by Tom Wolfe
chapter XXII
¡Diablo!
MOUNTAIN GIRL STUCK IT OUT WITH BABBS, GRETCH, Walker—for the sake of the great idea—and she meant it—but any way she thought it out, it came out Kesey. Mountain Girl was almost eight months pregnant now. The bus, The Movie, was at a total standstill now, sinking into the swamper bogs. One day a package came in by mail, from Mexico, a tape, from Kesey, to Mountain Girl. And there was his voice. She could hardly make out a word he said, the quality of the tape was so bad—all she could make out was, he was in the jungle somewhere and paranoid as hell and smoking a lot of grass.
O DEAR DEAD ONE!
Then Babbs made the decision to take the bus to Mexico. They were a little paranoid themselves, about the heat put on the Acid Tests. Two days after the story broke about Kesey being in Puerto Vallarta, the good fink California press ran another big one: KESEY’S PALS IN LSD PARTY IN L.A.—a barnburner about the Watts Test. But mainly they couldn’t hack it any more; not even Babbs. Get the goddamn bus moving, that was the main thing.
Mountain Girl had one more ordeal to go through. She had to stand trial in San Francisco for possession of marijuana, result of the bust on the rooftop. All the shit in society that the Pranksters had liberated themselves from through years of arduous initiation—the shit rolled in, in lava gulps. She had to sit there, great with child, like a prisoner of war in a bamboo cage, while the straight world put her on prize exhibit and clucked and remonstrated and scolded and then shook its head and blubbered a little over her. Doped, seduced and abandoned, the poor miscreant teenager. She got a little Prankster mileage out of it even then, although she had to play it fairly straight, just to let them play out their game so she could get on with it. Their fantasy for her was a new dawn for this unfortunate girl, not a beeline for Mexico, but that was their fantasy.
Mountain Girl showed up in court on March 20 in a red dress, four inches above the knees, and this was long before mini-dresses were on every eyeball, and pregnant as hell. She came to court on the arm of the Cavalier Hassler. Hassler was great throughout the whole thing. He was her sanity. Hassler came to court with her, wearing a green velveteen shirt, yellow bouclé stretch pants and red boots, and when the reporters came up slavering for sob stuff, he put them on so righteously, it was beautiful.
“We must do everything possible,” he would say, peering out as sincere as the Student Council president from under his Prince Valiant locks, “to get Carolyn on her feet and out of this life of crime”—Carolyn Adams, naturally, being the fantasy that the Court knew her by. “I’m going to be the strong stabilizing force in her life”—vibrating yellow and green. “She’s had a lot of misjudgment.”
“My misjudgment may extend to you,” said Mountain Girl. Great fun had by all.
The sob-story angle was the fantasy they all came up with for her in court, her lawyer included. It was like they had all looked at her and thought it over and hmmmmmmmm this poor misguided runaway girl 20 years old, lately a teenager, you understand, and more than seven months in the family way seduction by the demon Kesey who left her to take the whole blame for the dope charge as well as abandoning her with an unborn child. Urgggggggggghhhhhh the prosecutor agreed on it, her lawyer agreed on it, the Judge agreed on it. So went the Justice game. And where was the demon Kesey who left so fast breathing dope from every nostril—it was as if everybody was going to be nice to her by way of pointing out the lesson of Kesey’s evil.
Her lawyer, Steven Dedina, said: “Carolyn is no dope fiend, no dope addict. Her one addiction is a perennial overdose of solicitude for persons who are far away. Were it not for that particular addiction, this defendant would not be standing in this particular place at this particular time.”
So on March 22 Mountain Girl was let off with a fine of $250 for possession of marijuana. Yet if Kesey had left her in a lurch, it was a lurch that they would never understand in a million years.
THE TRIP DOWN INTO MEXICO WAS THE BUS AT ITS MOST AWFUL. Mountain Girl, so pregnant, just held on and forced back the bilious as the thing bounced and pitched and rolled through the desert. She felt like a 200-pound egg. But moving again! that was the main thing. Anything was better than what she had been going through. And this was truly something. Every 20 miles it seemed like the bus broke down and Babbs sweated over it. All the vibrations outside were bad. Corpses, chiefly. Scrub cactus, brown dung dust and bloated corpses, dogs, coyotes, armadillos, a cow, all gas-bellied and dead, swollen and dead, Babbs, Gretch, Faye and the kids, Walker and Mountain Girl.
The fantasy this time had been dreamed up by Zonker. Zonker had gotten in touch with them, and Hagen had already driven down in an old car. Now the bus was going to keep a secret rendezvous with them in Mazatlan. Kesey had lit out for Mazatlan after the big scare in Puerto Vallarta.
In Puerto Vallarta, Kesey had sure enough had something to worry about after all. Chief Arturo Martínez Garza of the Mexican Federales had ordered a search of Puerto Vallarta on February 16, two days after the story broke in the California papers. They had hassled all strange bohemian-looking Americans on the streets and so on. But Kesey had already made a run for it, back to Mazatlan. Zonker had arranged the rendezvous for the beach at Mazatlan, such-and-such a day, such-and-such an hour.
Babbs flogged the bus through the corpse horizon day and night, desperate to make it on time, with the bus breaking down over and over again, everybody ill, not just Mountain Girl, but flogging on like it was life or death. And finally, Mazatlan, the sea, the big curve of the malecón—they made it. This was the flow, and it was a sickening horrible flow, but they had made it, and they tooled up to the rendezvous point—no Kesey. No Zonker and no Hagen.
It was too much, this particular predictable fuckup, after all that. It wasn’t a cool thing for them to just sit there by the beach in this lurid freak of a bus, such as Mexico had never seen, but this was too much, and they sat there, beat, and let the hours tool by. They were a hell of a hit with the Mexicans, however. They never saw anything like it. “¡Diablo!” they kept saying. Women hid their children with their skirts. A whole bunch of locals gathered around the bus and grinned their hideous magenta-gummed native grins and stared at the crazies.
Heeeee!—an old car with no windows in the mother comes by, slowing down. The face at the driver’s window, with the incredulous look—Hagen. And that old gray head peeking over the window’s edge in the back, just peeking over ever so gingerly—could it possibly be … Hagen stops and gets out. Then the back door opens ever so gingerly and out steps a gray-haired soul with his head cocked to one side, radiating surprise and appall and not at all happy about the Diablo multitudes.
He has on a hincty washed-out faded tourist sport shirt and balloon-seat pants. He walks like a repertory theater shambles. He looks ten or fifteen years older, like an old workadaddy on the 21-day plan to Mexico. Ecce Fugitive.
Shee-ut, it’s all too freaking absurd, this secret rendezvous. The bus glowing Day-Glo on the beach at Mazatlan, the Diablo multitudes whooping it up like a cock fight, Mountain Girl beautiful and fulsome with her hair down to her waist and dyed yellow from the last Test—they could have sold tickets.
You’re looking at the New Super Fugitive, Mountain Girl: Steve Lamb—45-year—old gray-haired ninny. Certified I.D.; Zonker’s driver’s license with the Steve Lambrecht doctored to read Steve Lamb and the birth date altered to make him 45 instead of 25. Mild-mannered lamb among men, Steve Lamb, 45-year-old reporter, creep and amateur ornithologist, broadcaster for KSRO, Mighty 590 on your dial. Got his tape recorder right here, yessir, for collecting bird calls. Also you never know when the spot news will break and the diligent reporter is always ready, even on holiday. Old mild-mannered Steve Lamb has learned the secret of invisibility, which is to crawl into the rut, the bottomest awfulest part of the sunken way society has dug for all those who properly fear her might, O Mighty 590.
But hardly seem worth it, somehow, with the bus beginning to glow in the Mexican dusk. ¡
Fuck it! ¡Diablo! ¡Cosmo! Let’s bull it through, here in the Rat lands! Glittering Prankster glances all around. Paint it big enough and bright enough and they won’t even be able to see it! Kesey and Mountain Girl and Babbs and Gretch and Faye and the kids standing here in the Rat vistas … and along the edge of the circle a little Mexican-looking girl with long black hair just emerged from the old car … Black Maria stares out to sea.
chapter XXIII
The Red Tide
FOCKING RED TIDE, MAN, AND EVERYBODY IN MANZANILLO is up tight. Tropic of Cancer, heat 110 degrees, no wind, many mosquitoes, and the red tide killing the fish. Thousands, tens of thousands focking dead fish floating belly up in the red tide. The stench you would not believe, and there is something in the air spewed up from the ocean that makes your eyes smart. Some people they feel like they have it in the lungs, like the flu. There is no greater calamity than the red tide, because we live on the fishing here in Manzanillo. Unless it is the American crazies. On top of the red tide, appearing like they rose up out of the red tide itself, we have the American crazies. Focking plague themselves, riding about in a devilish criminal bus. They ride into the plaza, near the great jaracanda tree, in a devilish bus covered in crazed fluorescent cholera flowers, gaudier than the red blossoms of Manzanillo’s great jaracanda tree
RED TIDE!
and old women and children say, “¡Diablo!”, and cross themselves, which the American crazies think is very funny. We do not, however.
The biggest of them, with a great mocking grin and American lightbulb eyeballs and pants of many colors, comes into our marketplace with a blond woman whom he calls Gretch and a trail of blond children behind him, rolling his grinning head around until he sees that all the world is watching, and then he throws his great arms of an ape up into the air and turns his eyeballs up and shouts:
“¡EAT ALLEY! ¡EAT ALLEY! ¡TAKE ME TO EAT ALLEY!”
“You mean the market, señor?”
Then he grins and stares with an intensity at the poor mestizo as if he has just uttered the most penetrating remark in the history of all Mexico and says:
“Yeah! Yeah! Right! Right! Right!”
And all the world gives way, wondering, as this strange train goes escombering into the marketplace.
There is much talk here about the crazies. Many think that these people are Germans, refugees from a cabala that failed. They mistake their strange talk for German. Some people think that they are American gangsters, in hiding. But I think that they came up out of the red tide.
¡AGUAJE!
In truth! Out in the ocean, where the water was once deepest blue-green, or, at worst, yellow-green near the beach, there are now vast streaks of reddish water, as if there were a channel cutting through the ocean itself, stretching for miles, hot and turbid, thick as mucus. The fish die almost at once when they enter it. I have watched a mullet come upon it. She swam from the blue-green water into the red tide and suddenly she is keeling over, as if paralyzed, then struggling to come upright again, then thrashing about crazily as if dizzy, then heading for the surface, where she whirls, flashing in the sunlight, then collapses, keeling over on her side again, paralyzed, then sinks, and then, by and by, without doubt, floats back up, dead, to join the great stinking school of dead fish, dead crabs, dead sea bass, mullets, thread herring, mackerel, shrimp, even barnacles, coquinas, sailfish, marlin, porpoises, turtles, huge gobs of reeking gluey tissue floating in a grisly death school on the red tide. Struck dead—
—by what? By the plankton. All the world knows that the plankton cause the red tide—as if that could be called a cause. For the plankton are always there, millions of invisible animiculae, thousands to a cupful of seawater. It is they who reflect blue-green and give our ocean its color, although elsewhere they reflect red and make the Red Sea red, without harm to any animal, and the Vermillion Sea vermillion and the Lake of Blood a rose-red milk of sulphur. But here, off the placid Bay of Manzanillo in the Pacific Ocean, this little invisible … um … dinoflagellate, Gymnodinium brevis, just one cell to him and two whips, whipping and darting about, begins to multiply. And suddenly he appears to explode, should one look at him under a microscope, as Charles Darwin once did, and he divides into two dinoflagellates, and they divide into four, and so on, in a progression of utmost rapidity until there are in truth ten million of them in a cup of water, and the water turns red from their red pigment, which reflects light, until finally, from the focking millions of explosions, a poison as powerful as aconitine gives off into the water—but why?—why has it started now, this malignant explosion of the plankton into—
—one vast immortal Group Animicula, fifteen miles long and three miles wide, immortal, in truth. The first little Gymnodinium brevis still lives just as surely as the 128-billionth as the red tide spreads. For they increase simply by cell division. The great marlins die, the porpoises, all the creatures of the sea die, and the fishermen die, but the Gymnodinium is immortal, the instant brother of every Gymnodinium brevis who ever lived, no past, no future, only Now, and immortal, the little fockers. No cause, señor, no starting point in time, just the point at which your game intersected the 256-octillionth Gymnodinium and all his ancestors and successors in old Manzanillo and brought you up tight. We know only that yesterday there were fish, and today the fish are dead and the poison plankton and the American crazies are alive, and tomorrow we must find out the cause and the cure—or could it possibly be that yesterday and tomorrow are merely more of Now stretching fifteen miles and three miles wide immortal—
THEN, NOW, ESAU, JUDITH, BASHEMATH, REUEL, SUSPENDED in the mucus; what a bummer. Mountain Girl lies on the bed in her room; staring at the ceiling; a pisspoor job of plastering it is, too; and all of them suspended in 110-degree mucus. She; Kesey; Faye; their children; George Walker; the new chick, Black Maria; have a house by the beach; new; raw certified Rat construction; cinderblock and plaster; she could scrabble through it with her hands. Fifty yards away, across the beach road, The Rat Shack; this being a Purina Chow factory; yep; inhabited by Babbs, Gretchen Fetchin and Babbs’s children; a curious little building empty of Purina Chow and glistening with tiles inside. All of them gittin stuck and stranded like flies in this 110-degree mucus of Manzanillo with the red tide stinking the place up for good measure; Hagen, with his leg in a cast; Julius Karpin, the Hardest Head in the West, from Berkeley, of the Prankster outer circle, here with his leg in a cast. They picked out Manzanillo for these very reasons, however; isolated, few Americans in the summer, off the tourist trail; secure desert island. Stranded in an uptight town; no roads leading north and no roads leading south; nine or ten hours of hell by bus to Guadalajara the only way to git back to the rest of the world; can’t git out in the daytime and do anything because of the heat; can’t git out at night because of the mosquitoes; the jungle beyond the Rat Shack filthy with cocoa palms and all sortsa jungle shit; itching crawling alive like a chigger-ridden groin; all manner exotic vermin; sting inflame chigger-blister mosquito heaven, with scorpions for good measure coming up outta the dung dust like lobsters as the crab louse is to the crab. Standing dead still in this shit; jes waiting; for what; for bread, mainly; every day in supplication at the altar of the Telégrafo, for money from Stateside; Kesey’s lawyers supposed to be hassling up money; and everyday some soul, like the chick Kesey picked up, Black Maria, down to the Telégrafo using an alias waiting for telégrafo coming from some lawyer in San Francisco; or from the Mexico City lawyer Kesey’s stateside lawyers had gotten hold of to straighten things out with the Mexican police; he was called Estrella; for Star Lawyer? who the fuck knows; here on Devil’s Island, us fugitives; no sense of time at all; unbelievable bad news is all that filters from the U.S.; Ron Boise, who had a rheumatic heart, has died of a heart attack at the age of thirty-two; Norman Hartweg in an accident on the drive east with Marge the Barge and Evan Engber, and he is in a hospital in Ann Arbor, almost completely paralyzed; unbelievable things out of the time-death Karma; and here no t
ime; jes a dead still now stretching back eternally and forward eternally.
So Mountain Girl lies on the bed and stares up through the heat waves rising in the 110-degree mucus of Manzanillo; and she is not high on anything; maybe slightly out of her head, but not high; no, not even out of her head; but it’s like that acid time-warp thing; like they’re all thrust back permanently into a primitive time; this is permanent; Kesey can’t go back ever; they will slam him away for good; meaning she can’t go back ever, either; how? back to the bamboo cage to be clucked and lectured and blubbered over until she drowned?; none of them can go back; ’cause there is nothing to go back to; it is all here now; Mexico, even as Kesey foresaw that day in La Honda and she started learning Spanish; which none of them really know, however, except Black Maria; always in a cocoon shut off from the worthy up-tight nativos; only the Pranksters are the primitives; thrown back on their own resources; reliving the primitive life of man with only the dwindling hope of a bountiful miracle from the sacred Telégrafo to possibly break the spell … of 3,000 years ago.
Three thousand years ago Mountain Girl walks down to the water, the backwater, every day to wash clothes, diapers and sundry other shit; every day walking through the heat waves under the salty sun through the scrub grass and dung sand, to wash clothes, by the waters of the … Nile and the daughter of Pharaoh came down to wash herself at the river; and her maidens walked along by the river’s side; and when she saw the ark among the flags, she sent her maid to fetch it … it is as if she is walking down to the river and she is watching herself, a maiden, 3,000 years ago, walking down to the river, at the same time, in … the Middle East; it is always the Middle East somehow, out of an old illustrated Bible; 110 degrees, bulrushes and the eternal laundry bummer; nothing to read here but The Nova Express by William Burroughs; the Nietzsche and Dostoevsky that Kesey has; and in the Bible; everybody goes through Nova Express in a couple of hours; but the Bible they can linger over … and gradually without anybody hardly saying anything about it, without getting high even, they are in another time dimension; biblical tribe, biblical tribeswoman washing in the water; living like the children of Isaac and Rebecca in the First Book; even taking biblical identities ; they each choose, become a character in the Bible; in truth; it is 3,000 years ago, now stretching back infinitely to … the very Genesis; to Esau; Kesey is Esau; the hairy one; and Esau was a cunning hunter; a man of the field; and Jacob was a plain man, dwelling in tents; 13. Did they grow up alike? Describe them.—Esau was a skillful hunter, and Jacob was a quiet man, fond of home; 14. Which was the first born?—Esau; 15. Did he value his birthright? The proof?—He sold it, when hungry, and faint, to Jacob for a dish of potted beans or other food. So thousands, for present pleasure, will risk or lose their souls; 16. To whom did he sell it, and for what?—See No. 15; 23. Whom did Esau choose as his wives?—Judith and Bashemath, Hittites. Gen. 26:34.; 24. Did his parents approve his choice?—No; they were grieved by it; and Bashemath bore Reuel … 3,000 years ago; for there is no time in this place; only an eternal now stretching on infinitely over the entire world and all the history thereof; for the world seeketh its own level; which is the sea; and all living creatures of the sea shall die; but the Gymnodinium brevis, which knoweth no time, except now, shall live forever; ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, The earth is round; but I say unto you …