by Tom Wolfe
“Peter?”
From many Rat miles away: “Ken!” Very surprised, naturally …
So Kesey whiled the time sitting in the snug hacienda on the edge of Puerto Vallarta sipping beer and smoking many joints and writing in a notebook occasionally. He wanted to get a little of all this down and send it to Larry McMurtry.
“Larry:
“Phone calls to the states eight bucks apiece besides was ever a good board to bound my favorite ball of bullshit prose offen, it was you …”
Like all about Black Maria. In many ways she was so great. She is quiet and has a kind of broody beauty. She cooks. She looks Mex and speaks Mex. She can even hassle Mex. She sounds out the Mayor of Puerto Vallarta as to how safe Kesey will be here in town. Hay tiempo, he says. The extradition takes forever. Very nice to know …
And yet Black Maria is not completely a Prankster. She wants to be a part of all this, she wants to do this thing, but she does it without belief. It is like the Mexican part of her Black Maria thing. She has all the trappings of Mexican—she looks it, she speaks it, her grandfather was even Mexican—but she is not Mexican. She is Carolyn Hannah of San Jose, California, under everything else, even the blood. He wrote in the notebook::Moving the dark Indian
10 SECONDS LEFT, YOU FREAKING EE-JOT!!!!
body out of the Indian land weakened the Indian blood witch chicken soup and matzoh balls. So much of the fire concealed by the dark and broody beauty lies just that deep. Because she does it without belief. And yet is is very nice up here in this thatched perch atop the last house. A car heads up the street—Zonker and Black Maria coming back to the house. He peers over the edge at the car kicking up the dust, then writes in the notebook, it is a perfect lookout, allowing me to see them, Without them seeing me. Many things … synch.
ZONKER AND BLACK MARIA DROVE DOWN THE ROAD, SCATTERING up the kids and the chickens and the dust, and Black Maria pointed up to the top of the house and said to Zonker:
“Look, there’s Kesey.” Then she looked out the window and stared at the jungle. “I bet he thinks we can’t see him.”
THE JIG IS UP. ZONKER BRINGS A TELEGRAM FROM PAUL Robertson back in San Jose and it is a bear. It is not even a warning, it
5 SECONDS—5 SECONDS LEFT—YOU REALLY JES GON’ SIT THERE FOR THE SQUASH?
is final. THE JIG is UP, is says. Meaning, it turned out, that the suicide ruse had been exposed and the cops knew he was in Puerto Vallarta. Exposed?—hell, the suicide prank had turned into a goddamn comic opera. For a start, Dee had pulled a sort of Dee-out, as Mountain Girl feared. Dee had driven up looking for a cliff near Humboldt Bay, about 250 miles north of San Francisco, up near Eureka, California, not far from the Oregon border in redwoods country. He got up to the last hill going up there and the panel truck wouldn’t pull the hill. So he called into town for a tow truck and the garage man and the tow truck pulled the suicide vehicle up the last mile. Hired and paid for and thanks a lot. Always nice to hire some help to commit suicide. Next Dee dropped Kesey’s distinctive sky-blue boots down to the shore below—but they hit the water instead and sank without a bubble. Next, the goddamned romantic suicide desolate foaming cliff was so goddamned desolate, nobody noticed the truck for about two weeks, despite the Ira Sandperl for President sign on the rear bumper. Apparently people figured the old heap had been abandoned. The Humboldt county police finally checked it out on February 11. Next, the suicide note, which seemed so ineluctably convincing as Kesey and Mountain Girl smoked a few joints and soared into passages of Shelleyan Weltschmerz—it gave off a giddy scent of put-on, even to the straight cops of the Humboldt. There were certain inconsistencies. Like the part about the truck smashing into a redwood. Well—even in a Dee-out, Dee couldn’t exactly ask the tow-truck man, Well, now that you’ve towed it up here, how about jamming it into a tree for me. Demma had really been bowled over to hear from Kesey. A lot of people, a lot of people who liked him, had really been worried that he was dead. And now here was Kesey calling him—alive—with a message for Faye and the whole thing. That was Saturday. The next night, Sunday, February 13, Demma dropped into Manuel’s Mexican Restaurant in Santa Cruz, and there was his old friend Bob Levy. By way of making conversation, Levy says,
“What have you heard from Ken?”
“I just got a call from him!” says Demma. “From Puerto Vallarta!”
That’s interesting.
Levy happened to be a reporter for the Watsonville Register-Pajaronian, Watsonville being a town near Santa Cruz. The next afternoon, Monday, the lead story in the Watsonville Register-Pajaronian carried a five-column headline reading:
MISSING NOVELIST TURNS UP IN MEXICO
The next day, Tuesday, the San Jose Mercury picked up the story and put a little more spin on it with a story headlined:
KESEY’S CORPSE HAVING A BALL IN PUERTO VALLARTA
2 SECONDS, OH CORPSE OF MINE!
THAT’S NO BLACK MARIA SHHHHHHHHUFFLING UP THE STAIRS
OUTSIDE
THE DOOR, DOLT, IT’S A COP CLUMP UP THE STAIRS NO EARTHLY SOUND LIKE IT
SHARP WHISTLE FROM THE TELEFONISTAS
VW BACKING DOWN THE STREET
THIS IS TRULY IT, TRULY IT
GRAB THE CORNEL WILDE RUNNING JACKET, FOOL! MAKE THE BRAIN CATCH HOLD! RRRRRRRRRRRRRRREVREVREVREV SPINNING AND IN THE GIANT PYRAMIDAL CELLS OF BETZ OF PRE-CENTRAL CEREBRAL CORTEX RISE AND HEAVE AND SLIP GANGLIONIC LAYER SHUDDERS AND GIGGLES SYNAPSES LIGHT LIKE RANDOM BEATLE FLASHBULBS KHEEWWW BLASTING OUT SILLY FROM MOTOR HOMUNCULUS YOU MISSED YR FLASH OH MIGHTY MASTICATOR, SALIVATOR, VOCALIZER, SWALLOWER, LICKER, BITER SUCKER BROW-KNITTER LOOKER BLINKER RUBBERNECKER THUMBER PRODDER UP-YOURS FINGERER RINGWEARER NOSEPICKER WAVER DRINKER ARMLIFTER BODYBENDER HIPSWIVELER KNEER SPRINGER RUNNER
ZERO::::::::OOOOOOOOO:::::::: RUN !
Sonbitch! The gears catch at last, he springs up, grabs Cornel Wilde jacket, leaps through the back window, down through the hole, down the drainpipe—now vault the wall, you mother, into the jungle floppy—
AWWRRRRRAMMMMANNNNNNN
WHAZZAT?
His head is down but he can see it
WHAZZAT!
Up there in the window he just jumped out of
BROWN !
He can feel it. There is a vibration on the parasympathetic efferent fibres behind the eyeballs and it hums
HRRRRRRRRRMANNNNNNNNNNN
Two of them one brown dumpy Mex with gold-handle butt gun one crewcut American FBI body-snatcher watching him flying like a monkey over the wall into the jungle the brown Mex holds gold gun but the brain behind that face too brown moldering Mex earth to worry about couldn’t hit a peeing dog
PLUNGE
into the lapping P.V. fronds bursting orchid and orange the motor homunculus working perfect now powerful gallop into the picturebook jungles of Mexico—
A MOMENT LATER BLACK MARIA WALKED INTO THE APARTMENT. She found Kesey gone and the Cornel Wilde jungle running jacket gone. That trip again. Well, he’ll come back when he’s ready to, worn out, and things will be cool for a while. Kesey had gotten paranoid as hell, but that wasn’t the only thing. He liked this Fugitive game. Man, he’d scram out in the jungle and hide out there for two or three days and smoke a lot of grass and finally straggle in. That started before the telegram even. There was a whole signal they worked out. Or he worked out. When the coast was clear, she was supposed to hang up a yellow shirt of Zonk’s on the line outside the back window, facing the jungle. It was a yellow shirt with a black and brown print on it, on the faggy side, if you asked Black Maria. The flag would go up and finally Kesey would straggle back home beat, having run himself about to death in the jungle or along the beach.
And yet it was nice. It was crazy but nice. Kesey was the most magnetic person she had ever met. He radiated something, a kind of power. His thoughts, the things he talked about, were very complex and metaphysical and cryptic but his manner was back-home, almost back-country. Even while he was reeking with paranoia, he seemed to have total co
nfidence. That was very strange. He could make you feel like part of something very … He had even given her a new name, Black Maria. She was … Black Maria.
As a girl in San Jose, California, she had felt like everything she really was had been smothered under layers and layers of games she couldn’t control. Externally there was nothing wrong. Her father and mother were both teachers and life in San Jose was comfortable and serene in the California suburban manner. But half the time nobody ever understands about growing up in this country. Little Penguin Islands full of kids playing Lord of the Flies, a world of pygmy tribes, invisible to the Isfahan adult eye, these little devils, tribes of studs, tribes of rakes, tribes of IntelFinks even, tribes of greasers, and an amorphous mass of hopeless cases left over. Until—psychedelics started around there, mainly grass and acid. The new scene started and suddenly all sorts of … well, beautiful people blossomed forth from out of the polyglot, people who really had a lot to them, only it had been smothered by all the eternal social games that had been set up. Suddenly they found each other.
One night she was high and experienced the unity, the All-one. A light was behind her in the room and hit her body from behind and broke up into beams and shone out before her, hitting the floor and the walls in spokes of light with shadows in between. The room broke up before her eyes and separated in just that pattern with bars of light vibrating. Suddenly it became very clear, the way the room was put together, the way the parts fit, the way the parts of everything fit, as if someone had taken an Indian puzzle ring apart for her. It was clear how everything fit together and it wasn’t really a world split up into pointless games and cliques. That was merely the way it looked before you knew the key. And now there were beautiful people who knew the key and this experience could be shared.
Her mother gave her money for the second semester at San Jose State, and although it would hurt her mother at first, she knew what she had to do. She took the money and headed off to Mexico with some beautiful kids. It was a little more complicated than that. She knew Zonk at San Jose State and she knew he was heading for Mexico, for Mazatlan, although she didn’t know about the Kesey prank, and so she was following Zonk, for if there were beautiful people, Zonk was one of them.
Mazatlan was just beginning to be the acid heads’ favorite spot on the Mexican west coast. It wasn’t a place the real hard-core tourists were onto yet. They went on down the coast to Acapulco, generally. At the same time Mazatlan wasn’t so unbearably Mexicali … sad … like the true Acid Central of Mexico, Ajijic, on Lake Chapala. Those poor sad Lake Chapala villages, Ajijic, Chapala, Jocotepec, with the lake drying up and the old suck-smack lily-pad scum mud showing and failed American aesthetes padding around earnestly in sandals, 48-year-old bohos sucking up to young heads of the new generation of Hip. Very sad. It is truly a sad thing when an American boho says fuck this and picks up and leaves this fucking tailfin and shopping plaza and war-crazy civilization and goes to live among real people, the honest folk-type folk, in the land of Earth feelings, Mexico, and the hell with tile baths—and then he sits there, in Mexico, amid the hunkering hardcheese mestizos, and, man, it is honest and real here … and just as miserable as hell, and he is a miserable aging fuckup with no place else to go.
But Mazatlan—the head scene there was a happy thing and a groove. So she sat down in Mazatlan and wrote her mother a Beautiful People letter …
And she found Zonk and, unexpectedly, the famous Ken Kesey and beautiful people. But one thing about the beautiful people themselves … . Namely, the Merry Pranksters. She had heard of the fabulous Merry Pranksters even in San Jose. Kesey and Zonk talked about them all the time, of course. The fabulous Babbs, the fabulous Mountain Girl, the fabulous Cassady, Hermit, Hassler and the rest. She had a Prankster name, Black Maria, but she was not yet a Prankster. She was sensitive even to the contours of Kesey’s world, too. Sooner or later Kesey would reunite with the Pranksters …
Well … put out Zonker’s shirt when the coast is clear. Zonker’s billowy faggy-looking shirt. Let him stay out on his jungle run for a while. If he enjoys the Fugitive game, why spoil it.
SHHHHHHHHHHWAAAAAAAAAP
flopping lush P.V. fronds Kesey thrashes out of the jungle and across the road—
CARS? ONE MEX ONE AMERICAN COMING IN PALE TAN VW?
no, no cars, man, and then down across the road to rocky scrabble down by the ocean on the rocks, his heart rattling away, he sinks down in his Cornel Wilde running jacket listening
WHOP!
surf hits the rocks, just a little holiday in picturesque P.V. with the sea kicking up at twilight. He concentrates on the surf—analogy spoken here?—but the surf is too aimless this way. His heart rattles tachycardiac at this speed, and the surf is synched in to another thing WHOPping against the rocks
BRANNGGGH
a tin-door sound up on the road like the ominous tin-car-door sounds in Hud always bring on the bad action—like brown Mex and crewcut drip-dry American up on the road eyes rocketing around, Brown Mex puffing I’m-supposed-to-be-off-duty-now-señor. Kesey faces out to sea, pulls a tablet out of the jacket. Makes the pink cover visible as if to prove just an aimless surf artist drawing water swells furl by furl like Leonardo who must have been a head, all the minute instincts, to sit by the water drawing the little furls as the water laps up on beach then starts rolling back toward the sea and minute little churning furls in the lead edge of the water, he drew it all, furl by furl, like a very meth head plugged into the great God Rotor. More surf, then
KABOOM!
first—they’re FIRING on him. They don’t give a shit.
HOT PURSUIT!
we got the guns and the rights, signed on this piece of paper here, one move blow yr fucking head off and you have already moved, Kesey—
HOT PURSUIT!
KABOOM!
but nothing happens. Silence except for the surf.
THAT IS VERY PARANOID, HONDO
why would they try to blast you out of the tub with elephant guns anyway. It must be workmen using dynamite. So he edges up to the road and it is workmen all right, sweating and heaving while the green fronds flap up the hill. He’ll just sit here and watch them dynamite
SURE
just watch them dynamite while every gringo car comes spinning off the shore drive out here Baskin-Robbins tourist matron lookout and say “Hey, Honey, that’s Ken Kee-zee …”
Back into the jungle, Cornel Wilde. Heart still banging up to the edge of fibrillation, through the lush shadowy danks of the jungle. Well, yessir, lookee here a minute, what’s this. A three-sided hut in the jungle, some kind of woodsman’s hut, with a cot in it and a little hoard of mango papaya, some kind of pallid little fruit. He sinks back on the cot, unzips his fly to air out his sweating nuts and dips into his jacket and pulls out three roaches and wraps a leaf around them like a cone and lights up. He cuts open a fruit and it bleeds meek white and he puts it aside.
A TRAP FOR JUNGLE RUNNERS
this perfect little snug harbor to suck you in, a hut, a cot, meek milk white fruit to eat, a joint of sorts, oh to be back in Baskin-Robbins country just one time facing endless beige tubs of ice cream 31 flavor decisions to make, pointed cone or cup-style
¡PARANOIA!
but this is the real-life jungle, Major. Two-winged flies, dapple-wing Anapholes, Culex tarsalis, verruga-crazed Phlebotomus biting 8-day fever and Oriental sores, greenhead rabbit-fever horseflies, tularemic Loa loa, tsetse mites, Mexican fleas, chinches, chiggers, velvet ants, crab lice crawling up your balls up your belly under your arms right up to your eyelashes for a nice fix of Mexican murine typhus, puss caterpillars, cantharidae beetles, Indian bedbugs, ticks, itch mites nice for scabies and rickety pox, Pacific Coast female tick hiding in the hairs at the base of the head sucking in the death bloat with blood, paralysis coming up from the toes will it reach the lungs before the big blood sausage mother drops off, a blood bag with tiny feet wriggling like worm hairs
DDT!
he gets down and pulls the DDT can out of the jacket and starts dusting all around the ground there around the cot, setting up a mighty defense perimeter against the mites of the jungle—which is very funny, come to think of it—down on all fours in deadly battle with the microscopic mites while
THEY
close in to slam you away for five, eight, twenty years … driven at last out onto the edge of your professed beliefs. You believed that a man should move off his sure center out onto the outer edges, that the outlaw, even more than the artist, is he who tests the limits of life and that—The Movie :::: by getting totally into Now and paying total Attention until it all flows together in the synch and imagining them all into the Movie, your will will determine the flow and control all jungles great and small
NEXT TO LAST JOINT IN ALL OF MEXICO
he pulls it out of his pocket and lights up. Maybe I’ll knock off the grass for a while. Su-u-u-ure.
AND THEN BELIEVE ALL THAT CRAP YOU’VE BEEN CLAIMING ABOUT ALTERING BY ACCEPTING. BELIEVE IT! OR YOU ARE A GONER, AND BOY, A WALKING DEAD MAN FOREVERMORE FADING FINALLY INAUDIBLE LIKE THE VOICES MUMBLING BITONES IN THE CATHEDRAL!
And now that I’ve got your attention—if he sits very still, the rush lowers in his ears, he can concentrate, pay total attention, an even, even, even world, flowing into now, no past terrors, no anticipation of the future horror, only now, this movie, the vibrating parallel rods, and he can feel them drawn into the flow, his, every verruga fly, velvet ant, murine fleas and crabs, every chinch and tick, every lizard, cat, palm, the very power of the most ancient palm, held in his will, and he is immune—