"-who are not enchanted with Ken Kesey and they sent him this letter."
"Jack-"
And Frenchy hunkers down on the floor and opens the cheese spread and pulls the knife out of the scabbard and sinks the blade into it. Quite a blade! a foot long and engraved with Chinese demons. He wipes gobs of cheese spread onto his tongue with the blade. Sandra sits silent in a clump, grooving on the full life. Jack raps on about perfidy in high places . . .
I don"t know what the reference to money is-"they want to know about their money." But the gist of it is clear enough. Kesey has sold out to keep from getting a five-year sentence or worse. Next he"ll nail it down by calling all the kids to Winterland and telling them to stop taking LSD ... Freaking copout ...
It"s quite a mess for Kesey, of course. If he had lectured back at the judges like a Superhero, that would have been the end of everything, probably, with him salted away for many years. On the other hand, if he just stares back Orientally as the current fantasy of "beyond acid" is put forth, he looks like a cop-out in Haight-Ashbury ...
All those good-loving heads... they"ve been having quite a time for themselves... a summer of euphoria, the millennium, in fact, LSD and hundreds of beautiful people already on the scene, and no more little games. They would just spread out like a wave over the world and end all the bull-s.h.i.t, drown it in love and awareness, and nothing could stop them. I"ll have to hand it to the heads. They really want to end the little games. Their hearts are pure. I never found more than one or two cynics or hustlers among them. But now that the moment is at hand, everyone is wondering ... Hmmmmmmm ... who is going to lead the way and hold the light? Then just one little game starts, known as politics... Hmmmmm ... As I say, their hearts are pure! Nevertheless, Chet Helms and the Family Dog have their thing, Bill Graham has his thing, the Grateful Dead have theirs, the Diggers have theirs, the Calliope Company have theirs, Bowen has his, even Gary Goldhill... It"s a little like the socialist movement in New York after World War I-the Revolution is imminent, as all know and agree, and yet, Christ, everybody and his brother has a manifesto, the Lovestonites, the Dubinsky Socialists, the CPUSA (Bolshevik), the Wobblies, everybody has his own typewriters and mimeograph machines and they"re all cranking away like mad and fuming over each other"s mistranslations of the Message . . . Not that the heads in Haight-Ashbury are wrangling with each other yet, but what do they do about Kesey? Just sit back and let him and the Pranksters do their thing? Let them try to turn a lot of impressionable kids off LSD, the way the newspapers say he intends? Or let him suddenly make a big power play at Winterland and take over the whole movement? Politics, in a word ...
And the Pranksters ... by and by ... I find them in the Calliope garage on Harriet Street, the old garage, the ex-pie factory in the bottom of the old hotel. I kept peeking around in the crazy gloom of the place, amid all the scabid wood and sour corners and ratty blankets and scaffoldings and beat-up theater seats and the luminous bus hulking in its own grease and the rotting mattresses where people stretched out and slept and the Sh.e.l.l station up the corner where everyone copped urinations, and I couldn"t figure out what they had to be so exultant about. It beat me. As I look back on it, they were all trying to tell me ... Ha.s.sler with his discourse on the world full of games and futile oppositioning and how the Pranksters meant to show the world how to live ... with his toothbrush case shimmering ... He was a kind man! He was trying to give me the whole picture at once. It wasn"t about cops and robbers in Mexico, it was about...
Pranksters arriving from far and wide . . . The old Schism forgotten ... Paul Foster back from India, looking emaciated, his mustache and mutton chops gone, his head shaved, but with the great G.o.d Rotor roaring and digging away . . . Page telling me about huaraches... Mountain Girl, Doris Delay, The Hermit, Freewheeling Frank the h.e.l.l"s Angel, Ca.s.sady flipping his sledgehammer, Babbs, Gretch, George Walker ... Zonker coming in with an Arab headdress as Torrence of Arabia ... Finally Kesey pulling in, Faye and the kids coming out... The Flag People, the bus glowing, the mystic fog rising ...
IN THE STUDIO OF JOHN BARTHOLOMEW TUCKER"S TELEVISION show, station KPIX, on Van Ness Avenue, I"m sitting in the studio audience up in the gloom behind the black backsides of the spotlights, the cameras, the dollies, the coils of wire ... Well, this is going to be fun-
THE DANGER OF LSD.
-coming on in big letters on the screen of the monitor sets in the studio, with a drawing of three sugar cubes under it... the symbol of LSD, of course, like four X"s x.x.xX, for whiskey,... and the voice-over saying
"... and author Ken Kesey ..."
Out in the clearing, beyond the jungle of light stands and wires and the rest of it, in a big pool of light, there"s Kesey in his buckskin shirt and red Guadalajara boots sitting in one of those milky-white fibergla.s.s-coated Saarinen swivel chairs that TV interview shows go for ... and Tucker, whose show it is, looking California Ivy League... and his other guest, Frankie Randall, looking sort of Las Vegas Yachtsman, as if any moment he is going to tell a long story about something very frustrating that happened to his El Dorado convertible in a parking lot in L.A. You can see this show has balance, as they say ... It fills up your head like a daydream ... brain candy ... a little talk with Randall about the Persian Room and dining at Sardi"s and lying on the sands at Malibu-"Well, where do you go from here, Frankie!" "Well, I"ll be at Lake Tahoe next week, John!"-and then, gravely, he"ll bring on the elder statesman of psychedelphia, talking about the dangers of LSD and telling the kids to turn off, as if Kesey were an ex-Communist, reformed and returned from the cla.s.s wars, with a few sizzling stories and then a moral. Just the ticket! a whiff of the dope dens and then a cold shower.
"Well, tell me, Ken, could you give some idea of what an LSD trip is like?"
"Yeah, it blows you out of your gourd."
Tucker stares at him- "Well-now, you"re-going to tell all the people not to take it any more, is that correct?"
"I"m going to tell them to move on to the next step."
"The next step?"
"It"s time to move on to the next step in the psychedelic revolution. I don"t know what this is going to be in any way I could just spell out, but I know we"ve reached a certain point but we"re not moving any more, we"re not creating any more, and that"s why we"ve got to move on to the next step-"
The next step?... it keeps going that way ... They can"t figure out what in the name of Christ this big cowboy is saying... What about the danger, man, those sugar cubes we had up there... and down in front of me, amid the wires and lights, a technician and a production a.s.sistant are frantically scrawling away on a big cue board with a marking pencil and they thrust it close to Tucker and Kesey, just out of camera range-
DON"T FORGET ABOUT DANGER OF LSD! SAY ABOUT LSD BEING.
DANGEROUS - ESPECIALLY FOR KIDS !.
-and Kesey just looks at them and gives them the biggest, most inscrutable upcountry smile, which on the screen looks as though he has suddenly gazed off toward an old buddy who is saying, What a shuck, Kee-zee ...
Later in the day, rolling across the TV screens of San Francisco again, Kesey and the Pranksters and the bus pull up to Winterland to look it over for the ACID TEST GRADUATION ... TV microphones ... Kesey in Flag People coveralls and a ten-gallon straw hat. ..
"Ken! Ken!" A TV announcer heaves into position. "Ken, could you tell us something about the message you"re going to have for the kids at this Acid Test Graduation?"
Kesey says, "I"m going to tell them, "Never trust a-" "
BRAAAAAAAAAAANG A huge glob of feedback screels into the microphone- "Could you repeat that, Ken?"
"Braaaaaaaaaaang," says Kesey.
"Ha-ha. No, what you were saying."
"Never trust a Prankster," says Kesey. The scene breaks up in a covey of Flag People bobbing off the bus...
Never trust a Prankster!... s.h.i.t! ... That shakes them up all over again in Haight-Ashbury, there"s no getting around that. A whole new inflammation of paranoia. The lunger heads are slithering up and down the store fronts on Haight Street. They"re hunkered down gabbling in the India-print living rooms. The whole thing takes a Stakhanovite left turn. Kesey is not a right deviationist but a left deviationist. He"s not going to cop out by telling the kids to stop taking LSD, that"s just the cover story. Instead he"s going to pull a monster prank that will wreck the psychedelic movement once and for all... Well, the acid heads in Haight-Ashbury are like a tribe in one respect, anyway, I can see that. It"s all jungle drums and gossip with them, they love it, they swim in it, like fish in a stream in a cave ... A terrific thought bubbles up in the universal brain ... The Acid Test Graduation is scheduled for Winterland on Monday, October 31, Halloween. The next night the California Democratic Party is holding a big rally in Winterland for Governor Brown, who is running against Ronald Reagan. Kesey and the Pranksters hold their Winterland blast on Halloween. Right? Far from being an "acid graduation," it will be an Acid Test of unbelievable proportions. Electric Kool-Aid will rain in the air like a typhoon, swizzle up every vein, 6,000 heads smashed out of their nuts, ricocheting off the walls like electric golf b.a.l.l.s... The sky falls... But that"s not all. They won"t stop there! these maniacs... The Pranksters will smear all the doors, railings, walls, chairs, the heating system, the water fountains, with DMSO ... laced with LSD ... Dig? ... DMSO is close to being an old alchemical ideal, the universal solvent. Put a drop of DMSO on your fingertip and thirty seconds later you can taste it in your mouth. It goes right through your skin and through your system that fast. DMSO with LSD ... What a vision! The following night the entire Democratic Party of California will get turned on, zonked out of their apples. Eight thousand emphysematous fatbacked Senators, a.s.semblymen, National Committeemen, National Committeewomen, Congressmen, the Governor himself, wailing like banshees, flopping around and gurgling and spitting and frying like a pile of insane pancakes, whereupon the Deaf Policemen descend on the whole psychedelic movement with knouts flailing ...
Christ! what a stew... Now the heads don"t know whether Kesey is selling them out or shoving a big Roman candle up the universal a.r.s.e. They"re fascinated. They come around the Warehouse and peep into the gloom. Their eyes shine at the doorway with a hepatic fever . .. They come into the Warehouse, they stare at the bus, they stare at Kesey, Mountain Girl, Ca.s.sady, Babbs... A whole platoon of them comes in, beads rattling, teetering around like gauchos, staring at the bus and going "Wowwwww! Wowwwwwww!" and smiling at each other, like, it"s so groooovy, and suddenly all the Pranksters fall silent. "Cops," says Mountain Girl in total disgust. "How do you know?" "Look at their shoes." They have on lace-up boots like telephone linesmen. "You could never git heads to wear heavy shoes like that," she says. Only a momentary downer, however. The fact is, the Pranksters are sailing. They"ve got the whole town into their movie by now, cops and all. Kesey is all over TV, radio, and newspapers. He"s a celebrity, the perfect celebrity, the Good-Bad Guy, reeking all the secret Zea-lot delights of sin but promising to do good. They were all over town on the bus, befuddling the communal brain ... Even into Fillmore, the big Negro section, with the loudspeakers playing rock "n" roll and American flags flying and a big sign on the bus reading
Colored Power
moving through the ghetto in a blur of Day-Glo swirls. The spades in Fillmore didn"t know what the h.e.l.l to make of that. Were these white freaks serious, only they got the term wrong? Or was it a shuuuuuuuuuuuck-by the time they figured it out, the bus was long gone, wailing off somewhere else. Then the big sign
Acid Test Graduation
went up on the bus, and the bus went wheeling through Haight-Ashbury and downtown San Francisco and North Beach and Berkeley advertising the world"s biggest convocation of all the heads. Pranksters flapping from every portal. George Walker up on top on the drums, Page on the electric guitar. Mountain Girl hanging out the back of the bus exploding sunb.a.l.l.s and screaming at the nonplused mult.i.tudes on the subject of the race for governor and Kesey"s various busts "Kesey for Governor!"
"A man of convictions!"
"He stands on his record!"
"The idiot"s choice!"
"A joint in every stash!"
"No hope without dope!"
They were immune again. The whole freaking town was into the movie. And after ...
. . . WINTERLAND; YES . . . THE HARDEST PART OF THE WHOLE fantasy, as usual, has been finding the right place. Winterland is perfect, the biggest indoor arena in the city limits, and a tight ship, used for ice shows and so on. The Winterland management didn"t want to deal directly with Kesey and the Pranksters. Maniacs! jailbirds ... That was where Bill Graham came in. There was no love lost between Graham and Kesey, but Graham agrees to serve as producer, impresario, the sane hand on the controls, and sign the contract. Graham"s job is to stay up on top of the new wave. But it"s an aesthetic and moral thing with him, too. He"s a believer, underneath it all... Hmmmm ... There"s Kesey ... Well... Anyway, Hallinan and Rohan draw up a contract between Graham and Intrepid Trips, Inc. It"s signed and a deposit is down, all legal and locked up.
Then there"s the Grateful Dead. Kesey wants them for the Acid Test Graduation. They"re essential, he says. But the Dead have a contract to play at an annual Halloween costume ball at California Hall. Ironically, the Pranksters" benefactors, the Calliope Company, were sponsoring it, and they had an impresario named Bob McKendrick running it. Kesey and McKendrick and a couple of the Calliope Company, Paul Hawken, Michael Laton and Bill Tara, are up in an apartment on the top floors of a rickety building on Pine Street, all wood slats and bay windows. There are no furnishings, just a mattress in the living room. The sun makes a huge glare in here. Kesey sits on the mattress and everybody else is hunkered down on the floor. Except Mc-Kendrick. He is standing up in the middle of the floor like someone dancing on a hot plate. He has on tight black pants, black shark toe slip-on shoes, a soft black sweater and open-neck shirt.. . dressed Main Stem hipster, in short. He"s broken up in the glare, twenty-seven parts, all fidgeting.
"Look, Ken," he"s saying, "you"re a leader, a prophet, you might say, and you have an important message, and I dig that, you know? I respect that. . . But I have to think of this in other terms. I"m responsible to a lot of people, and there"s a lot of money involved."
Twenty-seven parts!-all moving, doesn"t anyone see that this is a main chance, this dance at California Hall, in the impresario game. Kesey just sits there and keeps working on him like how long is it before he will see how it"s going to be-h.e.l.l, man! join forces with the Pranksters. Move your scene to Winterland, co-sponsor it. If he doesn"t, everybody on ... The Scene will go to Winterland anyway, and he and his whole California Hall scene will be wiped out anyway. McKendrick is beside himself. His black pants shimmy in the glare. He smells disaster either way. Put me back together again! Everyone stares. It"s all glare and myopia in here! He comes to a stop. He agrees. He pulls out of California Hall, freeing the Dead, thrash, crumble- -bits and freaking pieces, grumbling. The heads start grumbling about Kesey"s power play. Kesey"s power play. The Grateful Dead ... They"ve been doing all right! Since the Acid Tests they have become a thing, the pioneers of the new sound, acid rock, with the record companies beginning to sniff around :::: hmm-mmm :::: the very next thing? Freak that. All and everyone in one bag now, Winterland.
Friday night and the Pranksters decide to drop in on the Fillmore. Like, well, it"s Friday night. Kesey, Ca.s.sady, Babbs, Page, about a dozen of them, all in the Flag People coveralls, Ca.s.sady flipping his sledgehammer. The scene around the Fillmore is a freak show for sure. The dance hall is set down right in the middle of the Negro slums, at Fillmore and Geary, and it"s Friday night with a lot of young spades with Stingy-Brim hats on out on the street having the usual Friday night on the streets and old Negro women doing the groceries for the weekend, liquor stores, drugstores, cars inching along, black faces all over the streets. Right in the middle of them, the white freaks. Kids in psychedelic dress burbling and gaggling up to the Fillmore-Colored Power! the kids have that, all right. Kesey and the Pranksters walk up the stairs to the dance hall, which is on the second floor. Kesey talks to the ticket seller and the ticket taker. There"s a big conference. The ticket taker goes upstairs. He comes back ... like, very bad vibrations... They can"t come in unless they buy tickets. .. Graham ... bad vibrations, a freaking insult, in fact. The Pranksters go back out on the street to mull that one over. There"s a Cyclone fence at the rear entrance of the Fillmore with a freaked-out chomping police dog behind it... Graham ... Ca.s.sady goes off... A few minutes later he"s back.
"I ran into Bill Graham," he says. "He was out on the street checking tire treads to see if they"d picked up any nickels. I says, "Bill..." and he says, "Look, Neal, we"re in two different worlds. You"re a hippie and I"m a square. Square." He did it like this"-and Ca.s.sady makes a square in the air with his forefingers to show how he did it-" "You"re a hippie and I"m a square." Says, "I got off the subway in 1955, but you"re still on it. We"re in two different worlds. You"re a hippie and I"m a square." I"m telling you, Chief," he says to Kesey, "I had some very negative feelings. I remembered what you said about negative feelings, but I had some very negative feelings." Kesey laughs, but- All day Sat.u.r.day the Pranksters are working like mad. They"re ha.s.sling up all sorts of equipment, mikes, spots, amplifiers, speakers, strobes, even an electronic music machine, all the stuff they had at the Acid Tests and more. They can"t get into Winterland until Sunday to start rigging it up because there"s some show in there Sat.u.r.day night. Anyway, they"re working en charrette Sat.u.r.day and into Sat.u.r.day night... At five o"clock in the morning, Sunday, it hits the fan. Kesey"s lawyer, Rohan, gets wakened up at 5 a.m., at home ... Graham is on the phone, very excited, explaining a million things a mile a minute.
They are having quite a little session up in Graham"s office at the Fillmore. All night it"s been going on. Graham has been wrestling with many negative feelings. He knows that term, too. By heart-also Chet Helms knows it, and the Grateful Dead, and the Quicksilver Messenger Service, and more and more ::::: three fourths of The Scene is here, says Graham, the"re all over the place, hanging on the walls... Everyone is in a terrific sweat. Are we actually going to let Kesey do this thing? pull off this debacle? Go :::: beyond acid, whatever that may be, which, whatever it is, is no good for anyone here .. . They"ve hauled out all the versions, the cop-out, the power play, the way Kesey twisted McKendrick"s arm, the DMSO ... the DMSO! . .. That"s it! Christ, Bill, can"t you see ... They"re putting pressure on Graham to pull out of the deal. . . They"ve got me by each limb, wild tow trucks heading to the four points of the compa.s.s... The more they talk, the more urgent it is to do something, else, Christ, why have we been here all night... Hope incubates in the warm loam of every armpit... Helms has it figured out. Kesey"s mentality is military. He thinks in terms of power differentials. He"s playing the desert fox-lure the enemy into your own battleground by doing a turn-face claiming you came back to stop kids from taking acid, and when you have thousands of these straight people together, turn them on to acid. Kesey"s playing the tactical deceit and facade game-and so on ... And the Dead ... Why should we blow our hard-earned scenes for Kesey? As Ralph Gleason the columnist says. .. Kesey"s going to blow the whole new San Francisco scene for us. And Graham ... I ran into Ca.s.sady on the street. He"s waving this sledgehammer at me like he"s going to knock my head off if I don"t play ball... Many negative feelings. Kesey"s an Elmer Gantry, says Graham ... That"s it! Elmer Gantry, the evangelical demagogue . . . Freaking debacle either way ... If he blows it, he blows it for us all. If he succeeds, he takes over the whole psychedelic movement and leads it into the Elmer Gantry thing, Father Divine, Daddy Grace, Cagliostro, charlatan limbo, sledgehammer theocracy, a phosph.o.r.escent fascist fandango, King Herod spavining the Flower Children, O f.u.c.k & Corruption, G-narl, G-nash, Elmer Gantry Cagliostro Day-Glo Nero .. . Stop Kesey ...
In short, Graham is pulling out of the deal and there will be no Acid Test Graduation at Winterland.
LATE IN THE AFTERNOON IN THE WAREHOUSE - CHRIST, IT"S dismal in here! The place is always a shambles, of course, but now the funk of the day"s debacle is settling in like a sludge. The vermin are regaining the upper hand ... The lice! The pigeon fleas! The roaches! rats! scabies! impetigo! clap! piles! herpes! all rising up out of the debris like boils . . . Faye, Mountain Girl, Babbs, Gretch, Black Maria, Page, Doris Delay, Stewart Brand, Lois, the Hermit, Roy Seburn, Gut the ex-h.e.l.l"s Angel, Kesey"s brother Chuck, Zonker-they"re all rumbling around in the gloom, but they"re not Flag People any more, the costumes are off like the war is over ... They"re gathering around in a circle in folding chairs and old theater seats on one side of the bus. .. Acid Test Graduation... The sign is still stretched across the whole side of the bus ... Well, s.h.i.t.. . Kesey, in his buckskin shirt again, comes around in the midst of them carrying a huge easy chair-stuffed with tiny wings!-over his head-and sets it down with the back to the bus and sits down in it-a molting chair-and the Prankster circle rings out from him. Kesey stares at a spiral notebook he has and then starts talking in a voice so soft I can hardly hear him at first... about what has just happened ... about Danny Rifkin and some others who came by to tell him they were pulling out of the Winterland fantasy.
"It didn"t take long to know they wouldn"t change their minds," he says. "They won"t change because they have too much money involved ... As soon as they left, I lay down and I thought about it and then I knew we have everything we want right here . . ."
Right here?
". . . in this warehouse, and this is where we"re going to do it. We"re going to have the Graduation here and it"s going to be our scene. We have a certain number of people we want to get close to us, and they"re going to be here and it"s going to be better than anything we could have done at Winterland ..."
Whistling ".. . Here we"re on our own grounds, and we can do what we want, for our own scene, and we don"t have to do any more politicking or compromising. We"ll do it our own way and we"ll be the Bay Area"s Superheroes ..."
Last hole in the sapling sky "... One reason it didn"t come off was that it was too big and too hot and they all got frightened. They all want to be eagles, but they don"t want to act like eagles, so we"re going to have to do it ourselves. We tried to do it the other way, but they weren"t interested ... So we"re going to keep it down to those people who are going to make it as tight a scene as we can get. They are the kind of people who, if they"ve got anything to say, it will spread out from them, and they can say it straight, and it will spread out from them and there will be no stopping it. And that"s the essential fantasy. We"re moving it all in here, into the Rat Shack."
Into the Rat Shack Then Kesey"s voice picks up and he starts a.s.signing tasks: Page in charge of setting up a stage and chairs. Roy Seburn to decorate the place with a lot of cloth hangings. Faye and Gretch to get food and drink. Hermit to seal up all the holes in the walls. Zonk to draw up and post the guest list...
The few!
The fantasy is to compile an invitation list and contact them all, far and wide, now, this afternoon and tonight, by telephone, messenger, whatever it takes, and everybody starts thinking of those people close in enough to THE WHOLE FREAKING ADVENTURE.
to invite to this last roundup .. . What a thought! ...
Do YOU REMEMBER all the Pranksters who have wandered far and wide, like June the Goon, Marge the Barge, Sensuous X, Anonymous, Norman Hartweg- "Hire an ambulance to bring him from Ann Arbor!" Christ, all the memories... the Perry Lane people ... Sandy Lehmann-Haupt- BECAUSE, NEVERTHELESS, HE WAS THERE WHEN.
the pudding whipped up creamy-- "Hugh Romney!"
"Bonnie Jean!"
And Paul Sawyer and Rachel Rightbred ... and all the wild screwy people who got on the bus on the golden track wherever and whither- "Mary Microgram!"
"That little guy who wrote the pot poem!"-and they write that down- "That guy with the ears, that weirdo!" says Babbs-and they write that down- "That couple in Portland!"-and they write that down- "That pretty Indian boy on Haight Street!"-and they write that down- "The Mad Chemist!"
Yeah ! Oh s.h.i.t, do you remember "Big Nig!"
Gimme the rent "Culley!"
"Owsley!"
Survival "That guy in jail!"
"The Who Cares Girl!"
RA-A-A-A-AY.
"Ray!"
"Pancho Pillow!"
"J. Edgar Hoover!"-and they write that down- SEE THE VERY HUNTED c.o.o.nS.
"g.a.y.l.o.r.d!"
"Jim Fish!"
"Agent Number One!"
MARICONES!.
Cosmo!
Cos-mo Oh s.h.i.t what a flow from eons ago in La Honda across the length and the breadth and the sleek and the Rat and it all comes flooding and bubbling back like a crest if they can just sit up on it and ride and ride and ride and ride here in the gloom and beat back those little crab lice in frogmen"s suits six little neoprene rubber armlets for each little crab louse leg creeping about camouflaged like tiny scars in the brain the focking debacle infestation, the morose thought clumped somewhere in every brain until out through the starveling self-shuck fiesta euphoria Page brings it out front and out loud in the scabid sinkhole of the Warehouse, the ancient Sh.e.l.lube voice of please-don"t-s.h.i.t-me: "It"s great to be a part of the greatest j.a.c.k.o.f.f in history."
NEVERTHEFREAKINGLESS! THE NEXT NIGHT, HALLOWEEN, the magic long-awaited hour ... I can hardly believe it, the Pranksters have transformed the place. You have to hand it to them, they must have worked like Turks. It"s still a pestilence among buildings, you understand, this Warehouse, but there"s verve in the air, Rat splendor. The most splendid thing is a huge orange-and-white parachute, an enormous thing, just the silk, not the strings and all, hooked to the ceiling at the apex, and billowed out to the far corners of the ceiling like some majestic canopy out of a Louis XV lawn revel in the Orangerie at Versailles. It glistens ! Grand luxe! The very same parachute, it turns out, that Astronauts use on reentry for the splashdown ... Hm-mmmm ... Yes... Quite a sight! The Pranksters have turned into the Flag People again, in their American Flag coveralls. Mountain Girl sits at the Sixth Street side in Flag coveralls checking guests against the invitation list which is posted up on the door in Paul Foster G.o.d Rotor script. Mountain Girl opens the Can"t Bust "Em coveralls and suckles Sunshine as the few, the faithful.. . the many! . . . come flapping by . . . Their faces are painted in Art Nouveau swirls, their Napoleon hats are painted, masks painted, hair dyed weird, embroidered Chinese pajamas, dresses made out of American flags, Flash Gordon diaphanous polyethylene, supermarket Saran Wrap, India-print coverlets shawls Cossack coats sleeveless fur coats piping frogging Bourbon hash embroidery serapes sarongs saris headbands bows batons vests frock coats clerical magisterial scholar"s robes stripes strips flaps thongs Hookah boots harem boots Mexicali boots Durango boots elf boots Knight boots Mod boots Day-Glo Wellingtons Flagellation boots beads medallions amulets totems polished bones pigeon skulls bat skeletons frog thoraxes dog femurs lemur tibia kneecap of a coyote ... A h.e.l.l of a circus, in short, a whole carnival banner, a panopticon. h.e.l.l"s Angels pulling in, in their colors, the death"s-head jackets, full dress, beards combed and trimmed, Terry the Tramp, Pete the Drag Racer, Ralph of Oakland, plus their girls... miniskirts and raspberry stockings. .. Chocolate George ... Chaos! s.h.i.tfire! Chocolate George doesn"t see his name on the list and his girl keeps saying, "What"s the matter, George, can"t we get in?" until Mountain Girl gives a bulls.h.i.t laugh and waves them in. A kid about ten pops out of the door onto Sixth Street and yells, "Who"s smoking gra.s.s around here?"-in the most demanding voice you ever heard ... aggressive little devil. There"s even a nursery set up inside the door and they keep making the Hermit stay the h.e.l.l out of there. Kesey is off to one side in a Flag People coverall, looking around, not saying much, listening to a big Angel from Oakland who has on a polka-dot shirt and a polka-dot tie under his Angels" jacket-"I wore a shirt and tie, Ken, on account of it"s Halloween"-rock "n" roll playing over the loudspeakers, which are all over the place, on the sides, on the ceiling, right up in the summit of the parachute canopy even ... microphones, cameras, TV cameras... Yes ... The Few and the Faithful!-all the same, the word of the hoopla in the scabid old Warehouse is around town like a chic piece of information. Irresistible, of course ... Three TV stations have cameramen there, four radio stations with microphones and tape machines. Herbert Gold the novelist with an aftershave smile on. Ingrid Bergman"s daughter, Pia Lindstrom ... Oh, sweet adrenal edge! This is where it"s at! what-could this be... the new wave?... Where? in comes the Women"s Wear Daily correspondent in San Francisco, Albert Morch, a bra.s.sy little character with a Rolleiflex around his neck ... Caterine Milinaire of Vogue with a miniature camera in a chain-mail evening purse, standing amid Angels, heads, and the Probation Generation like a Bulfinch princess . . . Larry Dietz the magazine writer from Los Angeles... And me ... Kesey looking around and saying nothing and . .. wondering . .. Hmmmmm ... The Few and the Faithful and the whole hulking world. It"s a regular beano, all right. But, Mother! These costumes aren"t for a Halloween party but for the liberation of dead souls... churchly vest.i.ture, in truth ...
Are we blind? ... Oblation ... Consecration ... Communion ... Well... The Anonymous Artists of America climbing up onto the stage ... They"re like freaking faeries out of A Midsummer Night"s Dream, dueling shirts and long gowns of phosph.o.r.escent pastels like the world never saw before, Day-Glo death masks beaming out in front of the instruments. The music suddenly submerges the room from a million speakers... a soprano tornado of it... all-electric, plus the Buchla electronic music machine screaming like a logical lunatic ...
Out into the middle, under the great parachute canopy and the spotlights, sailing across the mungery carpet. . . Doris Delay of the Pranksters in Flag People coveralls and Terry the Tramp of h.e.l.l"s Angels in an Ozark razorback stovepipe hat dark gla.s.ses Angel beard, a huge brown-and-black striped sweater like a racc.o.o.n, the Angels" sleeveless jacket and the death"s head, blue jeans, motorcycle boots ... Christ, here"s a coming-out party for you, Doris Delay and Terry the Tramp . .. stomping and flailing about in a regular hoedown ... but formal in a wacky way. They dance for about a minute and then the others rush out, a storm of them, couples in acid-head fancy dress, dancing to the rock "n" roll, only they"re dancing clean out of their gourds, they leap, they flail their arms up in the air, they throw their heads back, they gyrate and levitate ... they"re in a state ... they"re ecstatic ... Gary Goldhill looks on from the side. He has on a huge lake-red Chinese pajama top with a gold dragon embroidered on it. He"s spooked about the Warehouse .. . Musty! . .. Insane! ... Friends or spirits? Well-Earth can be Heaven & h.e.l.l and he takes the plunge ... and reaches into his pants pocket and swallows a potion . ..
Already a few enraptured grins breaking out in the crowd ... Rapt wet-lipped bliss... They glisten, their eyes are wide open like plastic nodules. The Telepathic Kid is so high, grinning so wet and glistening, he looks like one great psychic o.r.g.a.s.m getting ready to unfold exfoliate into ... a calla lily ... and a blond kid with a white Nehru coat on and a big silver pendant hanging down over his chest kneeling before the rock "n" roll band with his hands brought up like in prayer and a grin of such pure acid bliss on his face that his teeth sizzle ... a pot full of boiling pearls ... The Pranksters; Babbs and Gretch and Page and others, take to the bandstand, all electrified, and they start beaming out the most weird loud Chinese science-fiction music and cranking up the Buchla electronic music machine until it maneuvers itself into the most incalculable sonic corner, the last turn in the soldered circuit maze, and lets out a pure topologically measured scream. Ultima-time, with heavy-duty wiring, the works. Kesey stands off to one side still, in the shadows, at... Control Central, only now he has the Flag People coveralls off and is bare chested, wearing only white leotards, a white satin cape tied at the neck, and a red, white, and blue sash running diagonally across his chest. It"s ... Captain America! The Flash! Captain Marvel! the Superhero, in a word ...
At the height of the frenzy suddenly the lights go out, the sound goes out, all replaced by a single spotlight hitting the center of the floor. Kesey"s brother Chuck is up in the rafters working the lights. You can hear Babbs"s and Ha.s.sler"s voices over microphones in the dark, rapping back and forth in a shuck manner: "Do you think they"d clear out of the center if we asked them, Ha.s.sler?" ... "Sure, they"re gonna clear out the center faster than you can say clear out the center" ... But everyone just mills around, caught in the blackout. Babbs says: "If they don"t clear out the center, then they"re a bunch of a.s.sholes" ... Well, let"s try the direct approach! They clear out of the ellipse where the spot beams down, and Kesey comes in out of the darkness. He"s taken the cape and the sash off, however. Too freaking much, I guess. He"s just wearing the white ballet tights and his wrestler"s build. A pair of jockey shorts show faintly under the leotards-just the right touch ... here in the Rat Shack ... He has a hand microphone up to his mouth.... Kesey in the leotards with the pool of light in front of him and the heads all packed in around the loop of light in the darkness.... It"s good and theatrical ... in a weird weird way ... Some of the heads get the point immediately. Without a sound, they start tossing things into the pool of light, sugar cubes, capsules, cigarette papers, a couple of joints, beads, amulets, headbands, all the charms and totems of psychedelphia into the pool of light. It"s ... an altar ... Kesey starts talking over the microphone in the upcountry drawl...