by Tom Wolfe
And … Sssss—ssss—ssss—Bradley. Bradley, Bradley Hodgeman, had been a college tennis star. He was short but very muscular. He turned up—or came on, Bradley was always coming on—acting so weird, people would stand there and look at him, even at Kesey’s. He talked in clots of words, “Fell down by the wino station—insoluble flying objects, nitrate—creasey greens by the back porch—Ray Bradbury interlining of the lone chrome nostril, you understand”—sidling through the room with a nonspecific grin on and his hair combed down over his face like a surfer, his back hunched over, and then going into a stopped-up laugh, Sssss—ssss—ssss—ssss—until somebody would try to break up his sequence by asking him how was the tennis playing going these days and he would widen his grin and open his eyes to a horizon of vast significance and say, “One day I hit the ball up in the air … and it never came down … Sssss—ssss—ssss—ssss …”
ACTUALLY, THERE WERE A LOT OF KIDS IN THE EARLY 1960s who were. used to think of them as the Beautiful People because of the Beautiful People letters they used to write their parents. They were chiefly in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York City, these kids. They had a regular circuit they were on, and there was a lot of traffic from city to city. Most of them were from middle-class backgrounds, but not upper bourgeois, more petit bourgeois, if that old garbanzo can stand being written down again—homes with Culture but no money or money but no Culture. At least that was the way it struck me, judging by the Beautiful People I knew. Culture, Truth, and Beauty were important to them … “Art is a creed, not a craft,” as somebody said … Young! Immune! Christ, somehow there was enough money floating around in the air so that one could do this thing, live together with other kids—Our own thing!—from our own status sphere, without having to work at a job, and live on our own terms—Us! and people our age!—it was … beautiful, it was a … whole feeling, and the straight world never understood it, this thing of one’s status sphere and how one was only nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two or so and not starting out helpless at the bottom of the ladder, at all, because the hell with the ladder itself—one was already up on a … level that the straight world was freaking baffled by! Straight people were always trying to figure out what is wrong here—never having had this feeling themselves. Straight people called them beatniks. I suppose the Beautiful People identified with the Beat Generation excitement of the late 1950s, but in fact there was a whole new motif in their particular bohemian status sphere: namely, psychedelic drugs.
El … Es … Dee … se-cret-ly … Timothy Leary, Alpert, and a few chemists like Al Hubbard and the incognito “Dr. Spaulding” had been pumping LSD out into the hip circuit with a truly messianic conviction. LSD, peyote, mescaline, morning-glory seeds were becoming the secret new thing in the hip life. A lot of kids who were into it were already piled into amputated apartments, as I called them. The seats, the tables, the beds—none of them ever had legs. Communal living on the floor, you might say, although nobody used terms like “communal living” or “tribes” or any of that. They had no particular philosophy, just a little leftover Buddhism and Hinduism from the beat period, plus Huxley’s theory of opening doors in the mind, no distinct life style, except for the Legless look … They were … well, Beautiful People!—not “students,” “clerks,” “salesgirls,” “executive trainees”—Christ, don’t give me your occupation-game labels! we are Beautiful People, ascendent from your robot junkyard :::::: and at this point they used to sit down and write home the Beautiful People letter. Usually the girls wrote these letters to their mothers. Mothers all over California, all over America, I guess, got to know the Beautiful People letter by heart. It went:
“Dear Mother,
“I meant to write to you before this and I hope you haven’t been worried. I am in [San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Arizona, a Hopi Indian Reservation!!!! New York, Ajijic, San Miguel de Allende, Mazatlán, Mexico!!!!] and it is really beautiful here. It is a beautiful scene. We’ve been here a week. I won’t bore you with the whole thing, how it happened, but I really tried, because I knew you wanted me to, but it just didn’t work out with [school, college, my job, me and Danny] and so I have come here and it a really beautiful scene. I don’t want you to worry about me. I have met some BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE and …”
… and in the heart of even the most unhip mamma in all the U.S. of A. instinctively goes up the adrenal shriek: beatniks, bums, spades—dope.
AT KESEY’S THE DAYS BEGAN—WHEN? THERE WERE NO clocks around and nobody had a watch. The lime light would be sparkling down through the redwoods when you woke up. The first sounds, usually, would be Faye calling the children—“Jed! Shannon!”—or a cabinet door slamming in the kitchen or a pan being put down on the drainboard. Faye the eternal—Then maybe a car coming over the wooden bridge and parking in the dirt area out front of the house. Sometimes it would be one of the regulars, like Hagen, coming back. He was always going off somewhere. Sometimes it would be the everlasting visitors, from god knows where, friends of friends of friends, curiosity seekers, some of them, dope seekers, some of them, kids from Berkeley, you could never tell. People around the house would just start to be getting up. Kesey emerges in his undershorts, walks out front to the creek and dives in that mothering cold water, by way of shocking himself awake. George Walker is sitting on the porch with just a pair of Levi’s on, going over his muscles, his arms, shoulders and torso and all the muscles, with his hands, looking for flaws, picking off hickies, sort of like the ministrations of a cat. There would be a great burst of activity in the late afternoon, people working on various projects, the most complicated of which, endless, it seemed like, was The Movie.
The Pranksters spent much of the fall of 1964, and the winter, and the early spring of 1965, working on … The Movie. They had about forty-five hours of color film from the bus trip, and once they got to going over it, it was a monster. Kesey had high hopes for the film, on every level. It was the world’s first acid film, taken under conditions of total spontaneity barreling through the heartlands of America, recording all now, in the moment. The current fantasy was … a total breakthrough in terms of expression … but also something that would amaze and delight many multitudes, a movie that could be shown commercially as well as in the esoteric world of the heads. But The Movie was a monster, as I say. The sheer labor and tedium in editing forty-five hours of film was unbelievable. And besides … much of the film was out of focus. Hagen, like everybody else, had been soaring half the time, and the bouncing of the bus hadn’t helped especially—but that was the trip! Still … Also, there were very few establishing shots, shots showing where the bus was when this or that took place. But who needs that old Hollywood thing of long shot, medium shot, closeup, and the careful cuts and wipes and pans and dolly in and dolly out, the old bullshit. Still … plunging in on those miles of bouncing, ricocheting, blazing film with a splicer was like entering a jungle where the greeny vines grew faster than you could chop them down in front of you.
The film had already cost a staggering sum, about $70,000, mostly for color processing. Kesey had put everything he had gotten from his two novels plus the play adaptation of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest into Intrepid Trips, Inc. His brother, Chuck, who had a good creamery business in Springfield, Oregon, invested to some extent. George Walker’s father had set up a trust fund for him, with strings on it, but he contributed when he could. By the end of 1965, according to Faye’s bookkeeping, Intrepid Trips, Inc., had spent $103,000 on the various Prankster enterprises. Living expenses for the whole group ran to about $20,000 for the year, a low figure considering that there were seldom fewer than ten people around to be taken care of and usually two or three vehicles. Food and lodging were all taken care of by Kesey.
A pot of money at the front door—There was a curious little library building up on the shelves in the living room, books of science fiction and other mysterious things, and you could pick up almost any of these books and find truly strange vibrations. The whole thing here
is so much like … this book on Kesey’s shelf, Robert Heinlein’s novel, Stranger in a Strange Land. It is bewildering. It is as if Heinlein and the Pranksters were bound together by some inexplicable acausal connecting bond. This is a novel about a Martian who comes to earth, a true Superhero, in fact, born of an Earth mother and father after a space flight from Earth to Mars, but raised by infinitely superior beings, the Martians. Beings on other planets are always infinitely superior in science-fiction novels. Anyway, around him gathers a mystic brotherhood, based on a mysterious ceremony known as water-sharing. They live in—La Honda! At Kesey’s! Their place is called the Nest. Their life transcends all the usual earthly games of status, sex, and money. No one who once shares water and partakes of life in the Nest ever cares about such banal competitions again. There is a pot of money inside the front door, provided by the Superhero … Everything is totally out front in the Nest—no secrets, no guilt, no jealousies, no putting anyone down for anything: “ … a plural marriage—a group theogamy … Therefore whatever took place—or was about to take place … was not public but private. ‘Ain’t nobody here but us gods’—so how could anyone be offended? Bacchanalia, unashamed swapping, communal living … everything.”
Kesey by now had not only the bus but the very woods wired for sound. There were wires running up the hillside into the redwoods and microphones up there that could pick up random sounds. Up in the redwoods atop the cliff on the other side of the highway from the house were huge speakers, theater horns, that could flood the entire gorge with sound. Roland Kirk and his half a dozen horns funking away in the old sphenoid saxophone sinus cavities of the redwoods.
Dusk! Huge stripes of Day-Glo green and orange ran up the soaring redwoods and gleamed out at dusk as if Nature had said at last, Aw freak it, and had freaked out. Up the gully back of the house, up past the Hermit’s Cave, were Day-Glo face masks and boxes and machines and things that glowed, winked, hummed, whistled, bellowed, and microphones that could pick up animals, hermits, anything, and broadcast them from the treetops, like the crazy gibbering rhesus background noises from the old Jungle Jim radio shows. Dusk! At dusk a man could put on something like a World War I aviator’s helmet, only painted in screaming Day-Glo, and with his face painted in Day-Glo constellations, the bear, the goat, a great walking Day-Glo hero in the dusky rusky forests, and he could orate in the deep of the forest, up the hill, only in spectral tones, like the Shadow, any old message, something like: “This is control tower, this is control tower, clear Runway One, the cougar microbes approach, bleeding antique lint from every pore and begging for high octane, beware, be aware, all ye who sleep in barracks on the main strip, the lumps in your mattress are carnivore spores, venereal butterflies sent by the Combine to mothproof your brain, a pro-kit in every light socket—Plug up the light sockets! The cougar microbes are marching in like army ants …”—happy to know that someone, somebody, might answer from the house, or some place, over another microphone, booming over the La Honda hills: “May day, May day, collapse the poles at every joint, hide inside your folding rules, calibrate your brains for the head count …” And Bob Dylan raunched and rheumed away in the sphenoids or some damned place—
By nightfall the Pranksters are in the house and a few joints are circulating, saliva-liva-liva-liva-liva, and the whole thing is getting deeper into the moment, as it were, and people are working on tapes, tapes being played back, stopped, rewound, played again, a click on the plastic lever, stopped again … and a little speed making the rounds—such a lordly surge under the redwoods! —tablets of Benzedrine and Dexedrine, mainly, and you take off for a burst of work and rapping into the night … experiments of all sorts favored here, like putting contact microphones up against the bare belly and listening to the enzymes gurgling. Most Prankster bellies go gurgle-galumph-blub and so on, but Cassady’s goes ping!—dingaping!—ting! as if he were wired at 78 rpm and everyone else is at 33 rpm, which seems about right. And then they play a tape against a television show. That is, they turn on the picture on the TV, the Ed Sullivan Show, say, but they turn off the sound and play a tape of, say, Babbs and somebody rapping off each other’s words. The picture of the Ed Sullivan Show and the words on the tape suddenly force your mind to reach for connections between two vastly different orders of experience. On the TV screen, Ed Sullivan is holding Ella Fitzgerald’s hands with his hands sopped over her hands as if her hands were the first robins of spring, and his lips are moving, probably saying, “Ella, that was wonderful! Really wonderful! Ladies and gentlemen, another hand for a great, great lady!” But the voice that comes out is saying to Ella Fitzgerald—in perfect synch—“The lumps in your mattress are carnivore spores, venereal butterflies sent by the Combine to mothproof your brain, a pro-kit in every light socket—Ladies and gentlemen, Plug up the light sockets! Plug up the light sockets! The cougar microbes are marching in …”
Perfect! The true message!—
—although this kind of weird synchronization usually struck outsiders as mere coincidence or just whimsical, meaningless in any case. They couldn’t understand why the Pranksters grooved on it so. The inevitable confusion of the unattuned—like most of the Pranksters’ unique practices, it derived from the LSD experience and was incomprehensible without it. Under LSD, if it really went right, Ego and Non-Ego started to merge. Countless things that seemed separate started to merge, too: a sound became … a color! blue … colors became smells, walls began to breathe like the underside of a leaf, with one’s own breath. A curtain became a column of concrete and yet it began rippling, this incredible concrete mass rippling in harmonic waves like the Puget Sound bridge before the crash and you can feel it, the entire harmonics of the universe from the most massive to the smallest and most personal—presque vu!—all flowing together in this very moment …
This side of the LSD experience—the feeling!—tied in with Jung’s theory of synchronicity. Jung tried to explain the meaningful coincidences that occur in life and cannot be explained by cause-and-effect reasoning, such as ESP phenomena. He put forth the hypothesis that the unconscious perceives certain archetypical patterns that elude the conscious mind. These patterns, he suggested, are what unite subjective or psychic events with objective phenomena, the Ego with the Non-Ego, as in psychosomatic medicine or in the microphysical events of modern physics in which the eye of the beholder becomes an integral part of the experiment. Countless philosophers, prophets, early scientists, not to mention alchemists and occultists, had tried to present the same idea in the past, Plotinus, Lao-tse, Pico della Mirandola, Agrippa, Kepler, Leibniz. Every phenomenon, and every person, is a microcosm of the whole pattern of the universe, according to this idea. It is as if each man were an atom in a molecule in a fingernail of a giant being. Most men spend their lives trying to understand the workings of the molecule they’re born into and all they know for sure are the cause-and-effect workings of the atoms in it. A few brilliant men grasp the structure of the entire fingernail. A few geniuses, like Einstein, may even see that they’re all part of a finger of some sort—So space equals time, hmmmmmm … All the while, however, many men get an occasional glimpse of another fingernail from another finger flashing by or even a whole finger or even the surface of the giant being’s face and they realize instinctively that this is a part of a pattern they’re all involved in, although they are totally powerless to explain it by cause and effect. And then—some visionary, through some accident—
—accident, Mahavira?—
—through some quirk of metabolism, through some drug perhaps, has his doors of perception opened for an instant and he almost sees—presque vu!—the entire being and he knows for the first time that there is a whole … other pattern here … Each moment in his life is only minutely related to the cause-and-effect chain within his little molecular world. Each moment, if he could only analyze it, reveals the entire pattern of the motion of the giant being, and his life is minutely synched in with it—
—AND WHEN THE CHEVRON TANKER
FOLLOWS THE BUS INTO … NOWHERE … ONE GETS A GLIMPSE OF THE PATTERN, A NEW LEVEL … MANY LEVELS HERE …
The Pranksters never talked about synchronicity by name, but they were more and more attuned to the principle. Obviously, according to this principle, man does not have free will. There is no use in his indulging in a lifelong competition to change the structure of the little environment he seems to be trapped in. But one could see the larger pattern and move with it—Go with the flow!—and accept it and rise above one’s immediate environment and even alter it by accepting the larger pattern and grooving with it—Put your good where it will do the most!
Gradually the Prankster attitude began to involve the main things religious mystics have always felt, things common to Hindus, Buddhists, Christians, and for that matter Theosophists and even flying-saucer cultists. Namely, the experiencing of an Other World, a higher level of reality. And a perception of the cosmic unity of this higher level. And a feeling of timelessness, the feeling that what we know as time is only the result of a naïve faith in causality—the notion that A in the past caused B in the present, which will cause C in the future, when actually A, B, and C are all part of a pattern that can be truly understood only by opening the doors of perception and experiencing it … in this moment … this supreme moment … this kairos—
For a long time I couldn’t understand the one Oriental practice the Pranksters liked, the throwing of the I Ching coins. The I Ching is an ancient Chinese text. The Book of Changes, it is called. It contains 64 oracular readings, all highly metaphorical. You ask the I Ching a question and throw three coins three times and come up with a hexagram and a number that points to one of the passages. It “answers” your question … yes; but the I Ching didn’t seem very Pranksterlike. I couldn’t fit it in with the Pranksters’ wired-up, American-flag-flying, Day-Glo electro-pastel surge down the great American superhighway. Yet—of course! The I Ching was supremely the book of Now, of the moment. For, as Jung said, the way the coins fall is inevitably tied up with the quality of the entire moment in which they fall, the entire pattern, and “form a part of it—a part that is insignificant to us, yet most meaningful to Chinese minds” … these things