heading straight for him at 50 miles an hour as he balances tamping the earth with his feet on the very center line. No undue cause for alarm and concern, however. He has but to GESTURE.
the car slows down and creeps around him, shuddering in the weird wind, trying to hold itself together in the face of This surge and he knows with absolute certainty he has... all the Power in the world can do what he wants with the Enemy in whatever form-he flings out his arm GESTURES.
the car stops. The enemy peers out. At this point he can do all DESTROY.
CREATE.
GALVANIZE.
CALL BACK.
SEND FORTH.
-has only to decide, with power too great to use and too formidable to squander. He walks back over the bridge to the house as the wind dies down. The skull mirrors... ring- Afterwards he knows it was the drug. And yet-Walker had been driving up near Skylonda in that selfsame moment and had suddenly felt a wind rise and said, How very strange! Too much!
Oh yes, Major, it was the drug, you understand-and yet-he was fully into the bare Halusion Gulp of the moment out there and there ::::: was the Power and the Call and this movie is big enough to include the world, a cast of millions, the castoff billions .. . Control Tower to Orbiter One CONTROL.
chapter.
XV.
Cloud
A HULKING GREAT SIGN ON THE GATE OUT FRONT.
THE MERRY PRANKSTERS WELCOME THE BEATLES.
The Beatles were going to be at the Cow Palace outside of San Francisco on the evening of September 2. The papers, the radio, the TV could talk of nothing else. Kesey"s idea, the current fantasy, is that after the show the Beatles will come to La Honda for a good freaking rout with the Merry Pranksters. Now as to how this is to all come about...
But one has to admit the sign creates an effect.
THE MERRY PRANKSTERS WELCOME THE BEATLES.
Out on Route 84, Mom&Dad&Buddy&Sis in their Ocelot Rabies 400 hardtop sedans, they slow down and stop and stare. The last sign, the one reading THE MERRY PRANKSTERS WELCOME THE h.e.l.l"S ANGELS, for that one they mainly just slowed down. After all, it didn"t say when. It might be 30 seconds from now-hundreds of the beasts, coming "round the mountain in a shower of spirochetes and crab lice, spitting out bone marrow from the last cannibal rape job up the road.
Well, it worked with the h.e.l.l"s Angels. They put up the sign THE MERRY PRANKSTERS WELCOME THE h.e.l.l"S ANGELS, and sure enough the Angels came, these unbelievable bogeymen for the middle cla.s.s, in the flesh, and they became part of the Prankster movie, in the rich ripe cheesy Angel flesh. So they put up the sign THE MERRY PRANKSTERS WELCOME THE BEATLES and maybe the Beatles will come. There is this one small difference of course. Kesey knew the h.e.l.l"s Angels. He invited them, face to face. Ah, but comes a time to put a few professed beliefs to the test. Control, Attention, Imagine the little freaks into the movie ...
Kesey raps on to Mountain Girl out in the backhouse. They lie there on the mattresses, with Kesey rapping on and on and Mountain Girl trying to absorb it. Ever since Asilomar, Kesey has been deep into the religion thing. Miracles-Control-Now- The Movie-on and on he talks to Mountain Girl out in the backhouse and very deep and far-out stuff it is, too. Mountain Girl tries to concentrate, but the words swim like great waves of. .. The words swim by and she hears the sound but it is like her cerebral cortex is tuned out to the content of it. Her mind keeps rolling and spinning over another set of data, always the same. Like-the eternal desperate calculation. In short, Mountain Girl is pregnant.
And yet with all this desperation rolling and spinning going on, something he says will catch hold. They are that bizarre, but that plausible, Kesey"s dreams are. It"s a matter of imagining them into the movie. The Beatles. It is like an experiment in everything the Pranksters have learned up to now. We can"t make the Beatles come out here to our place. We can"t cause them to do it in the usual sense. But we can imagine them into the movie and work them into the great flow of acausal connection and then it will happen of its own accord. This sign starts the movie going, THE MERRY PRANKSTERS WELCOME THE BEATLES, and our movie becomes their movie, Mom"s and Dad"s and Buddy"s and Sis"s and all the Berkeley kids" and all the heads" and proto-heads" of the San Francisco peninsula, until our fantasy becomes the Beatles" fantasy ... Wonder when they will first feel it... Despite the rolling and spinning and all, Mountain Girl can"t hardly help but marvel at the current fantasy because there has already been so much ... weird s.h.i.t... that worked. Bringing the Angels in, like Kesey did, the most feared demons in America . . . and finding Good People like Buzzard and Sonny and Tiny and Frank and Terry the Tramp, who Done Well, and Beautiful People like Gut... And the poor tortured intellectual angels at Asilomar, from Watermelon Henry to freaking Rachel-for a week Kesey had mystified, like mystified, and taken over the whole Unitarian Church of California. They would never be the same again, which was just as well. A true Miracle, in fact, since they had been the same for so G.o.dd.a.m.n long. Control :::: and it was so plausible, the way it sounded in Kesey"s certain Oregon drawl. So few humans have the hubris to exert their wills upon the flow, maybe not more than forty on the whole planet at any given time. The world is flat, it is supported by forty, or maybe four, men, one at each corner, like the cosmic turtles and elephants in the mythology books, because no one else dares. Mountain Girl is 18 and she is pregnant, but this is Kesey ...
And Miracles? You haven"t seen miracles yet, Job, until you see the Pranksters draw the Beatles into their movie.
SEPTEMBER 2. FAYE"S SEWING MACHINE IS THE FIRST THING everyone hears as they wake up. Faye and Gretch pull out the big costume chest, full of all sorts of ungainly theatrical s.h.i.t, swash-buckle swords and plumed hats and Errol Flynn dueling shirts and Robin Hood boots and quivers and quail masks and Day-Glo roadworker vests and sashes and medals and saris and sarongs and shades and beaks and bells and steelworker hard hats and World War I aviator helmets and Dr. Strange capes and cutla.s.ses and codpieces and jumpsuits and football jerseys and ap.r.o.ns and ascots and wigs and warlock rattles and Jungle Jim jodhpurs and Captain Easy epaulets and Fearless Four tights-and Merry Prankster Page Browning special face paints. The Merry Pranksters are getting ready to head bombed out into the mightiest crazed throng in San Francisco history, come to see the Beatles at the Cow Palace.
One of the Pranksters" outer circle, so to speak, a fellow called C--, from Palo Alto-C--had worked out some kind of a deal and gotten thirty tickets to the Beatles concert for the Pranksters, even though tickets were supposed to be impossible to get. C-was one of the Pranksters" acid sources. Another was an old guy known as the Mad Chemist, an amateur chemistry genius who was also a gun freak. Anyway, this C-- worked out some kind of a deal and he also got enough acid for everybody for the trip. Just before the Pranksters, inner and outer circle, and kids, climbed on the bus, Kesey grinned and pa.s.sed out the acid. It was in capsules, but it was such high concentration it just coated part of the inside of the capsules, so it looked like there was nothing in there. The Pranksters called it acid gas. So they all took acid gas and got on the bus. Ca.s.sady was off somewhere, so Babbs drove. Kesey was up on top of the bus, directing the movie. Well, it was colorful enough, this movie. The bus was super-rigged, all the sound equipment, two big speakers up top, records and tapes, plus the whole Prankster band up top of the bus, George Walker"s drums, and ba.s.ses and guitars and trombones and plumes spilling out the windows and flashes of Day-Glo and flapping epaulets, freaking flashing epaulets, and the Beatles alb.u.m from the movie Help! screaming out the speakers, and up on top, Kesey and Sandy, Mountain Girl, Walker, Zonker, and a new Prankster, a little girl called Mary Microgram, and guitars and drums-He-e-e-elp I ne-e-e-e-ed somebody-the whole flapping yahooing carnival of a bus bouncing and jouncing and grinding up over Skylonda, Cahill Ridge, and down through Palo Alto and out onto the Harbor Freeway heading toward San Francisco, a G.o.dd.a.m.n rolling circus once again. Everybody was getting kind of high on acid, wasted, in fact, and starting, one by one, Mountain Girl and Sandy and Norman, who was inside the bus, to have that thing where the motion and the roar of the bus and the beat of the music and the sound of it are all one thing rolling together, and like Babbs is driving to the exact tempo and speed of the Beatles music, since they are all one thing together, growing high as baboons down through the freaking motels and electric signs and gull lights in Burlingame, near the airport, the Hyatt House super-America motel spires aloft-pitching and rolling and gunning along in exact time to the Beatles music, that being the soundtrack of this movie, you understand-and then off the expressway at the Cow Palace exit and down the swerving-ne-e-e-ed some-body-ramp, down an incline, down a hill, toward dusk, with the fever millions of cars streaming south on the freeway and the sun a low bomb over the hills, zonked, in fact. And grinding down to the stop light, thunk, and the brakes sound like a cast-iron flute A below high C-and at that very moment, that very moment of bus stop-the Beatles song Help! ends, in that very moment, and weird music starts, from the part of the movie Help! where the Arab is sneaking up behind Ringo, and in that weird moment the wind rises over the freeway and to the right there is an abandoned factory, all brick and gla.s.s, mostly gla.s.s, great 1920s factory gla.s.s panes and all of them bending weird in the wind and flashing sheets of that huge afternoon sun like a huge thousand-eyed thing pulsing explosions of sunlight in exact time to the weird Arab music- and in that very moment Kesey, Mountain Girl, Sandy, Zonker, all of them-no one even has to look at another because they not only know that everyone else is seeing it at once, they feel, they feel it flowing through one brain, Atman and Brahman, all one on the bus and all one with the writhing ma.s.s sun reflector ripple sun bomb prisms, the bricks, the gla.s.s, the whole hulk of it, Pranksters and Beatles and sun bombs flashing Arab music- and then in that very moment, they all, the all in one, the one brain flow, see the mouldering sign silhoutted against the sky above the building:
CLOUD.
Suddenly it seemed like the Pranksters could draw the whole universe into ... the movie ...
AND THEN, CURIOUSLY, BEING AS IT IS, SO FREAKING HIGH OUT here-Mountain Girl thinks what the f.u.c.k is this. It looks like a slaughterhouse. In fact, it is the Cow Palace. She can"t even focus on the big hulking building itself for the miles and endless rings of slaughterhouse fences around it, fences and barbed wire and a million cars jamming in and being jammed in in the cold f.a.g end of the dusk. Curiously, it isn"t terrifying to Mountain Girl, however. It is just a slaughterhouse, that"s all.
But to other Pranksters-a concentration camp. We"re going to jail, for the rest of our lives only. Everybody scrambling down off the bus, all still in motion with the ground and the concentration-camp fences flailing in the gruesome gloaming while billions of teeny freaks rush by them, screaming and freaking. They have their tickets in their hand like it is the last corner of salvation extant but they can"t even read the mothers. They are wasted. The letters on the ticket curdle and freak off into the teeny freak flow. Thirty Pranksters in full flapping epaulets and plumes desperately staring at the minute disappearing tickets in their hands in the barby ante-pens of the concentration camp. They are going to arrest us and lock us away for the rest of our lives. That seems very certain, almost like well, that"s why we came. Thirty acid heads, with innocent children in tow, in full Prankster regalia, bombed out of their gourds on the dread LSD, veering, careening in delirium sun pulse. In public, stoned out of their skulls on LSD, not only in public but in this momentous heaving Beatles throng amid 2,000 red dog forensic cops, in full go-to-h.e.l.l costume-exterminate the monsters- ... but... no one lays a hand on them or says the first word, thousands of cops and not even one ha.s.sle ... because we"re too obvious. Suddenly it couldn"t be clearer to Norman. We"re too obvious and we"ve blown their brains. They can"t focus on us- or-we"ve sucked them into the movie and dissolved the bastids- Inside the Cow Palace it is very roaring h.e.l.l. Somehow Kesey and Babbs lead the Day-Glo crazies up to their seats. The Pranksters are sitting in a great clump, a wacky perch up high in precipitous pitch high up pitching down to the stage and millions of the screaming teeny freaks. The teeny freaks, tens of thousands of little girls, have gone raving mad already, even though the Beatles have not come on. Other groups, preliminaries, keep trooping on, And now-Martha and the Vandellas and the electrified throb and brang vibrates up your aorta and picks your bones like a sonic cleaner, and the teeny freaks scream-great sheets of scream like sheets of rain in a squall-and kheew, Xheew, pow, pow, pow-how very marvelous, how very clever, figures Norman. From up out of the Cow Palace horde of sheet scream teeny freaks comes this very marvelous clever light display, hundreds of exploding lights throughout the high intensity lights, ricocheting off everything, what a marvelous clever thing they"ve rigged up here for our ...
-Mountain Girl smiles... the incredible exploding lights explode out in front of her, a great sea of them, and then they explode on her retina in great sunburst retinal sulphur rockets, images and after-images that she will never forget as long as she lives, in truth- ... for our entertainment, and it is twenty or thirty minutes before Norman, stoned, realizes that they are flashbulbs, hundreds, thousands of teeny freaks with flashbulb cameras, aimed at the stage or just shot off in optic o.r.g.a.s.m. Sheets of screams, rock "n" roll, blam blam, a sea of flashbulbs-perfect madness, of course.
-Mountain Girl grins and takes it all in- Other Pranksters, stoned, are slowly getting up tight, however, including Kesey and Babbs. The vibrations are very bad, a poison madness in the air- Each group of musicians that goes off the stage-the horde thinks now the Beatles, but the Beatles don"t come, some other group appears, and the sea of girls gets more and more intense and impatient and the screaming gets higher, and the thought slips into Norman"s flailing flash-frayed brain stem ::: the human lung cannot go beyond this :::: and yet when the voice says And now-the Beatles-what else could he say?-and out they come on stage-them-John and George and Ringo and uh the other one-it might as well have been four imported vinyl dolls for all it was going to matter-that sound he thinks cannot get higher, it doubles, his eardrums ring like stamped metal with it and suddenly Ghhhhhhwooooooooowwwwww, it is like the whole thing has snapped, and the whole front section of the arena becomes a writhing, seething ma.s.s of little girls waving their arms in the air, this ma.s.s of pink arms, it is all you can see, it is like a single colonial animal with a thousand waving pink tentacles-it is a single colonial animal with a thousand waving pink tentacles, -vibrating poison madness and filling the universe with the teeny agony torn out of them. It dawns on Kesey: it is one being. They have all been transformed into one being.
-Mountain Girl grins and urges them on-its scream does not subside for a moment, during after or between numbers, the Beatles could be miming it for all it matters. But something else ... does. .. matter ... and Kesey sees it. One of the Beatles, John, George, Paul, dips his long electric guitar handle in one direction and the whole teeny horde ripples precisely along the line of energy he set off-and then in the other direction, precisely along that line. It causes them to grin, John and Paul and George and Ringo, rippling the poor huge freaked teeny beast this way and that- Control-it is perfectly obvious-they have brought this whole ma.s.s of human beings to the point where they are one, out of their skulls, one psyche, and they have utter control over them-but they don"t know what in the h.e.l.l to do with it, they haven"t the first idea, and they will lose it. In Kesey the vibration is an awful antic.i.p.ation of the snap- Ghhhhhwooooooooowwwww, thousands of teeny bodies hurtling toward the stage and a fence there and a solid line of cops, fighting to hurl the a.s.sault back, while the Beatles keep moving their chops and switching their hips around sunk like a dumb show under the universal scream. In that surge, just when you would have thought not another sound in the universe could break through, it starts-thwaaaac-thwaaaac-the sound of the folding chairs on the arena floor collapsing and smashing down on the floor, and the remains are down there amid the pink tentacles, crushed to a pulp, little bits and splinters that used to be folding chairs, debris being pa.s.sed out from hand to hand traveling over the pink tentacles from one to the other like some hideously diseased lurching monster c.o.c.kroaches. And then the girls start fainting, like suffocation, and getting tromped on, and they start handing out their bodies, c.o.c.kroach chair debris and the bodies of little teeny freaks being shuttled out over the pitched sea like squashed lice picked off the beast, screaming and fainting and Ghhhhhwooooowwwwww again up against the cop fence while the Beatles cheese and mince at them in the dumb show, utterly helpless to ripple them or anything else now, with no control left- CANCER-Kesey has only to look and it is perfectly obvious-all of them, the teeny freaks and the Beatles, are one creature, caught in a state of sheer poison mad cancer. The Beatles are the creature"s head. The teeny freaks are the body. But the head has lost control of the body and the body rebels and goes amok and that is what cancer is. The vibrations of it hit the Pranksters, in a clump, stoned out of their gourds, in sickening waves. Kesey-Babbs-they all feel it at once, and Norman.
-Mountain Girl looks very surprised. She wants to see the rest of it. But Kesey and Babbs have decided they should all leave-before the Monster Snap occurs, the big cancer wrap-up of the whole process.
-Wait a minute, says Mountain Girl.
But the Pranksters get up in a clump and a rustle of plumes and epaulets and Day-Glo, zonked out of their heads on acid, and all sorts of people start getting up-but like, concrete. The more headway they make toward the exits, the more it becomes a claustrophobia of pens, an endless series of pens. They head down long corridors, all concrete, and already hundreds are jammed in the corridors, all looking kind of raggy-because- They get the total vibration from them-everybody has the one same feeling: suppose this thing snaps now and there is panic and everybody makes a rush for it, the exit, but there is no exit, only concrete walls and concrete ceilings weighing down like a thousand tons and ramps-toward nothing-leading down-then up in a great clump of hump-and then down, outside, there is the sky, but it is black, it is nighttime by now and sick ochre floodlights, but they have merely made it to another pen, more Cyclone fences and barbed wire with frantic raggy people-all fleeing-milling around in it like rats, trying to get to the exit, which is a turnstile, an upright turnstile with bars, like an iron maiden, and you have to get inside of it, totally, one person at a time, with a frantic crush on both sides, and even then you have only made it to another pen, a parking lot, with more Cyclone fence and barbed wire and now teeny freaks and cars crushed in here, all trying to get out, seven and eight cars at a whack trying to nose through an opening big enough for one. Cages, cages, cages and no end to it. Even out there, beyond, where cars have escaped and they are in a line with their lights on-trapped by the hills, which are another great pen trapping the whole place in ... in ... The Pranksters all silent and numb with the apprehension of the Great Cancer Snap to come- -Except that Mountain Girl says Wait a minute- -and Zonker, with his huge euphoric Zonker grin on, fraternizing madly with all teeny freaks as they stream out, saying to all who listen: "The Beatles are going to Kesey"s when they leave here . . . the Beatles are going to Kesey"s . . ." and the word spreads among the crowd in the most delirious way- Kesey plunges back in for survivors. See if there are any Pranksters trapped inside. He tells the rest to go to the bus and stay there, and he plunges in. The Pranksters touch the bus and their morale revives a bit. They rev up the amplifiers and the speakers and climb up on top in their crazy costumes and start idling over the drums and the electric guitars. The thousands of little raggy girls keep pouring out into the parking lot, still wound up like a motorcycle and no release and of course they see the bus and these strange Day-Glo people. One group of kids is protesting that the music business is rigged and they"re carrying placards and screaming and they figure the Pranksters support them-the Pranksters grin and wave back-everybody figures the strange Day-Glo people are for whatever they"re for. They start piling around the bus, these little teeny freaks, and start pelting it with jelly beans, the hard kind, the kind they brought to throw at the Beatles. The Pranksters sit on top of the bus with the jelly beans clattering off the side and the flaming little teeny freaks pressed around screaming-So this is what the Beatles feel, this mindless amok energy surging at them for-what?
At last Kesey returns with the last to be rescued, Mary Microgram, looking like a countryside after a long and fierce war, and Kesey says let"s haul a.s.s out of here. Babbs starts the bus up and they pull out, bulling their way slowly out toward freedom.
Cancer! We saw it. It was there. Bad vibrations, say all. Endless cages. They all rock and sway, stoned on acid.
"h.e.l.l," thinks Mountain Girl. "I have to come here with a bunch of old men who never saw a rock "n" roll show before."
ON THE WAY BACK THEY PUT THE BEATLES TAPE ON AGAIN, from Help! but it was no use. They were all too dispirited. Except for Mountain Girl and Zonker. Mountain Girl said she"d wanted to stay and see the rest of the show. Well-what the h.e.l.l. Zonker was smiling about the Beatles coming. Well-that was what he had told the whole world anyway. And where the h.e.l.l else would they go from there? In fact, the current fantasy-the imminent arrival of the Beatles-had hardly crossed anybody"s mind for the last hour, not even Kesey"s. Get the h.e.l.l out of there, that was the main thing. Where were the Beatles? Who the h.e.l.l knew. The little vinyl dolls had probably cheesed and minced off into a time warp. ... In any case, it wasn"t very hulking likely they were coming to La Honda.
Finally the bus comes grinding around the last curve round the mountain, up to Kesey"s place, and the bus noses across the bridge and the headlights. .h.i.t the yard-and the sight is gruesome and comical at the same time. It is like a super version of the nightmare of the man who just wants to go home and go to bed. The Pranksters have guests. In fact, they have three or four hundred guests. They are all jammed into the big yard between the main house and the backhouse, with big bitter lollipop eyes. It"s like every head, freak, boho, and weirdo in the West has a.s.sembled in one spot, the first freakout, with a couple of hundred teeny freaks thrown in for good measure. Half of them are hunkered down with their big lollipop eyes turned up like somebody spit them up against the house and they slid down to the ground like slugs. Naturally they all came for the big beano with the Beatles. The party. Zonker did his work in the highest Prankster tradition. The sign still hangs on the gate:
THE MERRY PRANKSTERS WELCOME THE BEATLES.
Kesey is not in the mood for a G.o.dd.a.m.ned thing and heads into the house. The whole head-freak-boho-slug mob stares at him, all these lollipop eyes, as if he is going to produce the Beatles from out of a sleeve. Then they start grumbling, like a bunch of prisoners who haven"t been fed but don"t know whether this is the time for the slave revolt or not. It is a debacle, except that it is so d.a.m.ned comical. The look on their faces. That, and the appearance of Owsley.
A c.o.c.kY LITTLE GUY, SHORT, WITH DARK HAIR, DRESSED LIKE an acid head, the usual boho gear, but with a strange wound-up nasal voice, like a head with the instincts of a roller-skating rink promoter-this little character materializes in front of Kesey from out of the boho-slub mult.i.tudes and announces: "I"m Owsley."
Kesey doesn"t say Hi, I"m Kesey. He just looks at him, as if to say, all right, you"re Owsley and you"re here-and then what?
Owsley looks stunned-I"m Owsley. In fact, Kesey never heard of him. It was like, if Owsley suddenly found himself in a place where n.o.body ever heard of him, he didn"t know what to do. He and Kesey are just standing there trading eyeb.a.l.l.s until finally Owsley produces a little bag he has and opens it and it is full of capsules of acid. He"s Owsley, the greatest LSD manufacturer in the world, which turns out to be just about right, the Sandoz Chemical Corporation included.
Mountain Girl looks and just smiles. Everything gets funnier and funnier on the Beatles patrol ! He"s got his little bag of acid. Mountain Girl figures him for a wiseacre right away. Kesey looks at the bagful of acid. One thing the little wiseacre"s got is acid.
The world"s greatest acid manufacturer, bar none, standing out in the dark in the middle of nowhere amid the boho-slug mult.i.tudes under the shadowy redwoods.
By and by they had most of the boho-slubs off the place and sliding up the highway in the dark looking for christ knows what, seeing as how the Beatles never made it. Kesey and Owsley and the Pranksters sat down around a fire out by the big stump. And who the h.e.l.l shows up but the Mad Chemist. He and Owsley start sniffing and eyeing each other. It"s like the slick sharp young neurological doctor genius from out of the Mayo Clinic face to face with the old blowsy homey country doctor-on the most puzzling and difficult case in the history of medicine. Owsley and the Mad Chemist start arguing over drugs. It"s like a debate. All of the Pranksters, even Kesey, keep out of it and the two of them start hammering away. Let the little wiseacre have it, Mad Chemist, Mountain Girl keeps thinking and most of the Pranksters feel the same way. But Owsley, the little wiseacre, is tearing him up. Owsley is young and sharp and quick and the Mad Chemist-the Mad Chemist is an old man and he has taken too much dope. He"s loose in the head. He tries to argue and his brains all run together like goo. Owsley, the Pranksters figure-well, maybe he never even took acid himself. Or maybe he took it once. It is just something they sense. And the poor old Mad Chemist, he has taken so much dope-caressing his guns and hooking down dope-he is loose in the head, and Owsley just tears him up. The Mad Chemist is getting crushed. The Mad Chemist never came around again but once or twice, it was all so humiliating. So the Pranksters had this little wiseacre Owsley on their hands whether they liked it or not. But he did make righteous acid and he had money. Between the two of them, Owsley and the Pranksters, they were about to put LSD all over the face of the globe.
Little by little, Owsley"s history seeped out. He was 30 years old, although he looked younger, and he had a huge sonorous name: Augustus Owsley Stanley III. His grandfather was a United States Senator from Kentucky. Owsley apparently had had a somewhat hungup time as a boy, going from prep school to prep school and then to a public high school, dropping out of that, but getting into the University of Virginia School of Engineering, apparently because of his flair for sciences, then dropping out of that. He finally wound up enrolling in the University of California, in Berkley, where he hooked up with a hip, good-looking chemistry major named Melissa. They dropped out of the University and Owsley set up his first acid factory at 1647 Virginia Street, Berkeley. He was doing a huge business when he got raided on February 21, 1965. He got off, however, because there was no law against making, taking, or having LSD in California until October 1966. He moved his operation to Los Angeles, 2205 Lafler Road, called himself the Baer Research Group, and paid out $20,000 in $100 bills to the Cycle Chemical Corporation for 500 grams of lysergic acid monohydrate, the basic material in LSD, which he could convert into 1.5 million doses of LSD at from $1 to $2 apiece wholesale. He bought another 300 grams from International Chemical and Nuclear Corporation. His first big shipment arrived March 30, 1965.
He had a flair, this Owsley. By and by he had turned out several million doses of LSD, in capsules and tablets. They had various whimsical emblems on them, to indicate the strength. The most famous, among the heads, were the "Owsley blues"-with a picture of Batman on them, 500 micrograms worth of Superhero inside your skull. The heads rapped over Owsley blues like old juice heads drawling over that famous onetime brand from Owsley"s Virginia home territory, Fairfax County Bourbon, bottled in bond. Owsley makes righteous acid, said the heads. Personally he wasn"t winning any popularity contests with the heads or the cops, either. He is, like, arrogant; he is a wiseacre; but the arrogant little wiseacre makes righteous acid.
In fact, Owsley"s acid was famous internationally. When the acid scene spread to England in late 1966 and 1967, the hippest intelligence one could pa.s.s around was that one was in possession of "Owsley acid." In the acid world, this was bottled-in-bond; certified; guaranteed; and high status. It was in this head world that the ... Beatles first took LSD. Now, just to get ahead of the story a bit-after Owsley hooked up with Kesey and the Pranksters, he began a musical group called the Grateful Dead. Through the Dead"s experience with the Pranksters was born the sound known as "acid rock." And it was that sound that the Beatles picked up on, after they started taking acid, to do a famous series of acid-rock record alb.u.ms, Revolver, Rubber Soul, and Sergeant Pepper"s Lonely Hearts" Club Band. Early in 1967 the Beatles got a fabulous idea. They got hold of a huge school bus and piled into it with thirty-nine friends and drove and wove across the British countryside, zonked out of their gourds. They were going to ... make a movie. Not an ordinary movie, but a totally spontaneous movie, using hand-held cameras, shooting the experience as it happened-off the top of the head!-cavorting, rapping on, soaring in the moment, visionary chaos-a daydream! a black art! a chaos! They finished up with miles and miles of film, a monster, a veritable mora.s.s of it, all shaky and out of focus-blissful Zonk!-which they saw as a total breakthrough in terms of expression but also as a commercial display-shown on British TV it was-that might be appreciated even outside the esoteric world of the heads-
THE MOVIE.
-called Magical Mystery Tour. And . . . the great banner rippled on the Prankster gate in the nighttime in ripples and intergalactic billows of great howling owsley electro-mad-chemical synchronicity...
THE MERRY PRANKSTERS.
WELCOME THE BEATLES.
chapter.
XVI.
The Frozen Jug Band
SYNCHRONICITY SPOKEN HERE!.
-and the Pranksters sit around Kesey"s living room at night, grooving on many strange events. Like the day of the great Blackout in New York City, the great power failure that knocked out subways, elevators, lights, air conditioners, TVs, clocks, buildings and the rest of the hulks in the great cancer capital of the East. The Pranksters grooved over the cataclysm and grokked it. Such consternation in the cancer capital! A huge surge of electricity had suddenly rolled through the wires and freaking blown everything. The utility companies didn"t know what had caused this surge, but byG.o.d they had experts working on it and they would figure it out and such a surge would never occur again.
A surge, Mahavira?- Meanwhile, there was one story in the newspapers that the Pranksters grooved on most truly. It seems that some kid had been playing hooky from school in New York that day and had gone off to the movies finally and come out of the movie house about 5:15 P.M. and started walking home, feeling guilty already, and he picked up a stick out of the gutter and he started whacking parking meters with it. When he got to the corner, he whacked the big utility pole there and IN THAT VERY MOMENT.
all the lights in New York went out NOW.
and the kid ran home in the dark, crying, confessing all to his mother- I did it, I did it, but I didn"t mean to- And Kesey and the Pranksters did groove on that. The kid was right, that was the funny part. Or at least as right as the utility companies. For no doubt there was a great surge, friends, and it came through that kid just like it came through everything and every being that existed in that moment. Just as Severn Darden blew out the candles on his birthday cake in that very moment-and they poked through every Con Ed transformer in the system and they never did find the cause.
COSMO!.
-and once you find out about Cosmo, you know he"s running the show. . . It"s like we"re strands of wire intertwined in a great cable that runs through a slot, the Pranksters, the Beatles, the Vietnam Day Committee-the Vietnam Day Committee?-running through a slot, and all the wires are vibrated by Cosmo. Most people lead two-dimensional lives. All they can see is the face of the slot, a cross section, so that the wires look like a ma.s.s of separate little circles looking bigger or smaller according to how close you are. They don"t-they can"t see that these "circles" are just cross sections of wires that run backward and forward infinitely and that there is a great surge through the whole cable and that anybody who is truly into the full bare essence of the thing...
There is food in the thing.
My comrades are envious.
But they cannot harm me.
Good fortune.
-the I Ching
... tends to react against political disorder because he is concerned with the deep basic religious experience, the deepest sources of life; transient politics are insignificant to him.
-Joachim Wach