious in the air, in the very atmosphere of the Prankster life, and yet one couldn't put one's finger on it. On the face of it there was just a group of people who had shared an unusual psychological state, the LSD experience- But exactly! The experience-that was the word! and it began to fall into place. In fact, none of the great founded religions, Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, Jainism, Judaism, Zoroastrian-ism, Hinduism, none of them began with a philosophical framework or even a main idea. They all began with an overwhelming new experience, what Joachim Wach called "the experience of the holy," and Max Weber, "possession of the deity," the sense of being a vessel of the divine, of the All-one. I remember I never truly understood what they were talking about when I first read of such things. I just took their weighty German word for it. Jesus, Mani, Zoroaster, Gautama Buddha-at the very outset the leader did not offer his circle of followers a better state hereafter or an improved social order or any reward other than a certain "psychological state in the here and now," as Weber put it. I suppose what I never really comprehended was that he was talking about an actual mental experience they all went through, an ecstasy, in short. In most cases, according to scriptures and legend, it happened in a flash. Mohammed fasting and meditating on a mountainside near Mecca and--flash!-ecstasy, vast revelation and the beginning of Islam. Zoroaster hauling haoma water along the road and--flash!-he runs into the flaming form of the Archangel Vohu Mano, messenger of Ahura Mazda, and the beginning of Zoroastrianism. Saul of Tarsus walking along the road to Damascus and-flash!-he hears the voice of the Lord and becomes a Christian. Plus G.o.d knows how many lesser figures in the 2,000 years since then, Christian Rosenkreuz and his "G.o.d-illuminated" brotherhood of Rosicrucians, Emanuel Swedenborg whose mind suddenly "opened" in 1743, Meister Eck-hart and his disciples Suso and Tauler, and in the twentieth-century Sadhu Sundar Singh-with-flash!-a vision at the age of 16 and many times thereafter; ".. . often when I come out of ecstasy I think the whole world must be blind not to see what I see, everything is so near and clear ... there is no language which will express the things which I see and hear in the spiritual world ..." Sounds like an acid head, of course. What they all saw in... a flash was the solution to the basic predicament of being human, the personal I, Me, trapped, mortal and helpless, in a vast impersonal It, the world around me. Suddenly!-All-in-one!-flowing together, I into It, and It into Me, and in that flow I perceive a power, so near and so clear, that the whole world is blind to. All the modern religions, and the occult mysteries, for that matter, talk about an Other World-whether Brahma's or the flying saucers'-that the rational work-a-day world is blind to. The-so called! friends-rational world. If only they, Mom&Dad&Buddy&Sis, dear-but-square ones, could but know the pairos, the supreme moment... The historic visions have been explained in many ways, as the result of epilepsy, self-hypnosis, changes in metabolism due to fasting, or actual intervention by G.o.ds-or drugs: Zoroastrianism began in a grand bath of haoma water, which was the same as the Hindu soma, and was unquestionably a drug. The experience!

And following the experience-after I got to know the Pranksters, I went back and read Joachim Wach's paradigm of the way religions are founded, written in 1944, and it was almost like a piece of occult precognition for me if I played it off against what I knew about the Pranksters: Following a profound new experience, providing a new illumination of the world, the founder, a highly charismatic person, begins enlisting disciples. These followers become an informally but closely knit a.s.sociation, bound together by the new experience, whose nature the founder has revealed and interpreted. The a.s.sociation might be called a circle, indicating that it is oriented toward a central figure with whom each of the followers is in intimate contact. The followers may be regarded as the founder's companions, bound to him by personal devotion, friendship and loyalty. A growing sense of solidarity both binds the members together and differentiates them from any other form of social organization. Membership in the circle requires a complete break with the ordinary pursuits of life and a radical change in social relationships. Ties of family and kinship and loyalties of various kinds were at least temporarily relaxed or severed. The hardships, suffering and persecution that loomed for those who cast their lot with the group were counterbalanced by their high hopes and firm expectations ... and so on. And of the founder himself: he has "visions, dreams, trances, frequent ecstasies" ... "unusual sensitiveness and an intense emotional life" ... "is ready to interpret manifestations of the divine" . . . "there is something elemental about [him], an uncompromising att.i.tude and an archaic manner and language" . . . "He appears as a renewer of lost contracts with the hidden powers of life" .. . "does not usually come from the aristocracy, the learned or refined; frequently he emerges from simpler folk and remains true to his origin even in a changed environment" ... "speaks cryptically, with words, signs, gestures, many metaphors, symbolic acts of a diverse nature" . .. "illuminates and interprets the past and antic.i.p.ates the future in terms of the kairos (the supreme moment)"- The kairos!-the experience!

-in one of two ways, according to Max Weber: as an "ethical" prophet, like Jesus or Moses, who outlines rules of conduct for his followers and describes G.o.d as a super-person who pa.s.ses judgment on how they live up to the rules. Or as an "exemplary" prophet, like Buddha: for him, G.o.d is impersonal, a force, an energy, a unifying flow, an All-in-one. The exemplary prophet does not present rules of conduct. He presents his own life as an example for his followers . . .

In all these religious circles, the groups became tighter and tighter by developing their own symbols, terminology, life styles, and, gradually, simple cultic practices, rites, often involving music and art, all of which grew out of the new experience and seemed weird or incomprehensible to those who have never had it. At that point they would also ... "develop a strong urge to extend the message to all people."

... all people ... Within the religious circle, status was always a simple matter. The world was simply and sheerly divided into "the aware," those who had had the experience of being vessels of the divine, and a great ma.s.s of "the unaware," "the unmusical," the unattuned." Or: you're either on the bus or off the bus. Consciously, the Aware were never sn.o.bbish toward the Unaware, but in fact most of that great jellyfish blob of straight souls looked like hopeless cases-and the music of your flute from up top the bus just brought them up tighter. But these groups treated anyone who showed possibilities, who was a potential brother, with generous solicitude ...

. . . THE POTENTIALLY ATTUNED . . . BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE started showing up at Kesey's in La Honda, and no one was turned away. They could stay there, live there, if they ...seemed attuned. Mountain Girl was waiting out front of Kesey's house when the bus came around the last bend on Route 84 and into the redwood gorge. Mountain Girl was a big brunette with a black motorcycle, wearing a T-shirt and dungarees. She was only 18 but big, about five-foot-nine, and heavy; and loud and sloppy, as far as that went. But it was funny ... she had beautiful teeth and a smile that lit up one's gizzard ... Her name was Carolyn Adams, but she became Mountain Girl right away. As far as I know, n.o.body ever called her anything else after that, until the police got technical about it nine months later with her and eleven other Pranksters...

Ca.s.sady had turned Mountain Girl on to Kesey's place. She had been working as a technician in a biological laboratory in Palo Alto. She had a boyfriend who-well, he probably thought of himself as a "beatnik" in his square hip way. Only he never did anything, this boyfriend of hers. They never went anywhere. They never went out. So she went out by herself. She ended up one night in St. Michael's Alley, one of Palo Alto's little boho rookeries, at a birthday party for Ca.s.sady. Ca.s.sady said over the mountain and down under the redwoods was where it was at.

Mountain Girl was a big hit with the Pranksters from the very start. She seemed always completely out front, without the slightest prompting. She was one big loud charge of vitality. Here comes Mountain Girl-and it was a thing that made you pick up, as soon as you saw her mouth broaden into a grin and her big brown eyes open, open, open, open until they practically exploded like sunspots in front of your eyes and you knew that wonderful countryfied voice was going to sing out something like: "Hey! Guess what we're gonna do! We were just up to Baw's"-the general store-"and we're gonna git some seeds and plant some gra.s.s in Baw's window box! Can't you see it! The whole town's gonna git turned on in six months!"-and so on.

But underneath all the gits and gonnas, she turned out to be probably the brightest girl around there, with the possible exception of Faye. Faye said very little, so it was a moot point. Mountain Girl turned out to be from a highly respectable upper-middle-cla.s.s background in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., a family of Unitarians. In any case, she caught on to everything right away. She was decisive and had all the nerve in the world. Also she was getting more beautiful every day. All it took was a few weeks of the rice and stew and irregular eating around Kesey's, the old involuntary macrobiotic diet, so to speak, and she started thinning out and getting beautiful. None of this was lost on Kesey. He was the Mountain Man and she was the Mountain Girl. She was just right for him ...

Mountain Girl moved into a tent up on a little plateau on the hill behind the house, under the redwoods. Page Browning had a tent up there, too. So did Babbs and Gretch. Mike Hagen had his Screw Shack. The Screw Shack was a very stellar-Mal Function!-Hagen production. None of the boards lay true and none of the nails ever quite made it all the way in. The boards seemed to be huddled together in a tentative agreement. One day Kesey took a hammer and hit a single nail on the peak of the shack and the whole shack fell down.

"Nothing lasts, Hagen!" yelled Mountain Girl, and her laugh boomed through the redwoods.

And the Hermit's Cave... One day Faye looked out the kitchen window and there was a little creature at the foot of the hill behind the house, peering out from the edge of the woods like a starved animal. He was a small, thin kid, barely five feet tall, but he had a huge black beard, like some Ozark g-nome in Barney Google. He just stood there with these big starveling eyes bugging out of his wild black s.h.a.g, looking at the house. Faye brought him out a plate of tuna fish. He took it without saying anything and ate it; and never left. The Hermit!

The Hermit hardly ever said anything, but he turned out to be perfectly literate, and he would talk to people he trusted, like Kesey. He was only 18. He had lived with his mother somewhere around La Honda. He had had a lot of trouble in school. He had had a lot of trouble everywhere. He was the Oddball. Finally he took off for the woods and lived up there barefoot, just wearing a shirt and Levi's, killing animals and spearing fish for food. People caught glimpses of him now and again and high-school kids used to try to hunt him down and demolish his lean-tos and otherwise torment him. His wandering had brought him up to the woods up behind Kesey's house, a wild stretch that had been designated "Sam McDonald Park" but never cleared.

The Hermit built himself a Hermit's Cave down in a pit in a dark green moldy mossy gully that dropped off the path up into the woods. He filled it with objects that winked and blinked and cooed. He was also keeper of the communal acid stash down there in the cave. And he had other secrets, such as his diaries... the Hermit Memoirs, in which real life and his Hermit fantasy ran together in wriggling rivers of little boys and lost hunters whom only the Hermit could rescue ... n.o.body ever knew his real name at all until a few months later when, as I say, the police would get technical about it...

Then Babbs discovered Day-Glo, Day-Glo paint, and started painting it up the very trunks of the redwoods, great zappers of green, orange, yellow. h.e.l.l, he even painted the leaves, and Kesey's place began to glow at night. And resound. More and more people were showing up for long or short stays. Ca.s.sady brought in a Scandinavian-style blonde who was always talking about hangups. Everybody had hangups. She became June the Goon. Then a girl who wore huge floppy red hats and granny gla.s.ses, the first anybody had ever seen. She became Marge the Barge. Then a sculptor named Ron Boise, a thin guy from New England with a nasal accent like t.i.tus Moody, only a t.i.tus Moody who spoke the language of Hip: "Man, like, I mean, you know," and so on. Boise brought in a sculpture of a hanged man, so they ran it up a tree limb with a hangman's noose. He also built a great Thunderbird, a great Thor-and-Wotan beaked monster with an amber dome on its back and you could get inside of it. Inside were some mighty wire strings, which you could pull, which they did, and the Thunderbird tw.a.n.ged out across the gorge like the mightiest vibrating ba.s.s beast in the history of the world. Then he brought in a Kama Sutra sculpture, a huge sheetmetal man with his face in the sheetmetal groin of a big sheetmetal babe. She had her left leg sticking up in the air. It was hollow and Babbs ran a hose up it and turned the water on and it spurted out, so they left it running, eternally spurting. It looked like she was having an eternal o.r.g.a.s.m out of her left foot.