Miles Miles Miles Miles Miles Miles Miles under all that good vegetation from Morris Orchids and having visions of
Faces Faces Faces Faces Faces Faces Faces so many faces rolling up behind the eyelids, faces he has never seen before, complete with spectral cheekbones, pregnant eyes, stringy wattles, and all of a sudden: Chief Broom. For some reason peyote does this... Kesey starts getting eyelid movies of faces, whole galleries of weird faces, churning up behind the eyelids, faces from out of nowhere. He knows nothing about Indians and has never met an Indian, but suddenly here is a full-blown Indian-Chief Broom-the solution, the whole mothering key, to the novel...
HE HADN"T EVEN MEANT TO WRITE THIS BOOK. HE HAD BEEN working on another one, called Zoo about North Beach. Lovell had suggested why didn"t he get a job as night attendant on the psychiatrie ward at Menlo Park. He could make some money, and since there wasn"t much doing on the ward at night, he could work on Zoo. But Kesey got absorbed in the life on the psychiatric ward. The whole system-if they set out to invent the perfect Anti-cure for what ailed the men on this ward, they couldn"t have done it better. Keep them cowed and docile. Play on the weakness that drove them nuts in the first place. Stupefy the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds with tranquilizers and if they still get out of line haul them up to the "shock shop" and punish them. Beautiful- Sometimes he would go to work high on acid. He could see into their faces. Sometimes he wrote, and sometimes he drew pictures of the patients, and as the lines of the ball-point greasy creased into the paper the lines of their faces, he could-the interiors of these men came into the lines, the ball-point creva.s.ses, it was the most incredible feeling, the anguish and the pain came right out front and flowed in the creva.s.ses in their faces, and in the ball-point creva.s.ses, the same-one!-creva.s.ses now, black starling nostrils, black starling eyes, blind black starling geek cry on every face: "Me! Me! Me! Me! I am-Me!"-he could see clear into them. And-how could you tell anybody about this? they"ll say you"re a nut yourself-but afterwards, not high on anything, he could still see into people.
The novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo"s Nest, was about a roustabout named Randle McMurphy. He is a big healthy animal, but he decides to fake insanity in order to get out of a short jail stretch he is serving on a work farm and into what he figures will be the soft life of a state mental hospital. He comes onto the ward with his tight reddish-blond curls tumbling out from under his cap, cracking jokes and trying to get some action going among these deada.s.ses in the loony bin. They can"t resist the guy. They suddenly want to do things. The tyrant who runs the place, Big Nurse, hates him for weakening .. . Control, and the System. By and by, many of the men resent him for forcing them to struggle to act like men again. Finally, Big Nurse is driven to play her trump card and finish off McMurphy by having him lobotomized. But this crucifixion inspires an Indian patient, a schizoid called Chief Broom, to rise up and break out of the hospital and go sane: namely, run like h.e.l.l for open country.
Chief Broom. The very one. From the point of view of craft, Chief Broom was his great inspiration. If he had told the story through McMurphy"s eyes, he would have had to end up with the big bruiser delivering a lot of homilies about his down-home theory of mental therapy. Instead, he told the story through the Indian. This way he could present a schizophrenic state the way the schizophrenic himself, Chief Broom, feels it and at the same time report the McMurphy Method more subtly.
Morris Orchids! He wrote several pa.s.sages of the book under peyote and LSD. He even had someone give him a shock treatment, clandestinely, so he could write a pa.s.sage in which Chief Broom comes back from "the shock shop." Eating Laredo buds-he would write like mad under the drugs. After he came out of it, he could see that a lot of it was junk. But certain pa.s.sages-like Chief Broom in his schizophrenic fogs-it was true vision, a little of what you could see if you opened the doors of perception, friends . . .
RIGHT AFTER HE FINISHED ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO"S NEST, Kesey sublet his cottage on Perry Lane and he and Faye went back up to Oregon. This was in June, 1961. He spent the summer working in his brother Chuck"s creamery in Springfield to acc.u.mulate some money. Then he and Faye moved into a little house in Florence, Oregon, about 50 miles west of Springfield, near the ocean, in logging country. Kesey started gathering material for his second novel, Sometimes a Great Notion, which was about a logging family. He took to riding early in the morning and at night in the "crummies." These were pickup trucks that served as buses taking the loggers to and from the camps. At night he would hang around the bars where the loggers went. He was Low Rent enough himself to talk to them. After about four months of that, they headed back to Perry Lane, where he was going to do the writing.
ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO"S NEST WAS PUBLISHED IN FEBRUARY, 1962, and it made his literary reputation immediately:
"A smashing achievement"-Mark Sch.o.r.er "A great new American novelist"-Jack Kerouac "Powerful poetic realism"-Life "An amazing first novel"-Boston Traveler "This is a first novel of special worth"-New York Herald Tribune "His storytelling is so effective, his style so impetuous, his grasp of characters so certain, that the reader is swept along... His is a large, robust talent, and he has written a large, robust book"-Sat.u.r.day Review
AND ON THE LANE - ALL THIS WAS A CONFIRMATION OF everything they and Kesey had been doing. For one thing there was the old Drug Paranoia-the fear that this wild uncharted drug thing they were into would gradually... rot your brain. Well, here was the answer. Chief Broom!
And McMurphy ... but of course. The current fantasy ... he was a McMurphy figure who was trying to get them to move off their own snug-harbor dead center, out of the plump little game of being ersatz daring and ersatz alive, the middle-cla.s.s intellectual"s game, and move out to ... Edge City ... where it was scary, but people were whole people. And if drugs were what unlocked the doors and enabled you to do this thing and realize all this that was in you, then so let it be ...
Not even on Perry Lane did people really seem to catch the thrust of the new book he was working on, Sometimes a Great Notion. It was about the head of a logging clan, Hank Stamper, who defies a labor union and thereby the whole community he lives in by continuing his logging operation through a strike. It was an unusual book. It was a novel in which the strikers are the villains and the strikebreaker is the hero. The style was experimental and sometimes difficult. And the main source of "mythic" reference was not Sophocles or even Sir James Frazer but... yes, Captain Marvel. The union leaders, the strikers, and the townspeople were the tarantulas, all joyfully taking their vow: "We shall wreak vengeance and abuse on all whose equals we are not... and "will to equality" shall henceforth be the name for virtue; and against all that has power we want to raise our clamor!" Hank Stamper was, quite intentionally, Captain Marvel. Once known as.. . Ubermensch. The current fantasy ...
... on Perry Lane. Nighttime, the night he and Faye and the kids came back to Perry Lane from Oregon, and they pull up to the old cottage and there is a funny figure in the front yard, smiling and rolling his shoulders this way and that and jerking his hands out to this side and the other side as if there"s a different drummer somewhere, different drummer, you understand, corked out of his gourd, in fact... and, well, Hi, Ken, yes, uh, well, you weren"t around, exactly, you understand, doubledy-clutch, doubledy-clutch, and they told me you wouldn"t mind, generosity knoweth no-ahem-yes, I had a "47 Pontiac myself once, held the road like a prehistoric bird, you understand ... and, yes, Neal Ca.s.sady had turned up in the old cottage, like he had just run out of the pages of On the Road, and ... what"s next, Chief? Ah .. . many Day-Glo freaking curlicues- All sorts of people began gathering around Perry Lane. Quite an... underground sensation it was, in Hip California. Kesey, Ca.s.sady, Larry McMurtry; two young writers, Ed McClanahan and Bob Stone; Chloe Scott the dancer, Roy Seburn the artist, Carl Lehmann-Haupt, Vic Lovell... and Richard Alpert him-self... all sorts of people were in and out of there all the time, because they had heard about it, like the local beats-that term was still used-a bunch of kids from a pad called the Chateau, a wildhaired kid named Jerry Garcia and the Cadaverous Cowboy, Page Browning. Everybody was attracted by the strange high times they had heard about... the Lane"s fabled Venison Chili, a Kesey dish made of venison stew laced with LSD, which you could consume and then go sprawl on the mattress in the fork of the great oak in the middle of the Lane at night and play pinball with the light show in the sky . .. Perry Lane.
And many puzzled souls looking in ... At first they were captivated. The Lane was too good to be true. It was Walden Pond, only without any Th.o.r.eau misanthropes around. Instead, a community of intelligent, very open, out-front people-out front was a term everybody was using-out-front people who cared deeply for one another, and shared... in incredible ways, even, and were embarked on some kind of... well, adventure in living. Christ, you could see them trying to put their finger on it and ... then .. . gradually figuring out there was something here they weren"t in on ... Like the girl that afternoon in somebody"s cottage when Alpert came by. This was a year after he started working with Timothy Leary. She had met Alpert a couple of years before and he had been 100 percent the serious young clinical psychologist-legions of rats and cats in cages with their brainstems, corpora callosa and optic chiasmas sliced, spliced, diced, iced in the name of the Scientific Method. Now Alpert was sitting on the floor in Perry Lane in the old boho Lotus hunker-down and exegeting very seriously about a baby crawling blindly about the room. Blindly? What do you mean, blindly? That baby is a very sentient creature . .. That baby sees the world with a completeness that you and I will never know again. His doors of perception have not yet been closed. He still experiences the moment he lives in. The inevitable bulls.h.i.t hasn"t constipated his cerebral cortex yet. He still sees the world as it really is, while we sit here, left with only a dim historical version of it manufactured for us by words and official bulls.h.i.t, and so forth and so on, and Alpert soars in Ouspenskyian loop-the-loops for baby while, as far as this girl can make out, baby just bobbles, dribbles, lists and rocks across the floor ... But she was learning ... that the world is sheerly divided into those who have had the experience and those who have not-those who have been through that door and- It was a strange feeling for all these good souls to suddenly realize that right here on woody thatchy little Perry Lane, amid the honeysuckle and dragonflies and boughs and leaves and a thousand little places where the sun peeped through, while straight plodding souls from out of the Stanford eucalyptus tunnel plodded by straight down the fairways on the golf course across the way-this amazing experiment in consciousness was going on, out on a frontier neither they nor anybody else ever heard of before.
PALO ALTO, CALIF., JULY 21, I963 - AND THEN ONE DAY THE end of an era, as the papers like to put it. A developer bought most of Perry Lane and was going to tear down the cottages and put up modern houses and the bulldozers were coming.
The papers turned up to write about the last night on Perry Lane, n.o.ble old Perry Lane, and had the old cliche at the ready, End of an Era, expecting to find some deep-thinking latter-day Thorstein Veblen intellectuals on hand with sonorous bitter statements about this machine civilization devouring its own past.
Instead, there were some kind of nuts out here. They were up in a tree lying on a mattress, all high as c.o.o.ns, and they kept offering everybody, all the reporters and photographers, some kind of venison chili, but there was something about the whole setup- and when it came time for the sentimental bitter statement, well, instead, this big guy Kesey dragged a piano out of his house and they all set about axing the h.e.l.l out of it and burning it up, calling it "the oldest living thing on Perry Lane," only they were giggling and yahooing about it, high as c.o.o.ns, in some weird way, all of them, hard-grabbing off the stars, and it was hard as h.e.l.l to make the End of an Era story come out right in the papers, with nothing but this kind of freaking Olsen & Johnson material to work with, but they managed to go back with the story they came with, End of an Era, the cliche intact, if they could only blot out the cries in their ears of Ve-ni-son Chi-li- -and none of them would have understood it, anyway, even if someone had told them what was happening. Kesey had already bought a new place in La Honda, California. He had already proposed to a dozen people on the Lane that they come with him, move the whole scene, the whole raggedy-manic Era, off to ...
Versailles, his Low Rent Versailles, over the mountain and through the woods, in La Honda, Calif. Where-where-in the lime :::::: light :::::: and the neon dust- "... a considerable new message ... the blissful counter-stroke ..."
chapter.
V.
The Rusky-Dusky Neon Dust
A very Christmas card, Kesey"s new place near La Honda.
A log house, a mountain creek, a little wooden bridge Fifteen miles from Palo Alto beyond Cahill Ridge where Route 84 Cuts through a redwood forest gorge- A redwood forest for a yard!
A very Christmas card.
And- Strategic privacy.
Not a neighbor for a mile.
La Honda lived it Western style.
One work-a-daddy hive, A housing tract, But it was back behind the redwoods.
The work-a-daddy faces could Not be seen from scenic old Route 84, Just a couple Wilde Weste roadside places, Baw"s General Store, The Hilltom Motel, in the Wilde Weste Touriste mode.
With brown wood signs sawed jagged at the ends, But sawed neat, you know, As if to suggest: Wilde Weste Roughing It, motoring friends, But Sanitized jake seats Ammonia pucks in every urinal We aim to keep your Wilde West Sani-pure- Who won the West?
Antisepsis did, I guess.
La Honda"s Wilde Weste lode Seems to be owed to the gunslinging Younger Brothers.
They holed up in town And dad-blame but they found a neighborly way To pay for their stay.
They built a whole wooden store, these notorious mothers.
But them was the Younger Brothers, Mere gunslingers.
Now this Kesey And his Merry Humdingers down the road-
-in the ::::: lime ::::: light ::::: Early in 1964, just a small group on hand as yet. In the afternoon-Faye, the eternal beatific pioneer wife, in the house, at the stove, at the sewing machine, at the washing machine, with the children, Shannon and Zane, gathered around her skirts. Out in a wooden shack near the creek Kesey has his desk and typewriter where he has just finished the revisions on Sometimes a Great Notion, now almost 300,000 words long. Kesey"s friend from Oregon, George Walker, is here, a blond All-American-looking guy in his twenties, well-built, son of a wealthy housing developer. Walker has what is known as a sunny disposition and is always saying Too much! in the most enthusiastic way. And Sandy Lehmann-Haupt. Sandy is the younger brother of Carl Lehmann-Haupt, whom Kesey had known on Perry Lane. Sandy is a handsome kid, 22 years old, tall, lean-high-strung. Sandy had met Kesey three months before, November 14, 1963, through Carl, when Kesey had come to New York for the opening of the stage version of One Flew Over the Cuckoo"s Nest. Kirk Douglas played McMurphy. Sandy had dropped out of N.Y.U. and was working as a sound engineer. He was a genius with tapes, soundtracks, audio systems and so forth, but he was going through a bad time. It got to the point where one day he tried to enter himself in a psychiatric ward, only to be talked out of it by Carl, who took him off to see the opening of One Flew Over the Cuckoo"s Nest. And there was Randle McMurphy ... Kesey ... and Carl asked Kesey to take Sandy out west with him, to La Honda, to get him out of the whole New York mora.s.s. And if there was any place for curing the New York thing, this was it, out back of Kesey"s in the lime :::::: light :::::: bower :::::: up the path out back of the house, up the hill into the redwood forest, Sandy suddenly came upon a fabulous bower, like a great domed enclosure, like what people mean when they talk about a "cathedral in the pines," only the redwoods were even more majestic. The way the sun came down through the redwood leaves-trunks and leaves seemed to stretch up for hundreds of feet above your head. It was always sunny and cool at the same time, like a perfect fall day all year around. The sun came down through miles of leaves and got broken up like a pointillist painting, deep green and dapple shadows but brilliant light in a soaring deep green super-bower, a perpetual lime-green light, green-and-gold afternoon, stillness, perpendicular peace, wood-scented, with the cars going by on Route 84 just adding pneumatic sound effects, sheee-ooooooooo, like a gentle wind. All peace here; very rea.s.suring!
A FEW TIMES SANDY AND KESEY AND WALKER WOULD WALK UP into the forest with axes and cut some wood for the house-but that wasn"t really the name of it at Kesey"s. Sandy could see that Kesey wasn"t primarily an outdoorsman. He wasn"t that crazy about unspoilt Nature. It was more like he had a vision of the forest as a fantastic stage setting ... in which every day would be a happening, an art form ...
He had hi-fi speakers up on the roof of the house, and suddenly out here in G.o.d"s great green mountain ozone erupts a manic spade blowing on a plastic saxophone, namely, an Ornette Coleman record. It"s a slightly weird path here that the three loggers take: nutty mobiles hanging from the low branches and a lot of wild paintings nailed up on the tree trunks. Then a huge tree with a hollow base, and inside it, glinting in the greeny dark, here is a tin horse with the tin bent so that the grotesque little animal is keeled over, kneeling, in bad shape.
The terrain Kesey was most interested in, in fact, was inside the house. The house was made of logs, but it was more like a lodge than a cabin. The main room had big French doors, for a picture-window effect, and exposed beams and a big stone fireplace at one end. Kesey had all sorts of recording apparatus around, tape recorders, motion-picture cameras and projectors, and Sandy helped add still more, some fairly sophisticated relay systems and the like. Often the Perry Lane people would drive over-although no one had moved to La Honda so far. Ed Mc-Clanahan, Bob Stone, Vic Lovell, Chloe Scott, Jane Burton, Roy Seburn. Occasionally Kesey"s brother Chuck and his cousin Dale would come down from Oregon. They both resembled Kesey but were smaller. Chuck was a bright quiet man. Casual and down-home. Dale was powerfully built and more completely down-home than either. Kesey was trying to develop various forms of spontaneous expression. They would do something like ... all lie on the floor and start rapping back and forth and Kesey puts a tape-recorder microphone up each sleeve and pa.s.ses his hands through the air and over their heads, like a sorcerer making signs, and their voices cut in and out as the microphones sail over. Sometimes the results were pretty- -well, freaking gibberish to normal human ears, most likely. Or, to the receptive standard intellectual who has heard about the 1913 Armory Show and Erik Satie and Edgard Varese and John Cage it might sound ... sort of avant-garde, you know. But in fact, like everything else here, it grows out of... the experience, with LSD. The whole other world that LSD opened your mind to existed only in the moment itself-Now-and any attempt to plan, compose, orchestrate, write a script, only locked you out of the moment, back in the world of conditioning and training where the brain was a reducing valve .. .
So they would try still wilder improvisations ... like the Human Tapes, huge rolls of butcher paper stretched out on the floor. They would take wax pencils, different colors, and scrawl out symbols for each other to improvise on: Sandy the pink drum strokes there, and he would make a sound like chee-oonh-chunh, chee-oonh-chunh, and so forth, and Kesey the guitar arrows there, broinga broinga brang brang, and Jane Burton the bursts of scat vocals there, and Bob Stone the Voice Over stories to the background of the Human Jazz-all of it recorded on the tape recorder-and then all soaring on-what?-acid, peyote, morning-glory seeds, which were very h.e.l.l to choke down, billions of bilious seeds mulching out into sodden dandelions in your belly, bloated-but soaring!-or IT-290, or dexedrine, benzedrine, methedrine-Speed!-or speed and gra.s.s-sometimes you could take a combination of speed and gra.s.s and prop that... LSD door open in the mind without going through the whole uncontrollable tumult of the LSD ... And Sandy takes LSD and the lime :::::: light :::::: and the magical bower turns into... neon dust... pointillist particles for sure, now. Golden particles, brilliant forest-green particles, each one picking up the light, and all shimmering and flowing like an electronic mosaic, pure California neon dust. There is no way to describe how beautiful this discovery is, to actually see the atmosphere you have lived in for years for the first time and to feel that it is inside of you, too, flowing up from the heart, the torso, into the brain, an electric fountain ... And ... IT-290!-he and George Walker are up in the big tree in front of the house, straddling a limb, and he experiences .. . intersubjectivity-he knows precisely what Walker is thinking. It isn"t necessary to say what the design is, just the part each will do.
"You paint the cobwebs," Sandy says, "and I"ll paint the leaves behind them."
"Too much!" says George, because, of course, he knows-all of us sliding in and out of these combinations of mutual consciousness, intersubjectivity, going out to the backhouse, near the creek, with tape recorders and starting to rap-a form of free a.s.sociation conversation, like a jazz conversation, or even a monologue, with everyone, or whoever, catching hold of words, symbols, ideas, sounds, and winging them back and forth and beyond ... the walls of conventional logic ... One of us finds a bunch of wooden chessmen. They are carved figures, some kind of ancient men, every piece an old carved man, only somebody left them outside and they got wet and now they"re warped, which sprung them open into their real selves. This one"s genitals are hanging out despite he has robes on and carries a spear- -Have you seen my daughter? Claims I embarra.s.s her. Claims the whole world knows I have c.u.n.t on the brain. At my age- -Yes, sir, we have the report. Your daughter"s a h.o.r.n.y little b.i.t.c.h, but I am the King and I have no choice but to cut your b.a.l.l.s off- -King, I"ll throw you for them- -Your b.a.l.l.s?
--Right! With those gold hubcaps you lug about there- -Right! In fact, incredible. Each one of us has a chess figure in his hand and becomes that character and they are rapping off the personalities they see in these figures, and they start thinking the same things at once. I, too, saw these funny little curves under this figure"s hand here, no larger than the head of a tiny tack, as... golden hubcaps... I was about to say it- It is the strangest feeling of my life-intersubjectivity, as if our consciousnesses have opened up and flowed together and now one has only to look at a flicker of the other"s mouth or eye or at the chessman he holds in his hand, wobbling- -You wouldn"t believe a girl with electric eel t.i.ts, would you, King?
-The ones that ionized King Arthur"s sword under swamp water?
-The very ones. Dugs with a thousand tiny suction caps, a h.o.r.n.y, duggy little girl, I"m afraid, 120 household volts of jail bait if I ever saw one- -and how, in the wildest operations of chance, could a term like 120 household volts of jail bait arise in all our minds at once- But the swamps, too-it is no longer all Garden of Eden and glorious discovery for the old Perry Lane crowd. In fact, there"s a little grumbling here in the magic dell. Kesey is starting to organize our trips. He hands out the drugs personally, one for you, and I one for you ... and just when you"re starting to lie back and groove on your thing, he comes in-Hup!-Hup!-Everybody up! and organizes a tramp through the woods ...
After it"s all over, some of them ask Kesey for some acid and IT-290 to take back to Palo Alto. No-o-o-o-o-o, says Kesey, and he c.o.c.ks his head as if he wants to say this thing just right, because it"s a delicate matter.-I think you should come here and take it...
Later, on the way back, someone says: We used to be equals. Now it"s Kesey"s trip. We go to his place. We take his acid. We do what he wants.
But what does he want? Gradually, vaguely, it dawns that Kesey"s fantasy has moved on again, beyond even theirs, old Perry Lane. In any case, n.o.body has the stomach for Kesey"s master plan, that they should all move out onto his place, in tents and so forth, transplanting the Perry Lane thing to La Honda. They began to eye Kesey"s place as a kind of hill-country Versailles, with Kesey as the Sun King, looking bigger all the time, with that great jaw in profile against the redwoods and the mountaintops. It never develops into an open breach, however, or even disenchantment. They just get uneasy. They get the feeling that Kesey was heading out on further, toward a fantasy they didn"t know if they wanted to explore.
OTHER PEOPLE WERE BEGINNING TO SHOW UP AT KESEY"S, AND that was part of the trouble. Some of the Perry Lane crowd didn"t know exactly what to make of Ca.s.sady. Here he is before us in Kesey"s Versailles, coming on, coming on, with his shirt off and his arms jerking and his abdominal obliques jutting out at the sides like a weight lifter"s . . . We are hip, we value the holy primitive. Only Kesey is intimating that one should learn from Ca.s.sady, he is talking to you. Which he was. Ca.s.sady wanted intellectual communion. But the intellectuals just wanted him to be the holy primitive, the Denver kid, the natural in our midst. Sometimes Ca.s.sady would sense they weren"t accepting him intellectually and go off into the corner, still on his manic monologue, muttering, "All right, I"ll take my own trip, I"ll go off on my own trip, this is my own trip, you understand ..."
Or Page Browning. The Cadaverous Cowboy had found his way over the mountain, too. Back on Perry Lane he had been just a Low Rent character popping in from time to time on his route. Only now Kesey is intimating that one can learn from Page Browning. Kesey finds something loyal, brave and creative, creative, under that cadaverous face and the Adam"s apple and the black motorcycle jacket like a leftover from when he must"ve ridden with the h.e.l.l"s Angels-and his thick Sh.e.l.lube pit voice. The primordial Sh.e.l.lube pits ... could that be it, a little cla.s.s fear, after all, among the hip ... genteel... intellectuals? A little Ahor, as Arthur Koestler called it, the Ancient Horror, from boyhood-the genteel suburban kid rides his bicycle over to the gas station and there in the grease pit area where they lubricate the cars the hard rocks are hunkered down telling jokes about p.u.s.s.y, with an occasional clinical reference to bowel movements and crepitation. And oh christ don"t you remember their forearms with the basilic veins wrapped around them like surgical tubes, gorged with the unattainable lower-cla.s.s hard-rock power that any moment is going to look up and spot us... genteel little pudding kids. But Kesey loved this Low Rent stuff. He was ready to swing with it. In time he would even be swinging with the beasts from the veritable Ahor fathoms of the Sh.e.l.lube pits, the h.e.l.l"s Angels themselves . . .
In fact, only a few of the new retinue that showed up at La Honda were Low Rent in terms of background, but the place became much more down-home than Perry Lane.
One of Kesey"s old friends, Kenneth Babbs, showed up, just back from Vietnam, where he had been a captain in the Marines, flying helicopters. Babbs had graduated magna c.u.m laude from Miami University, majoring in English. He had also been a great athlete. He entered the creative-writing program at Stanford, where Kesey met him. Babbs was tall, powerful, a very Rabelaisian creature. Back from the wars, he came on like a great hearty grizzly bear roaring a cosmic laugh. Sometimes he would wear a flight suit for days at a time, no matter where he was, come fly with me. And Babbs was capable of some wild flights. He gave the Kesey colony much of its new style ... Yes. He introduced the idea of the pranks, great public put-ons they could perform ...
And Mike Hagen arrived. Hagen was a fellow Kesey had known in Oregon, good-looking, soft-spoken, well-mannered, from a good family, fairly rich, the kind of kid daddies smile over as he takes their teenage daughter out on her first date, Yup, I"ve raised her pretty d.a.m.n well, if I do say so. No riffraff for my girl, just nice Christian boys who say Yes, sir, Yes, ma"am and comb their hair down with water on the comb. About ten minutes after Hagen pulled into Kesey"s, he had his Screw Shack built out back of the cabin, a lean-to banged together with old boards and decorated inside with carpet remnants, a mattress with an India-print coverlet, candles, sparkling little bijoux, a hi-fi speaker-for the delight and comfort of Hagen"s Girls. Oh christ Hagen"s Girls and the trouble they caused-Stark Naked, Anonymous-but they come later. Hagen was a benign but inspired con man in a sweet way. He had a special gift for haggling, bartering, ha.s.sling, and Hagen would turn up with his car crammed with gleaming tape-recorder equipment, movie equipment, microphones, speakers, amplifiers, even video-tape equipment, and the audio-visual level started rising around here- Then one day, for example, one of Kesey"s old Perry Lane friends, Gurney Norman, a writer, drove up for the weekend from Fort Ord, the Army camp, and brought along one of his Army friends, a 24-year-old first lieutenant in the infantry named Ron Bevirt. Bevirt put everybody off at first, because he looked totally Army. He was fat and sloppy-looking and had a particularly gross-looking Army crewcut and was totally unsophisticated. Bevirt, however, liked them and he kept coming on weekends and bringing a lot of food, which he enjoyed sharing with everybody, and he smiled and laughed a lot and people couldn"t help but get to like him. By and by he was out of the Army and he came around all the time. He even started getting leaner and harder and his hair grew out until it was like Prince Valiant"s, in the comic strip, and he was a pretty handsome guy and very much into the ... pudding. By and by he became known as The Ha.s.sler and his real name vanished almost...
AND BY AND BY, OF COURSE, THE CITIZENS OF LA HONDA AND others would start wondering ... what are the ninnies doing? How to tell it? But there was no way to tell them about the experience. You couldn"t put it into words. The citizens always had the same fantasy, known as the pathology fantasy. These ninnies are pathological. Sometimes it was psychological-what do these kids come from, broken homes or what? Sometimes it was social-are these kids alienated? is our society getting rotten at the core? or what? The citizens couldn"t know about the LSD experience, because that door had never opened for them. To be on the threshold of-Christ! how to tell them about the life here? The Youth had always had only three options: go to school, get a job or live at home. And-how boring each was!-compared to the experience of. . . the infinite . . . and a life in which the subject is not scholastic or bureaucratic but... Me and Us, the attuned ones amid the non-musical shiny-black-shoe mult.i.tudes, /-with my eyes on that almost invisible hole up there in the r-r-r-redwood sky ...
ONE NIGHT BOB STONE WAS SITTING AT HOME IN MENLO Park-he was still in the creative-writing program at Stanford-and the phone rang and it was Babbs calling from Kesey"s in La Honda. Come on over, he said, we"re going to get something going. Well, no, Stone said, he didn"t feel much up to it, he was kind of tired and it would take an hour to drive over the mountain and an hour to drive back, and maybe some other time- "Come on, Bob," says Babbs. "It won"t take you an hour. You can get here in thirty minutes."
Babbs is in very high spirits and in the background Stone can hear music and voices and they are, indeed, getting something going.
"I know how long it takes," says Stone. "And it takes forty-five minutes or an hour, more like an hour at night."
"Listen!" says Babbs, who is laughing and practically shouting into the phone. "The intrepid traveler can make it in thirty minutes! The intrepid traveler can make it with the speed of light!"
In the background Babbs can hear a couple of voices rapping ff that: "The intrepid traveler! The intrepid traveler!"
"The intrepid traveler," Babbs is shouting. "The intrepid traveler just gets up and walks out and he"s here!"
And so on, until Stone"s resistance wears down and he gets in his car and heads over. He arrives; after an hour, yes.
As soon as he gets out of his car out front of the house he starts hearing the Big Rap, from inside the house, from up in the woods, it"s like drums are beating and horns are blowing and Pranksters are ululating and rapping: "The Intrepid Traveler!"
"The Intrepid Traveler!"
"The Intrepid Traveler!"
"The Intrepid Traveler!"
"The Intrepid Traveler!"
He goes through the French doors in the front, mad ochre and lurid lights, gongs, pipes, drums, guitars being banged like percussion bangers- "The Intrepid Traveler!"
"The Intrepid Traveler-the traveler in a flash!"
"The Intrepid Traveler-"
"-straights out the curves!"
"The Intrepid Traveler-"
"-curves out the straights!"
"The Intrepid Traveler-"
"-a beam of light!"
"The Intrepid Traveler-"
"-a lightning beam ! "
"The Intrepid Traveler-"
"-shortens the circuit!"
"The Intrepid Traveler-"