by Tom Wolfe
THAT ONLY LUCKY DOGS AND MERRY PRANKSTERS HEAR—and SO many mysteries of the synch from that time on … There is another book in the shelf in Kesey’s living room that everybody seems to look at, a little book called The Journey to the East, by Hermann Hesse. Hesse wrote it in 1932 and yet … the synch! … it is a book about … exactly … the Pranksters! and the great bus trip of 1964! “It was my destiny to join in a great experience,” the book began. “Having had the good fortune to belong to the League, I was permitted to be a participant in a unique journey.” It goes on to tell about a weird, circuitous journey across Europe, toward the East, that the members of this League took. It began, supposedly, as just a journey, to get from here to there, but gradually it took on a profound though unclassifiable meaning: “My happiness did indeed arise from the same secret as the happiness in dreams; it arose from the freedom to experience everything imaginable simultaneously, to exchange outward and inward easily, to move Time and Space about like scenes in a theater. And as we League brothers traveled throughout the world without motor-cars or ships, as we conquered the war-shattered world by our faith and transformed it into Paradise, we creatively brought the past, the future and the fictitious into the present moment.” The present moment! Now! I The kairos! It was like the man had been on acid himself and was on the bus.
EVERY FRIDAY NIGHT THEY HELD A BRIEFING. BRIEFING WAS Babbs’s term, from his military days in Vietnam. Faye fixes some supper of rice and beans and meat, kind of a stew, and they all go into the kitchen and dig into the pots and put some on a plate and eat. A few joints are circulating around, saliva-liva-liva-liva-liva. Then they all go up to one of the tents on the plateau, Page’s, and they all crowd in there, sitting this way and that with their legs pulled up under their chins and they start throwing out this and that subject for discussions. Curiously, this is like summer camp, on one level, the Honor Council meeting out in the woods after supper, everything smelling of charred firewood and canvas damp with dew, and crickets and cicadas sounding off and people slapping their ankles from mosquitoes and bugs and shit. On the other hand, the smell of new-mown grass burning and … the many levels … aren’t particularly summer camp. They usually wait for Kesey to start off. He usually starts off with something specific, something he’s seen, something he’s been doing … and builds up to what he’s been thinking.
He starts talking about the lag systems he is trying to work out with tape recorders. Out in the backhouse he has variable lag systems in which a microphone broadcasts over a speaker, and in front of the speaker is a second microphone. This microphone picks up what you just broadcast, but an instant later. If you wear earphones from the second speaker, you can play off against the sound of what you’ve just said, as in an echo. Or you can do the things with tapes, running the tape over the sound heads of two machines before it’s wound on the takeup reel, or you can use three microphones and three speakers, four tape recorders and four sound heads, and on and on, until you get a total sense of the lag …
A person has all sorts of lags built into him, Kesey is saying. One, the most basic, is the sensory lag, the lag between the time your senses receive something and you are able to react. One-thirtieth of a second is the time it takes, if you’re the most alert person alive, and most people are a lot slower than that. Now, Cassady is right up against that of a second barrier. He is going as fast as a human can go, but even he can’t overcome it. He is a living example of how close you can come, but it can’t be done. You can’t go any faster than that. You can’t through sheer speed overcome the lag. We are all of us doomed to spend our lives watching a movie of our lives—we are always acting on what has just finished happening. It happened at least of a second ago. We think we’re in the present, but we aren’t. The present we know is only a movie of the past, and we will really never be able to control the present through ordinary means. That lag has to be overcome some other way, through some kind of total breakthrough. And there are all sorts of other lags, besides, that go along with it. There are historical and social lags, where people are living by what their ancestors or somebody else perceived, and they may be twenty-five or fifty years or centuries behind, and nobody can be creative without overcoming all those lags first of all. A person can overcome that much through intellect or theory or study of history and so forth and get pretty much into the present that way, but he’s still going to be up against one of the worst lags of all, the psychological. Your emotions remain behind because of training, education, the way you were brought up, blocks, hangups and stuff like that, and as a result your mind wants to go one way but your emotions don’t—
Cassady speaks up: “Blue noses, red eyes, and that’s all there is to say about that.” And, for once, he stops right there.
But of course!—the whole emotional lag—and Cassady, voluble King Vulcan himself, has suddenly put it all into one immediate image, like a Zen poem or an early Pound poem—hot little animal red eyes bottled up by cold little blue nose hangups—
Cassady’s disciple, Bradley, says: “God is red”—and even he stops right there. The sonofabitch is on for once—it is all compacted into those three words, even shorter than Cassady’s line, like Bradley didn’t even have to think it out, it just came out, a play on the phrase God is dead, only saying, for those of us on to the analogical thing, God is not dead, God is red, God is the bottled-up red animal inside all of us, whole, all-feeling, complete, out front, only it is made dead by all the lags—
Kesey giggles slightly and says, “I think maybe we’re really synched up tonight”—
Somebody starts talking about some kid they know who has been busted for possession, of grass, and the cops said something to him and he said something back and the cops started beating on him. Everybody commiserates with the poor incarcerated bastard and they comment on the unfortunate tendency cops have of beating up on people, and Babbs says,
“Yeah! Yeah! Right! Right! Right!—but that’s in his movie.”
In his movie—right right right—and they all grok over that. Grok—and then it’s clear, without anybody having to say it. Everybody, everybody everywhere, has his own movie going, his own scenario, and everybody is acting his movie out like mad, only most people don’t know that is what they’re trapped by, their little script. Everybody looks around inside the tent and nobody says it out loud, because nobody has to. Yet everybody knows at once ::::: somehow this ties in, synchs, directly with what Kesey has just said about the movie screen of our perceptions that closes us out from our own reality ::::: and somehow synchs directly, at the same time, in this very moment, with the actual, physical movie, The Movie, that they have been slaving over, the great morass of a movie, with miles and miles of spiraling spliced-over film and hot splices billowing around them like so many intertwined, synched, but still chaotic and struggling human lives, theirs, the whole fucking world’s—in this very moment—Cassady in his movie, called Speed Limit, he is both a head whose thing is speed, meaning amphetamines, and a unique being whose quest is Speed, faster, goddamn it, spiraling, jerking, kicking, fibrillating tight up against the of a second movie-screen barrier of our senses, trying to get into … Now—
—Mountain Girl’s movie is called Big Girl, and her scenario stars a girl who grew up being the big surging powerful girl in genteel surroundings, oh, fin de siècle Poughkeepsie, N.Y., oh Vassar scholars, and who didn’t fit into whatever they had in mind for delicate girls in striped seersucker jumpers in faint ratcheting watersprinkler sun jewels on the water drops on the green grass Poughkeepsie, a big girl who’s got to break out and she gets good and loud and brassy to come on stronger in this unequal contest—and later in the plot finds out she is bigger in quite another way, and bright, and beautiful …
… One looks around, and one sees the Hermit, huddled up here inside the tent, Hermit whom all love but he gets on nerves—why?—and they say Fuck off, Hermit, after which they regret it, and his movie is called Everybody’s Bad Trip. He is everybody’s bad trip,
he takes it upon himself, he takes your bad trip for you, the worst way you thought it could happen—
And Page, with his black jacket with the Iron Cross on it, his movie is called—of course!—Zea-lot. It is as if everyone in here, smelling the burning grass, suddenly remembers a dream Page told them he had while he was sleeping on a cot in a jail in Arizona for, er, turning the citizens on to Dimensional Kreemo, yes, well—in this dream a young man named Zea-lot came to town, dressed in black, and he inflamed the citizens into doing all the secret fiend things they most dreaded letting themselves do, like staving in the windows of the Fat Jewelry Co., Inc., and sco-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-ping it up, like jumping little high-assed mulatto wenches, doing all the forbidden things, led on, encouraged, onward, upward, by the burning shiny black horseman, Zealot—after which, in the freaking cold blue morning after, they all look at each each—who did this?—who did all this dope-taking and looting and shafting?—what in the name of God came over us?—what came over this town?—well—shit!—it wasn’t us, it was him, he infected and inflamed our brains, that damned snake, Zea—lot—and they charge down the street alternately beating their breasts and their bald heads, yelling for the hide of Zea-lot, crying out his name as the ultimate infamy—while Zea-lot just rides off nonchalantly into the black noon, and they just have to watch his black back and the black ass of his horse receding over the next hill, taking the crusade on to … . turn on … the next town …
…yes …
“Yeah, we’re really synched up tonight.”
—and, of course, everyone in this tent looks at Kesey and wonders. What is his movie? Well, you might call it Randle McMurphy, for a start. McMurphy, goading, coaxing, leading everybody on to give themselves a little bigger movie, a little action, moving the plot from out of deadass snug harbor. There’s a hell of a scene going for you, bub, out here in Edge City. But don’t even stop there—
—and all those things are keeping us out of the present, Kesey is saying, out of our own world, our own reality, and until we can get into our own world, we can’t control it. If you ever make that breakthrough, you’ll know it. It’ll be like you had a player piano, and it is playing a mile a minute, with all the keys sinking in front of you in fantastic chords, and you never heard of the song before, but you are so far into the thing, your hands start going along with it exactly. When you make that breakthrough, then you’ll start controlling the piano—
—and extend the message to all people—
chapter XII
The Bust
WHEREAS La Honda’s Wilde Weste lode
Seems to be owed to the gunslinging Younger Brothers; and
WHEREAS They holed up in town
And dad-blamed but they found a neighborly way
To pay for their stay; and
WHEREAS They built a whole modern store, those notorious mothers;
But them was the Younger Brothers,
Mere gunslingers; and
WHEREAS Now this Kesey
And his Merry Humdingers down the road—
God-damn Wild West ob-scene
Crazies and dope fiends
And putrescent beatniks
Paint the treetrunks phosphorescent; and
WHEREAS They beat on tin drums with sticks
And roots while a tin man
With a tin tenderloin
Buries his smile in the tin groin
Of a tin bitch ejaculating through a bunion; and
WHEREAS The crazies go cooing, keening, itchy-gooning
Ululating and yahooing
Worse than gunslingers; and
WHEREAS We know what the ninnies are doing—
YOU ARE HEREBY EMPOWERED ::::::::::::
By now the Pranksters had built up so much momentum they begin to feel immune even to a very obvious danger, namely, the cops.
The citizens of La Honda were becoming more and more exercised about Kesey and the Pranksters, and so were the San Mateo County sheriff and federal narcotics officials. Not knowing what the hell accounted for the crazy life at Kesey’s place, they apparently assumed there was some hard drug use going on—heroin, cocaine, morphine. Late in 1964 they put Kesey’s place under surveillance. The Pranksters knew about it and used to play games with the cops. The main federal narcotics agent in the area was a San Francisco Chinese, Agent William Wong. The Pranksters made a huge sign and put it up on the house:
WE’RE CLEAN, WILLIE!
It was fun, the cop game. The cops would be out in the woods at night, along the creek, and one of them would step into the creek and get his feet wet and say something. The Pranksters would pick all this up on the remote mikes in the woods, whereupon the voice of Mountain Girl, broadcasting from inside the cabin, would jeer out over an amplifier up in the redwoods: “Hey! Why don’t you come in the house and dry off your feet, you cops! Quit playing the cop game and come in and git some nice hot coffee!”
The cops were just playing their eternal cop game. That’s all it seemed like to the Pranksters.
About April 21, 1965, the Pranksters got a tip that a warrant had been drawn up and the cops were going to raid. Delightful! The cops were really going to play their game right up to their BB gun eyeballs. The Pranksters put up a great sign at the front gate
NO ADMITTANCE. FIVE-DAY COUNTDOWN IN PROGRESS
as if they were embarked upon the damnedest, most awfulest dope orgy brain blowout in the history of the world. In fact, they set about making the premises clean. On the third day of the countdown, April 23, 1965, 10:50 P.M., the raid came. Oh God, there was never a better game played by any cops. Here they were, the absolute perfect cop-game cops, the sheriff, seventeen deputies, Federal Agent Wong, eight police dogs, cars, wagons, guns, posses, ropes, walkie-talkies, bullhorns—Cosmo! the whole freaking raid scene—and right up to the end the Pranksters played it as they saw it: namely, as a high farce, an opéra bouffe. The cops claimed they caught Kesey trying to flush a batch of marijuana down the toilet. Kesey claimed he was only in there painting flowers on the toilet bowl. The bathroom was already a madhouse collage of photos, clippings, murals, mandalas, every weird thing in the world, like an indoor version of the bus, and the cops crashed in and Agent Wong grabbed Kesey from behind. Kesey was later booked on a charge of resisting arrest, among other charges, to which he said that he had been in the bathroom and some unidentified male came up and embraced him from behind, and so naturally he slugged him. It was a laugh and a half. Kesey’s resistance, he said, upended Wong and hurtled him into the bathtub on top of Page Browning, who was taking a bath. Browning was arrested for resisting arrest, too. It was too much.
Even after the raiders had everybody in there, thirteen people, lined up against the walls, and were searching them for drugs, it was just the most wacked-out cop game anybody had ever seen any cops play. One of the raiders reached into Mike Hagen’s pocket, and when he drew his hand out, it held a vial of some clear liquid, whereupon all the Pranksters started shouting: “Hey! Play fair! Play fair! Be fair cops! Play hard but play fair”—and so on. The vial, whatever it was or was supposed to be, was never heard of again. In a tool box outside, the raiders found a hypodermic syringe full of some kind of liquid—which turned out to be Three-in-One Oil for oiling the tape-recorder mechanisms—and Kesey and twelve others, including Babbs, Gretch, Hagen, Walker, Mountain Girl, Page, Cassady, and the Hermit, were booked on many charges, including possession of marijuana and narcotics paraphernalia (the syringe), resisting arrest and impairing the morals of minors (Mountain Girl and the Hermit). Even then, the whole thing became not much more than the cop-and-jailhouse-and-judge-and-lawyer game, with such high moments as when they all got bailed out and emerged from the jail in San Mateo and the Hermit’s mother appeared. Hermit, they discovered from the police blotter, was named Anthony Dean Wells. Nobody had ever asked him what his name was. Anyway, his mother slapped Kesey across the face with a paperback edition of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and screamed, “Go back to your cuckoo pad! Yo
u should have stayed in the nest instead of flying over it, you big cuckoo!”
Well, the whole thing was too much. When the cops booked them, Babbs gave his occupation as “movie producer,” and Mountain Girl said she was a “movie technician.” So Babbs solemnly appeared in the local newspapers as the big movie producer caught in the raid along with the big novelist, Kesey. It was something. The San Francisco newspapers took a very lively interest in the case and sent people out to interview Kesey within the Dope Den, and word of the Prankster life style was made public, however obliquely, for the first time.
The publicity couldn’t have been better, at least in terms of the hip-intellectual circles where the Pranksters might hope to have some immediate influence. Accusing somebody of possession of marijuana was like saying “I saw him take a drink.” Kesey was referred to as a kind of “hipster Christ,” “a modern mystic,” after the model of Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs. As all could plainly read in the press, Kesey had gone even further. He had stopped writing. He was now working on a vast experimental movie entitled—the newspapers solemnly reported—Intrepid Traveler and His Merry Pranksters Leave in Search of a Cool Place. “Writers,” he told a reporter, “are trapped by artificial rules. We are trapped in syntax. We are ruled by an imaginary teacher with a red ball-point pen who will brand us with an A-minus for the slightest infraction of the rules. Even Cuckoo seems like an elaborate commercial.”