by Tom Wolfe
No turning back, man! We’re on the space ship now, fly by … Control … and Attention … going with the flow and we can’t duck the weird shit, no matter how weird it is. Kesey was doing some acid rapping, taking 500, 1,000, 1,500 micrograms instead of the normal 100 to 250. He had always been against that. Acid rappers, freaks who made a competition out of who could take the most acid—they all seemed to end up loose in the head, that breed. But now it was as if no experiment could be left undone. One night Kesey took about 1,500 micrograms and several other Pranksters took lesser doses and they got down on the floor and started the Humanoid Radio. They started babbling, going into echolalia, ululation, all manner of nonverbal expression, talking in Tongues, as it were. The idea was to try to hit that beam and that mode that would enable you to communicate with beings on other planets, other galaxies … They were all high as hell, of course, but one thought shot through the manic dendrite raps like a subliminal legend: What if—and you’ll never know until you do it if you have the
POWER! THEY’RE SITTING AROUND A BIG ROUND TABLE IN KESEY’S living room. It is a big wooden table, now covered with the carved initials and inscriptions of Hell’s Angels, “Ralph of Oakland,” and so on, playing the game of Power. Page Browning wins and he orders: Now we all take DMT and hold hands, seated in a circle around the table.
And rrrrrrrrrrush those fantastic neon bubbles rushing up out of the heart square into the human squash and bursting into—skull mirrors! out of Nipponese kaleidoscope got it down Grant through a door of tesselated straw over the carvings of the Hell’s Angels on the table here brought into The Movie because now, Hondo, on the space craft you can deal with anyone just imagine them into The Movie, get so totally into the moment that whichever way you move the entire moment moves with you, not causing, bub, just, flowing—Go with the flow—Go
OUTSIDE
Kesey hears a voice and it tells him to get up from the table, and he does, and there are Page and other Pranksters spaced out of their gourds and holding hands and … keening, with their eyes closed because like with DMT opening your eyes doesn’t change a thing—those eyelid movies just keep on pouring out into the living room and Kesey goes outside in the dark in the cool of the redwood dell and now it—
I AM THE ACE AND FAYE IS THE RED QUEEN
WHUMP?
in a flash the water heater out back of the house in the dark—meaning—if he gestures it will
BLOW UP
and he gestures and it is blown up, the heater, demolished, a hell of a blast—the voice says
GO OUT UPON THE MAIN ROAD
and he goes out over the wooden bridge, out onto Route 84 in the dark with only the smallest blowwwwwwnnn glow from the house to be seen, and a wind comes up. Weird shit, Major—the wind never comes up in this gorge with all these hills and trees around and strange the wind lifts under the thoracic box and every convex leaf and the balloon canopy cathedral bowers and now; he; is;
GOD
It is crazy and delirious and zonked out and real, with half of the mesencephalon saying
YOU ARE HIGH
and the other half saying, Nevertheless
YOU ARE GOD
Car coming down the hill from La Honda around the last bend on Route 84, the lights swooping over the redwoods
THE ENEMY
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 HELL’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 Hell’s Angels. They put up the sign THE MERRY PRANKSTERS WELCOME THE HELL’S ANGELS, and sure enough the Angels came, these unbelievable bogeymen for the middle class, 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 Hell’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 shit … 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 goddamn 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 shit, 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 cutlasses and codpieces and jumpsuits and football jerseys and aprons 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 passed 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. Cassady 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 basses and guitars and trombones and plumes spilling out the windows and flashes of Day-Glo and flapping epaulets, freaking flashing epaulets, and the Beatles album 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 goddamn 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 glass, mostly glass, great 1920s factory glass 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 mass sun reflector ripple sun bomb prisms, the bricks, the glass, 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 fuck 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 fag 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-hell costume—exterminate the monsters—
… but … no one lays a hand on them or says the first word, thousands of cops and not even one hassle … 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 hell. 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 i
n a squall—and kheew, kheew, 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 orgasm. 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 mass of little girls waving their arms in the air, this mass 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,