Sometimes a Great Notion

by Ken Kesey

  ". . . six bits."

  In his own letter in his own ledger, up in the woods, Lee struggles with a stubby pencil to illuminate his own particular reality to someone else--"Before moving on to farther-out explanations, Peters . . ."--secretly hoping in this way to throw a little light on the dim puzzle of his life for his own benefit:

  Do you recall, Peters, being introduced to this oracle? I believe I called him "Old Reliable," as is my wont when bringing him into society to meet my friends: "Old Reliable, The Sentry of my Be-sieged Pysche." You remember? I said that he was my faithful and constant lookout for danger, perched atop the loftiest mast of my mind, sweeping the horizon for any sign of disaster . . . and you said he looked like nothing more than plain old paranoia to you? I have said the same about him a time or two myself, I must admit, but, all name-calling aside, experience has taught me to trust his call of WATCH OUT to be as infallible as radar. Whatever perceptions he uses must be as sensitive to the slightest radiation of risk as a Geiger counter, because when his signal advises WATCH OUT it has always turned out that the advice was always founded in fact. But this time, as I ready my plan, for the life of me I can not see the danger he warns of. WATCH OUT, he screams down, but when I ask "Watch out what, old friend? Can't you point to the danger? Can't you show me where I have left room for the slightest element of risk? You've always been able to pick out the pitfalls before. . . . Where awaits this peril you proclaim so positively?" In answer he only squawks WATCH OUT! WATCH OUT! over and over like a hysterical thinking machine, unable to point to a thing. Can I be expected to stay my hands much longer on such flimsy advice? Maybe the old fellow has flipped; maybe there is no specific risk, and the overall radiation of the scene has become high enough to blow his wiring and set him to hallucinating horrors that never existed at all. . . .

  Nevertheless, Peters, I'm still spooked by him enough to hesitate: while I have seen my sentry fail this once to point out the peril, I have yet to see him be mistaken about a peril's presence. So I make some conjecture on my own; I ask myself, "Now just what could happen to me if I go through with this?" And the only answer I can truthfully make is, "Viv. Viv could happen to you. . . ."

  But unlike the time before, when I did not want to hurt her, this time I am hung-up with the possibility of helping her and the gratitude that might result. This is why I was coming on about roots and our generation's aversion to being tied down: Perhaps I have become fond enough of this girl (or fond enough of this girl's need for what I have to offer) that I stand a chance of being caught. Perhaps Old Reliable is warning me of a treacherous tarbaby trap, that Viv is a sticky pickaninny of a woman who is just waiting to turn a fond touch into an attachment so black and unbreakable that a man would feel forever horrible and eternally--

  The pencil lead had dimmed almost completely into the chewed wood; I stopped and reread the last few lines of the letter, then penciled through them with anger and shame and the very last of the protruding lead, telling myself that even Peters--as emancipated as he claimed to be from caring about cracks to do with color--still didn't deserve to be subjected to such tasteless tar-colored metaphors: "No reason to risk hurting a friend's feelings," I told myself, but I knew that I had crossed out the statement in the interest more of honesty than of diplomacy. In the first place I knew that there was nothing farther from the truth than a description presenting Viv as a sort of glue-ball female, and that there was even reason to suspect that any attachment occurring between us, be it black or be it unbreakable, would have made me feel quite the opposite of horrible.

  I gnawed a bit more lead into view on the stub of pencil, turned to the next page in my musty-smelling ledger, and tried again:

  In spite of this girl's Al Capp cover story, Peters, she is a rather extraordinary person. She told me, for example, that her parents were both college grads (killed in a car accident when she was in the second grade) and that her mother had taught keyboard for some years. At Juilliard, no less.

  Again I stopped, snapping the ledger shut on the pencil in my disgust and breaking its lead; while this statement about her parents was at least accurate, it still seemed a long way from telling any sort of truth about the girl I had come to know. It was still part of the intellectual smoke-screen put up to shroud the true scene, and the true emotions I had felt growing since the night that circumstances--and an SOS from some hapless saboteurs up the river--gave Viv and me the first chance since the fox-hunt to be alone together.

  I had perhaps been the only one still awake in the rain-battered old house when the phone rang. Unable to sleep as a result of too much hot lemon-tea sloshed to soothe an irritated throat, I was passing the caffeined hours propped up under the covers beside my bedside lamp, trying to collect some new meanings from the depths of some old Wallace Stevens poetry (as we grow more literate it seems we mature mentally in our collecting, passing from the kid stuff of stamps and bubble-gum cards and butterflies to the more adult items such as "deep meanings"), when I heard the ringing start downstairs. After a dozen or so nail-loosening rings, I heard the unmistakable hard-heeled thudding of Hank's barefoot tread as he worked his way along the hall and down the steps. In a moment the tread came back up the steps and past my door to Joe and Jan's room, then returned, accompanied by the erratic hop-step-and-stumble of Joe Ben's walk. The feet hurried downstairs and donned boots; I listened, wondering what strange midnight doings were afoot and--after I heard the boat start outside and roar off up river--afloat.

  All this strange and sudden activity seemed even more pregnant with possible deep meanings than Stevens' poetry, so I switched off my light and lay back to try to plumb the depth of these midnight doings. What was up with all this barefoot roaming? Where were those feet going in that boat at this hour? And, snuggling deeper into my drowse, I was just getting the boots laced onto the feet of my own fantasies--"Perhaps the call told of a great forest fire and Hank and Joe Ben . . . no; too wet; . . . a flood, that's it. Andy has called to say that a terrible forty-caliber rainstorm is strafing the land and splintering the trees and tearing the machinery to shreds!"--when a soft click snapped my eyes back open and a thin needle of light stabbing my bed told me that Viv had turned on her lamp in the room next to mine. . . . Going to read until he gets back, I surmised. This means either he is to be gone only a short time and nothing to worry about, or a long time and maybe she'd better wait up.

  I wrestled with my curiosity a few minutes, then got out of bed and pulled on an old army surplus raincoat in lieu of a bathrobe; neither a fitting nor stylish attire to call at a young lady's room, but it was a choice between the raincoat, the still damp work pants spread out before the heater, or the pegged and pressed slacks hanging in my closet, and somehow the raincoat seemed the least ridiculous of the three.

  My choice turned out to be a fortunate one; when she said, "Yes?" to my knock I opened the door to find her in almost complete accord with my apparel: she was on the couch, surrounded by pillows and lamplight and an overcoat even bigger and harsher than mine. And much heavier. A black wool job of obscure extraction; I suspected that the coat had once belonged to old Henry or someone even taller; its folds and fabric were so dark that it lost all outline against itself, becoming a featureless clot of sooty black from which was thrust a gleam of face and two slight white hands holding a paperback novel.

  The coincidence gave us a chance to laugh, a chance to cut through the distances that ordinarily take hours to overcome before you can feel anything in common. The raincoats afforded us an in-commonness to start from. "Very pleased to see that you are hip to the latest thing in casual wear," I told her when our laughter had stopped, "but I feel that you--ah--should see your tailor about the fit," I said, and shuffled a sneaky yard into the room.

  She lifted her arms and studied the overwhelming sleeves. "You think so? Or should I wait till I wash it and see if it shrinks?"

  "Yes. Better wait; wouldn't want it to be too small for you."

  We laughed again and I a
dvanced another dozen inches. "Actually," she explained, "I do have a housecoat, but I never wear it. I believe it was a gift--it must have been a gift--from Hank for my birthday or something right after I first came out here."

  "It must be a sight to behold, this gift, if you wear that tent instead. . . ."

  "No," she said. "It's all right. For a housecoat. But, you see . . . I had an aunt that was in a housecoat all the day long, morning to night, never got into anything else till night, when she got fixed up to go to Pueblo or someplace . . . and I promised myself Vivian, honey, when you get big you go nakedy before you run around in a old housecoat!"

  "My reason precisely," I replied, "for not wearing a smoking jacket." I assumed a look of lidded reverie. "Yes. Had an uncle. Same way about his dress. Always in this ruddy old tweed, getting cigar ashes in the sherry; smelling up the house; shedding. Damn nuisance."

  "My aunt had terrible breath . . ."

  "Oh, my uncle's breath would sometimes asphyxiate entire rooms full of poor souls unaccustomed to his stench."

  "Did he always leave the sleepy in his eyes?"

  "Never removed it; let it build up in the corners of his eyes over the weeks until it was heavy enough to fall out in walnut-sized chunks."

  "I wish we might have got them together, my aunt and this uncle of yours; they sound made for each other, don't they? Too bad that she couldn't have married a man like him. With those cigars," she remarked wistfully. "My aunt had a perfume that she wore that would have gone perfect with his cigars. What will we call your uncle?"

  "Uncle Mortique. Mort for short. Your aunt?"

  "Her real name was Mabel, but I always called her--to myself, I mean--Maybelline . . . because of all the eye make-up she used."

  "Uncle Mort . . . ? meet Maybelline. Now why don't you two go on off someplace and get acquainted? There's good kids . . ."

  Sputtering giggles like silly children, we went on to wave the pretended pair out of the room, bade them not hurry back, then--"There goes a real cute couple,"--closed the door behind them triumphantly.

  With the little trip ended, we were for a moment without words. I sat down on the big piece of driftwood. Viv closed her paperback. "Well," I said, "alone at last"--trying to draw out the joke. But this time the response was forced, the giggle much less childlike, and the joke not nearly so silly. Viv and I were fortunate to be able to kid with each other; as with Peters, operating within the limits of humor and make-believe afforded Viv and me opportunities to laugh and make jokes, put each other at ease with pretense; and with this system we could enjoy a relationship without too much worry about commitment. But a system made secure by the protective plating of humor and pretense always runs the risk of having its protection get out of hand. A relationship based on jokes invites jokes; jokes about anything--"Yes," Viv said, in an attempt to reinforce my attempt, "alone at long last,"--and jokes about anything are now and then bound to cut too close to the truth.

  I saved us from the fate of hangnail-tending and lint-picking, by remembering what I had come calling to ask about in the first place. The mysterious phone call, she answered, was almost as much a mystery to her as to me. Hank had stuck his head in the door and told her he had to go up to the mill to fish some of his friends and neighbors out of the river, but he hadn't said who they were or what they were doing at the mill at this hour. I asked if she had any ideas what it was all about. She said no ideas at all. I said it certainly is peculiar. She said it sure is. And I said especially this late at night. And she said and it raining so bad and all. And I said we'll probably find out in the morning. And she said yes, in the morning, or maybe when Hank and Joby get back. And I said yes. . . .

  And after another small silence I said that the weather doesn't seem to be easing up any. And she said the radio says a new low's moving down from Canada, be like this another week. And I said that's sure happy tidings. And she said isn't it, though . . . ?

  And then, we just sat. Wishing we hadn't been so wasteful with our topics, realizing we had exhausted all the excuses and that if we were to talk it would have to be plunge right into the subject of each other--the only topic left in common--or not talk at all. I stood up, and shuffled backward toward the door, preferring at this point to take the second alternative of not-at-all, but before I could finish my good night Viv took the plunge.

  "Lee . . ." She paused a moment to debate something with herself, while she tilted her head and studied me with one blue eye peeking over the coat's black collar. Then all at once asked me point-blank ". . . what are you doing out here? with all your learning . . . education, out here spending your time wrapping a dull old cable around a dull old log?"

  "The cable and the log are not that dull"--I tried to clown my way through--"not when analyzed in their truer, their deeper meaning, as sexual symbols. Yas. You must keep it a secret , of course, but I am out here on a grant from the Kinsey foundation, doing research for a book on the Castration Complex of the Choker-setter. Fascinating study . . ." But she had asked the question out of serious curiosity and she was waiting for a serious answer.

  "No, I mean it, Lee," she said. "Why are you out here?"

  I began racking my brain and kicking my rear for not having anticipated this inevitable question with a good, ready-made, and logical-sounding lie. Damn stupid oversight! And this brain-racking, or the rear-kicking, or both, must have produced an expression of considerable anguish, for Viv's head immediately straightened out of its questioning tilt and her face filled with sympathy. "Oh. I didn't mean to ask about something . . . about something you--"

  "It's okay. It's not that kind of question. It was just that--"

  "No; it is that kind of question. I could see it. I'm really sorry, Lee; I do that sometimes without thinking. I had just been wondering why and thought I'd ask; I wasn't intending to pick at a purple place. . . ."

  "Purple place?"

  "A bruise, a hurt place in somebody's past, do you know? Well . . . see, in Rocky Ford, my uncle used to run the jail . . . and he used to tell me that I ought to talk with the prisoners a little when I brought their food because they--he was a good man about things like this--because the poor men felt low enough already without me acting stuck-uppish. Mostly drifters, tramps, drunks; Rocky Ford was a big railroad town once. And he was right, my uncle, that they felt low enough. I would listen to them, their stories and how come they were in jail and what they were aiming to do, and really get involved, you see? And then my aunt would see this and come in and sit on my bed at night and tell me that I was maybe fooling those poor men or my uncle, but she was onto me. She knew what I was, she'd say--whispering, sitting there on my cot in the dark--that I was one of these carrion-bird people. Like a magpie or a raven.

  Somebody . . . just interested in picking at the purple places in people's past, she'd say, not at their healthy places, just at their hurts . . . that she was onto me and that I'd better watch out." Viv looked down at her hands for a second. "And a lot of times--I'm still not sure--I thought she was right." Then back up at me: "Anyway, do you see what I mean? about purple places?"

  "No. Yes. I mean yes I see what a purple place is and no you didn't hit one with your question . . . all right? Why I couldn't answer, Viv . . . I don't really know what I'm doing out here, fighting dull old logs. But then I didn't know what I was doing back at school, fighting dull old poems and plays written by dull old Englishmen, either . . . making believe I cared about it all so a committee of dull old professors would authorize me to teach the same rot to more young fellows making believe so more committees would authorize them to teach more fellows, and so on to the last syllables of recorded time. . . . Didn't it bother you? having your aunt accuse you of preying on the jailbirds?"

  "Terribly," she answered, "for a while, anyway."

  I sat down again on the driftwood. "It's one of the worst sort of binds you can be put in, you know," I informed her, in a voice I'm sure must have made me sound as though a record number of similar situations ha
d made me the world's foremost authority on the resulting hang-ups. "The binds--I mean a bind; the binds sounds like something caused by nitrogen bubbles in your ego--a bind is when you are put in a damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don't situation. In your case, for instance, you were made to feel guilty if you didn't listen to the prisoners, and guilty if you did."

  She listened patiently but didn't seem very impressed by my diagnosis. "I felt something like that, I guess," she said, and smiled, "but you know, it didn't bother me too long. Because I found out something. I found out little by little that whatever either my aunt or uncle were after me about didn't really mean anything but that they were onto themselves about it already. That aunt of mine; boy, she used to wear make-up all week long so terrible thick that--well, she started about Wednesday layering it on, and she never washed, and every day she slapped down a new layer. Until Sunday. Then on Sunday she kind of peeled it off to go to church. And after church she was so holy she'd follow after me for hours to see if she could catch me putting on some lipstick so she could make a big fuss." Viv smiled, remembering. "Boy, she was a case; I used to hope she'd skip a Sunday--sleep through to Monday or something--because I knew two weeks' worth of make-up and she'd set up like a statue. Especially as hot as it got around there. Boy oh boy." She shook her head at the memory, smiling. Then yawned and stretched, becoming lanky, her lanky cowgirl arms lengthening up out of the sleeves. Arms still stretched, she said, "Lee, if it really isn't prying . . . was it always dull, your studies? Or did something happen to take the life out of it?"

  I had become so engrossed in the shy outpouring from her world that the sudden cut back to me and mine once more caught me off guard; and I stammered out the first answer that came into my mind. "Yes," I said. "No," I said. "No, it wasn't always dull. Not at first. When I first discovered the worlds that came before our world, other scenes in other times, I thought the discovery so bright and blazing I wanted to read everything ever written about these worlds, in these worlds. Let it teach me, then me teach it to everybody. But the more I read . . . after a while . . . I began to find they were all writing about the same thing, this same dull old here-today-gone-tomorrow scene . . . Shakespeare, Milton, Matthew Arnold, even Baudelaire, even this cat whoever he was that wrote Beowulf . . . the same scene for the same reasons and to the same end, whether it was Dante with his pit or Baudelaire with his pot: . . . the same dull old scene . . ."