The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test Part 15

Kesey in la casa grande-there's always a taffy triangle being pulled at the house, what with four private rooms laced with endless variations on the Faye-me-George-Mountain Girl theme.

Mountain Girl is gr.i.m.m.i.n.g on: "Look at this wall. It's awful. No, I'm serious, look at it. I could scrabble through this wall in five minutes."

"Whyn't you go roll us a joint?"

"Can we smoke it in my room so I don't have to keep jumping every time Faye bangs the door?"

"Hmmmm ..."

"Never mind. That's a tricky question. Besides it keeps me on my toes in here."

SPIRITS PICKING UP SLIGHTLY IN THE RED TIDE TORPOR. Pranksters beginning to do small Prankster things. Hagen back from the Hospital Civil hobbling but ha.s.sling with the old sweet Vesper boy charm. No stereo rigs, projectors, video tapes to be ha.s.sled hereabouts on Devil's Island, but he finds the biggest rig there is and ha.s.sles some poor local out of it-a turtle. A huge sea turtle, weighs about 50 pounds. Much jubilation over the monster, but n.o.body knows what to do with it, not even Faye, the pioneer wife and master cook, dietician, technician and mechanic. No caldron they are ever likely to get can deal with it. So they put a huge skull and crossbones in Day-Glo on its sh.e.l.l and put it back in the sea, thinking happily of another 200 years of life they have a.s.sured it. n.o.body in Zecotopetl death-G.o.d Mexico will seek this one for his stewpot...

Babbs, after many days of glumming in his Purina Chow redoubt, strolls over, lewding out, "Hi, Je-e-e-ed!" to Kesey's three-year-old son. Only Babbs in his Be-elzebabbs best could greet a three-year-old with such lewd lubricious loonacy.

Page Browning has pulled in, ready to go, enchanted with Huaraches and the Rat thing. Huaraches on every foot in Mexico! Zea-lot himself could not have devised a more devilish troublesome contrivance.

"They keep 'em strung out on huaraches! You can't run in 'em, you can't walk in 'em, they never fit, they hurt your feet. All you can do is sit tight. That's how they keep this country straight. They keep 'em strung out on this b.u.mmer!" and so on.

Suddenly-Sandy Lehmann-Haupt turns up, back from way over the edge, on a motorcycle. He drove all the way from New York City on this motorcycle, halfway across the U.S.A. and all the way through the Rat lands to this southwesternmost edge of Mexico, no mean stint even for a Neal Ca.s.sady. Kesey looks at him and can't believe it. He looks stronger, healthier, calmer, more confident than he has ever seen him. It gives him a foreboding that he can't put a name on ...

Even Bob Stone sails in, Bob Stone from way back from old Perry Lane days. He pulls in in a Hertz car. He flew into Mexico City, got a Hertz car. He has an a.s.signment from Esquire to do a story on Kesey in Exile. Ah; so the old world still waits. Stone, still hypersensitive, seeing the FBI and Federales behind every cocoa palm-or else scorpions-and in that very moment, however, plunging head first, as always, into whatever chaos debacle any Prankster cares to dream up, crying lissen this is dangerous as he swandives off every handy cliff.

Hooking down dexedrine. Stone and Babbs go off in Stone's car, high on pills, heading up Tepic way, in Rat country. Come back giggling and carrying on over weird experience with the Road Animal. They had driven through the dung dust, days without sleep and soaring on dex, scrub country and burros, and night fell and it got really weird. Stone sees little Mex bridges and they become gila monsters, and Babbs sees them, too. The road becomes the veriest little tightrope between the no-man's land of the monsters, and then all at once the monsters take command of the road!-up ahead, the biggest road monster any man has ever seen, so huge it straddles the road, like a tarantula with legs 10 feet high, on the edges of the road, and its huge filthy body and jaws over the middle waiting for food and their car is bearing down toward it, don't dare stop and don't dare go on- "No! Don't go near it!" shouts Stone.

"No," says Babbs, "we've got to. We've got to go through it."

"Through it!!"

"We've got to," says Babbs. "If we don't, we'll never make any progress. "

Suddenly it seems the most crucial thing in the history of the world that they make progress. "I know! But it's too-"

"Got to go through it!" says Babbs. They steel for the debacle, Armageddon, the end of all- -and sail through it!- --it's a focking great road-building machine of some sort, tooling down the highway at Mex huarache speed, the mestizos up top look down bewildered at this car that just shot under them at 60 or 70 ...

Stone and Kesey tooling up toward Sonora, nice and high on speed. Stone thinks he's behind tinted gla.s.s in a cab, although he is doing the driving. So like a taxi! They pick up a kid, an American, hitchhiking back to California. They can take him as far as Sonora. We're going to California, says Stone, and they gun off. "Californee!" says Kesey, in the stupidest country way possible. "Yeah," says Stone. "I'm driving this fella here"-Kesey-"up to California to see the sun come up. He's never seen the sun come up."

"Awww," says Kesey, "yer pullin my leg. Ain't no sun come up.

"I wouldn't put you on," says Stone. "The sun comes up and you're going to see it." Pa.s.sing strange somehow to be riding in a taxi cab through the Mexican nowhere with Kesey, behind a tinted gla.s.s.

"Awwwww," says Kesey. The kid, meanwhile, is deathly quiet.

"I'm not lying!" says Stone. "Look up there. There it is, the sum "Uhhh, uhhhh, G.o.d, you was right, there it is, the sun! Why ... it fi-i-i-i-lls the sky! It li-i-i-i-i-ights up the valley! It s.h.i.+-i-i-i-ines upon the ocean!"

After a few miles the kid speaks up in a casual way, best he can, "Say, fellows, I think I'll get out in Tepic instead of Sonora. 1 just remembered, I got to see somebody there."

So he gets out.

Never trust a Prankster!

And Ca.s.sady-Ca.s.sady barreling onto the Rat strand in yet another Ca.s.sady vehicle, revved up revved up revved up at the ; eternal Ca.s.sady speed, with a new typical Ca.s.sady Excalibur. He has a four-pound sledge hammer with the handle wrapped in Day-Glo tape, which he throws about from noon to doom like an Indian club, flipping it up in the air and catching it, flipping it up in double spins, triples, quadruples, true spins, eccentric spins, sprocketing his shoulders his elbows his knees his feet about in the jerky beat. The Prank and the Schism are apparently long forgotten. If there's any soul can break up this focking red tide and clear the mucus air sailing speedily on all channels, it is Ca.s.sady. So they smoke some gra.s.s and climb up on top of la casa grande and sit up there while Ca.s.sady circuses and sprockets with his sledge hammer off on his speedy trip just the barest l/30th second from Now at dusk. Ca.s.sady does his wild American sledge hammer ballet by the side of a pool of backwater and they can see Ca.s.sady's reflection in the pool and their own reflection looking down at Ca.s.sady, but looking up in the pool in perfect asymmetric playback, winking Day-Glo and dusk, invoking apparitions from the past, a moon door, for the world in the immense act of contemplating itself, Domnu, sativa and rajas all at once, fons et origo, instant Movie-Now Wet-handle Harry!

And the Halusion Gulp begins to shake its wings again like leather paddle flaps on the wheel o' fortune carnival game, a Rat bird, but it knows the one hole in the sky. Kesey in la casa grande with the wind up and the sky cloudy, and the Gulp flapping, and the Rat plaster paneled with pages from out of Marvel comics, whole scenes of Dr. Strange, Sub Mariner, the Incredible Hulk, the Fantastic Four, the Human Torch-Superheroes, in short. All heads believe them to be drawn by meth freaks, because of the minute phosph.o.r.escent dedication of their hands. Super-heroes! ubermenschen! It was pa.s.sing strange that Nietzsche, that curious little Peter Lorre misanthrope with whiskers and a sour black Tubingen professorial frock coat on, should be into the essence of the thing- -and Kesey can hear Bob Stone telling him, "Nietzsche is up in Heaven now, Ken, saying 'I dig what you're doing-but don't read my books' "- -yet the old Valkyrie was into the thing. The world not a line of cause and effect heading forward forever, but finite and ever-repeating, so that all that ever was and ever will be is caught up in now, in endless Recurrence, only waiting for the Superheroes to resurface; after which, a total revaluation. And combining Nietzsche's inspiration with his own of at-present-best-of man forever watching his own movie and never being able to get to the paradise beyond the screen: as Nietzsche glimmered, life is a circle and so it is the going, not the getting there, that counts. Live in the moment. Lots of good heads said it. I tried. I devoted much time and much energy. To find that those good heads had been tricked-that simple trick of I was right about living in the moment but we can never get in the moment! Orggggggg!

Yet, as Pranksters and many close and near believe, he knows he has somehow caught sight of the great flapping beast and is somewhere beyond this side of the screen and into the true old full bare essence of the thing-he is onto what is popularly thought of as enlightenment... thinking back: Nighttime and he had gone out to the water, high on gra.s.s, and sat down and the light from the electric signs-Coca-Cola?-in the town came across the bay, and every line of light came off straight, the primitive line, Stone Age, the line of gra.s.s

CUT TO.

nighttime, same spot, high on acid, and the lines come off not straight but in perfect half circles, the acid line, the line of the present, the perfect circle, like the spiders they injected with acid, and they wove perfect little round webs

CUT TO.

nighttime, same spot, high on opium, only time he ever took hard dope, and the lines came off starting into circles and instead finished with a little hook, like the little hook in the water of a j.a.panese print, like the little hook even in the lines of that strange comic strip, The Spirit, and this was the line of the future, completing the circle without having to go all the way every time, getting there by knowing the beginning of the trip

CUT TO.

Nighttime and an electrical storm in the Mexican heat flashes, high on acid, the lightning breaking out-there!-there!-and the electricity flows through him and out of him, a second skin, a suit of electricity, and if the time was ever now it is-Now!-and he hurls his hand toward the sky to make the lightning break out where he points-Now!-we've got to close it, the gap between the flash and the eye, and make it, the reentry into Now ... as Superheroes ... open ... until he falls to the beach and Mountain Girl finds him holding his throat and choking as if he is gagging on sand ...

Beyond acid. They have made the trip now, closed the circle, all of them, and they either emerge as Superheroes, closing the door behind them and soaring through the hole in the sapling sky, or just lollygag in the loop-the-loop of the lag. Almost clear! Presque vu!-many good heads have seen it-Paul telling the early Christians: hooking down wine for the Holy Spirit-sooner or later the Blood has got to flood into you for good-Zoroaster telling his followers: you can't keep taking haoma water to see the names of Vohu Mano-you've got to become the flames, man-And Dr. Strange and Sub Mariner and the Incredible Hulk and the Fantastic Four and the Human Torch prank about on the Rat walls of la casa grande like stroboscopic sledgehammer Ca.s.sadys, fons et origo ::::: and it is either make this thing permanent inside of you or forever just climb draggled up into the conning tower every time for one short glimpse of the horizon :::::

chapter.

XXIV.

The Mexican Bust

HAGEN, MEANWHILE, WAS MORE AND MORE . . . HAGEN. The irresistible charmer ... and it seems some beautiful deb from California had insisted on following him to Mexico. Dear Dad. Don't worry about me. I am in Mexico with some beautiful people.. . Her father sensed beatnik and dope right away, of course, and pulled all manner of strings to find out where she was and get her back. At least the Pranksters figured later that was what explained the mysterious debacle that came next, on the road to Guadalajara.

Hagen, Kesey and Ram Rod were driving up toward Guadalajara in a panel truck one night when they came upon a roadblock manned by Mexican Federales. What to do? Turn around? bust through? fake it? At the time, everything had been so cool with the local legals, they were feeling strong and confident, and so Kesey decided to stop and just do the old thing of draw them into the movie. G.o.d knows the Pranksters had coped with many cops before.

But-of course, they couldn't speak Mexican, so they couldn't even get the Movie going with these Federales. The Federales grabbed all three of them and searched the truck immediately for gra.s.s, which they found, and that wrapped that up. Out in the rain and the dark in the Rat lands. The Mexicans don't ha.s.sle people over gra.s.s as much as the American cops, but they have the same kind of laws, and they are not delighted to have American heads guests of their country, and Kesey was "hot," as they say. A certified debacle, in a word.

This Route 15 ran along the railroad tracks that come up from the Guatemalan border. Between the road and the tracks were the spiky dark clumps of a lot of high foliage, scrub and s.h.i.+t, thorns, razor leaves. Kesey smiles sadly and goes through a big well-you-got us, fellas, fair-and-square pantomine, that's the way it goes. The Federales take his turista card, which is a fake. Yup-you-win-fellas, and say, Lemme just go over in them bushes a second before you haul us off. Fella has to take a leak; all men equal, gringos and Mex and whatever, when the p.i.s.s call comes, right-fellas? So the Federales say O.K. and Kesey goes off in the scrub- -out the corner of his eye he sees a train easing over the siding on the tracks, coming around the bend slow- -Haul a.s.s! Rotor Rooter! Kesey plunges into the brush toward the tracks, thorns and razor leaves raking his legs, the light from the train shaking that weird sick ochre cast over the spiky brush clumps, thras.h.i.+ng through this s.h.i.+t, up against the side of the train jumps up on top of a coupling, grabs a ladder to the top of the boxcar. Rain comes in a sudden sheet, lightning breaks out, lighting up the whole scene and his body-Federales huffing and galomping through the scrub like comic-movie Mexicans popping b.u.t.tons off their guts and screaming hoy! p.r.o.nto! and then HRHAAAAAAAAAAMMMNNNNNNNNNN.

The b.a.s.t.a.r.ds are shooting at him! Mama don't 'low no gra.s.s-smokin' in hyar! Testy out here on edges of professed belief- blackness-then Cosmo let him in on it for an instant with a flash of lightning-more huffing harroomping HRHAAAAAAAAMMMNNNNNNNNNN.

comic latino cops-until the train picks up speed and he lies battened down to the top of the car heading off to somebody's Edge City somewhere.

Which turns out to be Guadalajara. He has no money on him, no gra.s.s, no nothing. He heads for the inevitable mariachi square, hunkers down in the dark, wet and s.h.i.+vering. Wonder do they tolerate gringo b.u.ms in this town? Daylight a Mexican comes through the park and strikes up a conversation, speaks English. He is a slender guy in his twenties, very handsome like a Valentino, almost feminine QUEER!.

offers to let Kesey rest up in his hotel room QUEER!.

so beat and s.h.i.+vering he takes him on it. The hotel is one step above a flophouse, but clean. He has a neat little room, this Mario, a snug harbor. "Go ahead, get some sleep." Kesey tries to fight off the sleep fantasy QUEER a.s.sAULT!.

but he falls asleep anyway, wakes up a long time later, all intact. Mario is broke himself, but gets off a collect telegram to Manzanillo under Kesey's new alias, Sol Almande. Salamander, you understand-the beast that lives in fire. Wait around all day and the next, Mario being nothing but a totally sweet person.

WHAT'S HIS GAME?.

Down to the holy telegrafo to pray. All the huarache telegrafo workers sitting around under fluttering leaves of telegrams piling up. Hay tiempo. You have to know how to approach them, says Mario. Goes upstairs in the telegrafo. Presently the Huarache Chief rummages through the whole heap for a message for the burning Almande. But-nothing.

Next morning Kesey decides to risk it, goes down to the American consulate as a poor broke grizzled balding American fisherman stranded and got to get back to Manzanillo. A girl there, a Miss. .h.i.tchc.o.c.k, gives him 27 pesos for third-cla.s.s bus fare to Manzanillo, and he gets on, with Mario waving a sweet valedictory goodbye. That was your b.u.mmer, Kesey, not to understand that the pure humble Mexican strain of sweetness-that was all that Mario was about, just a muy simpatico human being. The bus ride was horrible, eighteen hours of bouncing through the Rat lands, half road and half no road, the Rat lands and yet so many open faces. They look at you just like a head, totally open, wanting to find something rather than hide something. Many p.i.s.s stops, and Kesey can only struggle around grizzled, waiting for the driver to get on with it. Kesey is hungry and burnt out like a husk. About ten hours out, they're stopped and the driver walks back and stares at Kesey with the wide-open simpatico look and gives him six pesos, just like that, without a word, worth about 17 cents but good for a taco or suchlike, and walks on back to the front of the bus. A strange land, this Rat land! Sometimes they know. There is hope!-not just for the Superaware elected few, but for the unsuspected mult.i.tudes who open up and look. They are waiting, here in this Rat land.

Back in Manzanillo, and the adrenaline was flowing again. Hagen and Ram Rod were salted away in jail. Like everything in Mexico, the jail scene was tough and soft at the same time. It was filthy, crawling with ticks, lice, scorpions, the whole scene. The food was filthy, too. But you could have anything you wanted to put down your gullet sent in, if you could pay for it, from luscious enchilada meals to gra.s.s, speed and acid. Hagen and Ram Rod stayed delightfully high and miserable.

In any case, Kesey began to feel like it was only a matter of time before they closed in. It wasn't so much the Mexicans he was worried about. The Mexicans were always ready to make a deal. It was the Stateside zealots. The FBI bodys.n.a.t.c.hers worried him. He knew about Morton Sobell, the atom spy, who suddenly turned up one day at a border town in the custody of an FBI agent, walking across the border with the Feds. If the FBI can grab you in Mexico, physically, the Mexicans will play along with that, too. And the zealous head-buff San Mateo County cops. Word was that San Mateo cops were taking their vacations in Mexico for no other reason than to go Kesey-hunting and make more fat headlines. La casa grande and the Rat Shack becoming steadily more uncool as first one head and then another showed up, with big comradely grins on, kids from California, even from New York, who had somehow learned where Kesey is. They always came on like naturally the Pranksters would be s.h.i.+ning with joy to see them-we holy few, we initiates of the acid scene-with the grins spilling out over the edge of their lower teeth. Obviously it was a big thing on the acid scene in the States to know where Kesey is. That was being very inside the thing. Yeah-I saw Kesey down there. Then-various Pranksters brought friends over. Including girls, of course. And Page struck up with a tall blond girl, kind of a Danish maiden sort, whom they all called Doris Delay. It was getting like La Honda, the tropical annex, La Honda in the Tropic of Cancer. People were bunked in and straggled all over the place, in the house, in the Rat Shack, on the bus. A girl named Jeannie got bit by a scorpion one night. Everybody woke up and what to do. They pondered awhile and decided to go with the flow and they all went back to sleep. She survived.

Kesey remained very permissive about the whole thing. n.o.body got shunted off. Put my professed beliefs to the Test. In any case, it was no longer possible to believe there was any semblance of secrecy about the whole Fugitive movie now. It was just a matter of time or lackadaisicalityityityityityityity . . . The whole scene would get Kesey up tight and he would get in a car and drive up on a bluff overlooking the ocean and smoke gra.s.s and watch the ocean ... like Black Maria, come to think of it.

Black Maria was going through a private h.e.l.l. Namely, she was lonely as h.e.l.l. Lonely? One means, how could a truly out-front person feel lonely amid so many truly out-front people doing so many things together and getting high together all the time. Would Mountain Girl ever feel lonely? Would Mountain Girl ever feel desperate? It was unthinkable; Mountain Girl was synched into this whole thing. She, Black Maria, was probably the only person in the history of this whole thing to get lonely ... in the Prankster hierarchy.

Prankster hierarchy? There wasn't supposed to be any Prankster hierarchy. Even Kesey was supposed to be the non-navigator and non-teacher. Certainly everybody else was an equal in the brotherhood, for there was no compet.i.tion, there were no games. They had left all that behind in the straight world .. . but. .. call it a game or what you will. Right now, among the women, Mountain Girl was first, closest to Kesey, and Faye was second, or was it really vice versa, and Black Maria was maybe third, but actually so remote it didn't matter. Among the men, there was Babbs, always the favorite ... and no games... but sometimes it seemed like the old personality game ... looks, and all the old aggressive, outgoing charm, even athletic ability-it won out here, like everywhere else .. .

Yet by and by Black Maria was a Prankster. It was just there, in the air, the fact that she was now a Prankster. She had altered the flow, and not by accepting it, either.

Page's girl, Doris Delay, was going through the same thing. There was something she wanted to ask somebody, but how could she ask it. Finally she came up to Sandy Lehmann-Haupt and said, 'What do they mean-Never trust a Prankster?"

chapter.

XXV.

Secret Agent Number One

AFTERNOON - PAGE COMES BUSTING IN LA CASA GRANDE saying, "Hey! There's a guy across the road taking pictures of us!"

Sure enough. There is a guy peeking over the edge of a window in an unfinished cottage across the beach road, another cinderblock Rat wonder. The sun highlights off his camera lens. Kesey gets the adrenaline pumping for a run, but Page charges across the road to the cottage like he owns the place, followed shortly by Babbs.

Inside the cottage he finds a Mexican, dressed like a businessman, metallic suit, white s.h.i.+rt and tie, looks like he's in his thirties.

"What the h.e.l.l do you think you're doing?" says Page.

"h.e.l.lo, amigo!" the guy says, looking fairly cool. He speaks English. "I theenk maybe I buy thees house. You like the beach here?"

"Yeah! Yeah! Right! Right! Right!" says Babbs. Babbs has his friendly put-on grin turned up to such maximum intensity the guy flinches his cool momentarily, but he gets it back. ' "Yes?"

"Yeah! Yeah! Right! Right! Right!"

"Yes. I am glad. I like another person's opeenion in thees theengs. Well-so long, amigos!"-and he steps outside like he's going.

"Send us some pictures if they turn out good," says Babbs.

"Some pictures?"

"Yeah! Yeah! Right! Right! Right!"

"What pictures?"

"Of us. We like pictures. We have a whole sc.r.a.pbook. We like candid pictures, you know? I bet you took some good ones."

"Yes." The Mexican looks very thoughtful. "I tell you, fren, maybe you can help me."

"Yeah! Yeah! Right! Right! Right!"

"I am weeth the Mexican Naval Intelligence, and maybe you can help ... us. We have reports of Russian submarines operating in these waters."

"Sub-ma-rines!" says Babbs in total put-on wonderment.

Several Pranksters have gathered in front of la casa grande to watch Babbs and Page and the Mexican outside the Rat cottage.