by Tom Wolfe
But it was not just North Beach that was dying. The whole old-style hip life—jazz, coffee houses, civil rights, invite a spade for dinner, Vietnam—it was all suddenly dying, I found out, even among the students at Berkeley, across the bay from San Francisco, which had been the heart of the “student-rebellion” and so forth. It had even gotten to the point that Negroes were no longer in the hip scene, not even as totem figures. It was unbelievable. Spades, the very soul figures of Hip, of jazz, of the hip vocabulary itself, man and like and dig and baby and scarf and split and later and so fine, of civil rights and graduating from Reed College and living on North Beach, down Mason, and balling spade cats—all that good elaborate petting and patting and pouring soul all over the spades—all over, finished, incredibly.
So I was starting to get the trend of all this heaving and convulsing in the bohemian world of San Francisco. Meantime, miraculously, Kesey’s three young lawyers, Pat Hallinan, Brian Rohan, and Paul Robertson, were about to get Kesey out on bail. They assured the judges, in San Mateo and San Francisco, that Mr. Kesey had a very public-spirited project in mind. He had returned from exile for the express purpose of calling a huge meeting of heads and hippies at Winterland Arena in San Francisco in order to tell The Youth to stop taking LSD because it was dangerous and might french fry their brains, etc. It was going to be an “acid graduation” ceremony. They should go “beyond acid.” That was what Kesey had been talking to me about, I guess. At the same time, six of Kesey’s close friends in the Palo Alto area had put their homes up as security for a total of $35,000 bail with the San Mateo County court. I suppose the courts figured they had Kesey either way. If he jumped bail now, it would be such a dirty trick on his friends, costing them their homes, that Kesey would be discredited as a drug apostle or anything else. If he didn’t, he would be obliged to give his talk to The Youth—and so much the better. In any case, Kesey was coming out.
This script was not very popular in Haight-Ashbury, however. I soon found out that the head life in San Francisco was already such a big thing that Kesey’s return and his acid graduation plan were causing the heads’ first big political crisis. All eyes were on Kesey and his group, known as the Merry Pranksters. Thousands of kids were moving into San Francisco for a life based on LSD and the psychedelic thing. Thing was the major abstract word in Haight-Ashbury. It could mean anything, isms, life styles, habits, leanings, causes, sexual organs; thing and freak; freak referred to styles and obsessions, as in “Stewart Brand is an Indian freak” or “the zodiac—that’s her freak,” or just to heads in costume. It wasn’t a negative word. Anyway, just a couple of weeks before, the heads had held their first big “be-in” in Golden Gate Park, at the foot of the hill leading up into Haight-Ashbury, in mock observance of the day LSD became illegal in California. This was a gathering of all the tribes, all the communal groups. All the freaks came and did their thing. A head named Michael Bowen started it, and thousands of them piled in, in high costume, ringing bells, chanting, dancing ecstatically, blowing their minds one way and another and making their favorite satiric gestures to the cops, handing them flowers, burying the bastids in tender fruity petals of love. Oh christ, Tom, the thing was fantastic, a freaking mind-blower, thousands of high-loving heads out there messing up the minds of the cops and everybody else in a fiesta of love and euphoria. Even Kesey, who was still on the run then, had brazened on in and mingled with the crowd for a while, and they were all one, even Kesey—and now all of a sudden here he is, in the hands of the FBI and other supercops, the biggest name in The Life, Kesey, announcing that it is time to “graduate from acid.” And what the hell is this, a copout or what? The Stop Kesey movement was beginning even within the hip world.
We pull up to the Warehouse in the crazed truck and—well, for a start, I begin to see that people like Lois and Stewart and Black Maria are the restrained, reflective wing of the Merry Pranksters. The Warehouse is on Harriet Street, between Howard and Folsom. Like most of San Francisco, Harriet Street is a lot of wooden buildings with bay windows all painted white. But Harriet Street is in San Francisco’s Skid Row area, and despite all the paint, it looks like about forty winos crawled off in the shadows and died and turned black and bloated and exploded, sending forth a stream of spirochetes that got into every board, every strip, every crack, every splinter, every flecking flake of paint. The Warehouse actually turns out to be the ground-floor garage of an abandoned hotel. Its last commercial use was as a pie factory. We pull up to the garage and there is a panel truck parked just outside, painted in blue, yellow, orange, red Day-Glo, with the word BAM in huge letters on the hood. From out the black hole of the garage comes the sound of a record by Bob Dylan with his raunchy harmonica and Ernest Tubb voice raunching and rheuming in the old jack-legged chants—
Inside is a huge chaotic space with what looks at first in the gloom like ten or fifteen American flags walking around. This turns out to be a bunch of men and women, most of them in their twenties, in white coveralls of the sort airport workers wear, only with sections of American flags sewn all over, mostly the stars against fields of blue but some with red stripes running down the legs. Around the side is a lot of theater scaffolding with blankets strewn across like curtains and whole rows of uprooted theater seats piled up against the walls and big cubes of metal debris and ropes and girders.
One of the blanket curtains edges back and a little figure vaults down from a platform about nine feet up. It glows. It is a guy about five feet tall with some sort of World War I aviator’s helmet on … glowing with curves and swirls of green and orange. His boots, too; he seems to be bouncing over on a pair of fluorescent globes. He stops. He has a small, fine, ascetic face with a big mustache and huge eyes. The eyes narrow and he breaks into a grin.
“I just had an eight-year-old boy up there,” he says.
Then he goes into a sniffling giggle and bounds, glowing, over into a corner, in among the debris.
Everybody laughs. It is some kind of family joke, I guess. At least I am the only one who scans the scaffolding for the remains.
“That’s the Hermit.” Three days later I see he has built a cave in the corner.
A bigger glow in the center of the garage. I make out a school bus … glowing orange, green, magenta, lavender, chlorine blue, every fluorescent pastel imaginable in thousands of designs, both large and small, like a cross between Fernand Léger and Dr. Strange, roaring together and vibrating off each other as if somebody had given Hieronymous Bosch fifty buckets of Day-Glo paint and a 1939 International Harvester school bus and told him to go to it. On the floor by the bus is a 15-foot banner reading ACID TEST GRADUATION, and two or three of the Flag People are working on it. Bob Dylan’s voice is raunching and rheuming and people are moving around, and babies are crying. I don’t see them but they are somewhere in here, crying. Off to one side is a guy about 40 with a lot of muscles, as you can see because he has no shirt on—just a pair of khakis and some red leather boots on and his hell of a build—and he seems to be in a kinetic trance, flipping a small sledge hammer up in the air over and over, always managing to catch the handle on the way down with his arms and legs kicking out the whole time and his shoulders rolling and his head bobbing, all in a jerky beat as if somewhere Joe Cuba is playing “Bang Bang” although in fact even Bob Dylan is no longer on and out of the speaker, wherever it is, comes some sort of tape with a spectral voice saying:
“ … The Nowhere Mine … we’ve got bubble-gum wrappers …” some sort of weird electronic music behind it, with Oriental intervals, like Juan Carrillo’s music: “ … We’re going to jerk it out from under the world … working in the Nowhere Mine … this day, every day …”
One of the Flag People comes up.
“Hey, Mountain Girl! That’s wild!”
Mountain Girl is a tall girl, big and beautiful with dark brown hair falling down to her shoulders except that the lower two-thirds of her falling hair looks like a paint brush dipped in cadmium yellow from where she dyed it
blond in Mexico. She pivots and shows the circle of stars on the back of her coveralls.
“We got ‘em at a uniform store,” she says. “Aren’t they great! There’s this old guy in there, says, ‘Now, you ain’t gonna cut them flags up for costumes, are you?’ And so I told him, ‘Naw, we’re gonna git some horns and have a parade.’ But you see this? This is really why we got ’em.”
She points to a button on the coveralls. Everybody leans in to look. A motto is engraved on the bottom in art nouveau curves: “Can’t Bust ’Em.”
Can’t Bust ’Em! … and about time. After all the times the Pranksters have gotten busted, by the San Mateo County cops, the San Francisco cops, the Mexicale Federale cops, FBI cops, cops cops cops cops …
And still the babies cry. Mountain Girl turns to Lois Jennings.
“What do Indians do to stop a baby from crying?”
“They hold its nose.”
“Yeah?”
“They learn.”
“I’ll try it … it sounds logical …” And Mountain Girl goes over and picks up her baby, a four-month-old girl named Sunshine, out of one of those tube-and-net portable cribs from behind the bus and sits down in one of the theater seats. But instead of the Indian treatment she unbuttons the Can’t Bust ’Em coveralls and starts feeding her.
“ … The Nowhere Mine … Nothing felt and screamed and cried …” brang tweeeeeeng “ … and I went back to the Nowhere Mine …”
The sledge-hammer juggler rockets away—
“Who is that?”
“That’s Cassady.”
This strikes me as a marvelous fact. I remember Cassady. Cassady, Neal Cassady, was the hero, “Dean Moriarty,” of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, the Denver Kid, a kid who was always racing back and forth across the U.S. by car, chasing, or outrunning, “life,” and here is the same guy, now 40, in the garage, flipping a sledge hammer, rocketing about to his own Joe Cuba and—talking. Cassady never stops talking. But that is a bad way to put it. Cassady is a monologuist, only he doesn’t seem to care whether anyone is listening or not. He just goes off on the monologue, by himself if necessary, although anyone is welcome aboard. He will answer all questions, although not exactly in that order, because we can’t stop here, next rest area 40 miles, you understand, spinning off memories, metaphors, literary, Oriental, hip allusions, all punctuated by the unlikely expression, “you understand—”
chapter II
The Bladder Totem
FOR TWO OR THREE DAYS IT WENT LIKE THAT FOR ME IN THE garage with the Merry Pranksters waiting for Kesey. The Pranksters took me pretty much for granted. One of the Flag People, a blonde who looked like Doris Day but was known as Doris Delay, told me I ought to put some more … well, color … into my appearance. That hurt, Doris Delay, but I know you meant it as a kindly suggestion. She really did. So I kept my necktie on to show that I had pride. But nobody gave a damn about that. I just hung around and Cassady flipped his sledge hammer, spectral tapes played, babies cried, mihs got flipped out, bus glowed, Flag People walk, freaks loop in outta sunlight on old Harriet Street, and I only left to sleep for a few hours or go to the bathroom.
The bathroom; yes. There was no plumbing in the Warehouse, not even any cold water. You could go out into a little vacant lot next door, behind a board fence, and take a stance amid the great fluffy fumes of human piss that were already lifting up from the mud, or you could climb a ladder through a trap door that led up to the old hotel where there were dead flophouse halls lined with rooms of a kind of spongy scabid old wood that broke apart under your glance and started crawling, vermin, molting underlife. It was too rank even for the Pranksters. Most of them went up to the Shell station on the corner. So I went up to the Shell station on the corner, at Sixth and Howard. I asked where the bathroom is and the guy gives me The Look—the rotten look of O.K., you’re not even buying gas but you want to use the bathroom—and finally he points inside the office to the tin can. The key to the bathroom is chained to a big empty Shell oil can. I pick it up and walk out of the office part, out onto the concrete apron, where the Credit Card elite are tanking up and stretching their legs and tweezing their undershorts out of the aging waxy folds of their scrota, and I am out there carrying a Shell oil can in both hands like a bladder totem, around the corner, to the toilet, and—all right, so what. But suddenly it hits me that for the Pranksters this is permanent. This is the way they live. Men, women, boys, girls, most from middle-class upbringings, men and women and boys and girls and children and babies, this is the way they have been living for months, for years, some of them, across America and back, on the bus, down to the Rat lands of Mexico and back, sailing like gypsies along the Servicenter fringes, copping urinations, fencing with rotten looks—it even turns out they have films and tapes of their duels with service-station managers in the American heartland trying to keep their concrete bathrooms and empty Dispensa-Towels safe from the Day-Glo crazies …
Back inside the Warehouse. Everything keeps up. Slowly I am getting more and more of a strange feeling about the whole thing. It is not just the costumes, the tapes, the bus and all that, however. I have been through some crewcut college fraternity weekends that have been weirder-looking and -sounding, insane on the beano. The … feeling begins when the Flag People start coming up to me and saying things like-well, when Cassady is flipping the sledge hammer, with his head down in the mull of the universe, just mulling the hell out of it, and blam, the sledge hammer, he misses it, and it slams onto the concrete floor of the garage and one of the Flag People says, “You know, the Chief says when Cassady misses it, it’s never an accident—”
For a start, the term the “Chief.” The Pranksters have two terms for referring to Kesey. If it is some mundane matter they’re talking about, it’s just Kesey, as in “Kesey got a tooth knocked out.” But if they are talking about Kesey as the leader or teacher of the whole group, he becomes the Chief. At first this struck me as phony. But then it turned to … mysto, as the general mysto steam began rising in my head. This steam, I can actually hear it inside my head, a great ssssssssss, like what you hear if you take too much quinine. I don’t know if this happens to anybody else or not. But if there is something startling enough, fearful, awesome, strange, or just weird enough, something I sense I can’t cope with, it is as if I go on Red Alert and the fogging steam starts …
“—when Cassady misses, it’s never an accident. He’s saying something. There’s something going on in the room, something’s getting up tight, there’s bad vibrations and he wants to break it up.”
They mean it. Everything in everybody’s life is … significant. And everybody is alert, watching for the meanings. And the vibrations. There is no end of vibrations. Sometime after that I was up in Haight-Ashbury with some kid, not a Prankster, a kid from another communal group, and the kid was trying to open an old secrétaire, the kind that opens out into a desktop you can write on, and he pinches his finger in a hinge. Only instead of saying Aw shit or whatever, the whole thing becomes a parable of life, and he says:
“That’s typical. You see that? Even the poor cat who designed this thing was playing the game they wanted him to play. You see how this thing is designed, to open out? It’s always out, into, it’s got to be out, into your life, the old bullshit thrust—you know?—they don’t even think about it—you know?—this is just the way they design things and you’re here and they’re there and they’re going to keep coming at you. You see that kitchen table?” There is an old enamel-top kitchen table you can see through a doorway in there. “Now that’s actually better design, it actually is, than all this ornate shit, I mean, I truly dig that kitchen table, because the whole thing is right there—you know?—it’s there to receive, that’s what it’s all about, it’s passive, I mean what the hell is a table anyway? Freud said a table is a symbol of a woman, with her shanks open, balling it, in dreams—you know?—and what is this a symbol of?” He points to the secrétaire. “It’s a symbol of fuck-you, Fuck you, right?”
And so on, until I want to put my hand on his shoulder and say why don’t you just kick it in the kneecaps and let it go at that.
But anyway this talk just flows. Everyone is picking up on the most minute incidents as if they are metaphors for life itself. Everybody’s life becomes more fabulous, every minute, than the most fabulous book. It’s phony, goddamn it … but mysto … and after a while it starts to infect you, like an itch, the roseola.
There is also a lot about games. The straight world outside, it seems, is made up of millions of people involved, trapped, in games they aren’t even aware of. A guy they call Hassler comes in out of the sunlight screen on Harriet Street and, zoom, he doesn’t even wait for the metaphors. I never got into an abstract discussion with a total stranger so fast in my life. We began talking right away about the games. Hassler is a young guy, good-looking with a wide face and long hair with bangs just exactly like Prince Valiant in the comic strip and a turtleneck jersey on with metal stars. on it, of the sort generals wear on their shoulders, and he says, “Games so permeate our culture that …” rumble rumble ego games judge everything screwed up brainwashing tell ourselves “ … keep on oppositioning”—here Hassler stiffens his hands and brings his fingertips together like a karate collision—
But my mind is wandering. I am having a hard time listening because I am fascinated by a little plastic case with a toothbrush and toothpaste in it that Hassler has tucked under one thumb. It is shuddering around in front of my eyes as Hassler’s hands opposition … What a curious bunch of bohos. This guy with the generals’ stars on his jersey is giving a kind of vesper service lecture on the sins of man and—a toothbrush!—but of course!—he brushes after every meal!—he really does. He brushes after every meal despite the fact that they are living here in this garage, like gypsies, and there is no hot water, no toilet, no beds, except for a couple of mattresses in which the dirt, the dust, the damps, and the scuds are all one, melded, with the stuffing, and they stretch out on the scaffoldings, in the bus, in the back of a pickup truck, nostrils mildewing—