by Tom Wolfe
right right right right an even even even even even world twenty-five minutes after the Grimsby TV show Friday afternoon, October 20, Kesey and Hassler driving out of San Francisco on the Bayshore freeway, toward Palo Alto, in an old red panel truck. The current fantasy … this movie is too real, Mommy—but they have actually pulled it off. They have just been in town in the hideaway watching Kesey the Fugitive on TV, and this prank was too beautiful. The FBI and all cops everywhere shucked in the most public galling way. The sun slants down on the Bayshore freeway in the afternoon and all the shiny black-shoe multitudes are out in their 300-horsepower fantasy cars heading into the rush hour, out the freeway, toward the waiting breezeway slots. It’s actually peaceful, this rush hour
WE PULLED IT OFF
thousands of cars sailing up the swooping expressway like so many Salt Flat Futur-o-matics with taillight bands like hard red candy … It’s relaxing, the rush hour is, and hypnotic, it drones, and it winks like red hard candy with the sun shining through it, and the sun shines in Kesey’s side of the panel truck, very relaxing, and he takes off his disguise, the cowboy hat and dark glasses
SEE THE VERY HUNTED COONS
SALT J. EDGAR HOOVER’S WOUNDS
Hassler, driving, vaguely aware of the cars floating by in the rush hour, shiny hulls with so many shaved globes sticking up inside …
KESEY!
Suddenly coming up on his left Hassler sees a car full of shiny haircut faces, jammed full of them, all staring at them—Hassler and Kesey—and now gray Alumicron arms flapping out the window, stabbing and motioning Pull Over, much grimacing and shouting soundlessly into the slipstream of the rush hour, and one with his wallet dangling out the window, flapping his badge at them
RUN! SPLIT! VANISH!
But there is no place to vanish to. It is all clear in a flash—trapped in the rush hour for a start—and the panel truck can’t outrun their sedan anyway. Opposite side pickoff!—Hassler tries to squeeze between cars and lose them that way, like a basketball play, but it’s no use. The cops keep floating abreast, grimacing and flapping, and drifting back and pulling even again
THERE!
Kesey motions to the shoulder of the expressway, by an embankment and Hassler cuts over there, skids to a stop
THRASH!
Kesey out the door and plunges over the guardrail and down the embankment, with the dust flying …
Hassler just sits there as the sedan skids to a stop in front of him, cutting him off. Seems like twenty doors fly open, haircut faces and gray-Alumicron bodies popping out in every direction, leaping over the guardrail—
ALL IN SHINY BLACK SHOES
One orders Hassler out of the panel truck and Hassler gets out and sits down on the edge of the freeway. Very strange. The great swarm of cars with hard-candy tails keeps sailing past, hypnotically. Hassler gets into the lotus position, sitting cross-legged on the asphalt, looking straight ahead. Three sets of
SHINY BLACK FBI SHOES
standing around him now. They all have these shiny black shoes on. Then one of them goes back to the sedan and comes back with a flare gun and stands over him with that. Hassler wonders if he intends to shoot him with a flare. A very Day-Glo death. Thread-soul, the causal body, ablation, Upanishads, Krishnamurti, the karmic vestiture of the soul, the nirvanic consciousness—it all runs together right here, like a tinned stew, and Hassler isn’t even high. On the other side of the expressway, on the edge of the bay, great fat seagulls are wheeling in the air in a great weird O pattern, coasting down below the level of the highway, then struggling up, dripping garbage out of their gullets, but a nice pattern, all in all—
THE VISITACION DRAIN
It’s the Visitacion Drain they’ve picked to work out their karma in … ah, we’re synched up this afternoon … and the gulls wax fat gulping garbage at the drain and grease a slippery fat O in the sky and it occurs to Hassler that today is his twenty-seventh birthday.
Skidding down the embankment chocking up dust like in a Western the blur of the Drain flats out beyond Kesey vaults over an erosion fence at the bottom of the embankment
RI-I-I-I-I-IP
a picket catches his pants in the crotch rips out the in-seams of both pants legs most neatly flapping on his legs like Low Rent cowboy chaps running and flapping through the Visitacion flats poor petered-out suckmuck marginal housing development last blasted edge of land you can build houses on before they just sink into the ooze and the compost poor Visitacion Drain kids playing ball in the last street before the ooze runs flapping through their ballgame stare at him
AND AT THE GHOST ON MY HEELS?
like the whole world turns into an endless kids’ ballgame on the edge of the ooze thousands of Drain kids furling toward the horizon like an urchin funnel
AND THAT ALUMICRON BLUR BEHIND ME?
shiny black shoes tusking up behind him stops stock still in the Visitacion Drain and
GOTCHA!
in the cops and robbers game.
chapter XXVII
The Graduation
THEY HAVE KESEY ON THREE FELONIES: THE ORIGINAL CONVICTION in San Mateo County for possession of marijuana, which he never served time on; the arrest for possession in San Francisco, after which he fled to Mexico; and a Federal charge of unlawful flight to avoid prosecution. A felon and a fugitive … who; yes; was going to rub the FBI’s nose in it for good measure … and all about dope, at that … and throw away the key … For three days they shuttle Kesey back and forth between County and Federal courthouses and jails in Redwood City and San Francisco. It will take a miracle to even get him out on bail, an inspiration, a vision ::::: ummm, a vision ::::: we can work it out ::::: Kesey’s lawyers, Pat Hallinan, Brian Rohan and Paul Robertson, have a vision. The next morning they’re in the courtroom in Redwood City at a bail hearing. The new style of Courtroom Modern, this courtroom, all great lineless slabs of blonde wood, and lowslung like … the friendly banks of the suburbs. All very sunny under the fluorescent tubes. Kesey sits at the defense table wearing a blue workshirt. Robertson is on his feet telling the judge about a certain vision Mr. Kesey has had, of “beyond acid,” an inspiration, a miracle, a light he has seen, although never mind the details of the beach in Manzanillo, not … those lights … In any case … Mr. Kesey has a very public-spirited plan … He has returned voluntarily from exile in his safe harbor, to risk certain arrest and imprisonment, in order to call a mass meeting of all LSD takers, past, present and potential, for the purpose of telling them to move beyond this pestilent habit of taking LSD … Robertson’s talking a streak. It’s a grand speech. Kesey is sitting up straight at the table staring blue bolts at the judge. But Robertson’s words are like a fog. Kesey disappears in the soup, he reappears in a mist, undergoing metamorphosis before your very eyes. He’s found religion, contrition, redemption, the error of his ways, and now he’s going to tell The Youth his sad lesson … Faye and the kids are in the audience. Also many of their old Perry Lane friends, Jim and Dorothea Fadiman, Ed McClanahan, Jim Woltman, and some others … Several will stake their homes as bail security, $35,000 worth … Repentance and redemption are sailing around the courtroom like cherubim. All us reporters are scribbling away … Now Kesey is standing up facing the judge with his arms folded and the judge is giving him a lecture … He may be a great literary lion and a romantic figure to some misguided youth but to this court he is a childish ass, an egotist who never grew up, a … The judge is pouring it on, pouring it down his throat like cod-liver oil, but it’s obvious it’s just a buildup to saying he’s going to grant bail anyway under the circumstances … Nevertheless Kesey is burning … You can see him setting his jaw and getting ready to move his lips … God knows Hallinan and Robertson can see it. They’re crouched beside him like bandits. The first peep out of him they’re going to grab him around the throat … Keep your mouth shut, damn it. Don’t blow it now. It’s only cod-liver oil … But the judge has finished and it’s over. He’s out on bail in San Mateo County.
The whole dam breaks after that. The FBI drops the Federal charge of unlawful flight to avoid prosecution. All of a sudden they don’t seem very interested in the case, despite the salt in J. Edgar Hoover’s wounds and the rest of it. Then back in San Francisco, and Kesey is standing in front of the judge in a faded sport shirt, work pants and boots. The judge has a terrific speech ready, saying this case has been blown up out of proportions in the press and it is only a common dope case as far as he is concerned, and Kesey is no dragon, just an ordinary jackass … and Kesey is starting to say something and Hallinan and Rohan are crouched for the garrote, but again it’s over and Kesey is out on bail in San Francisco, too. It’s unbelievable. He’s out after only five days.
In the San Francisco jail
Before he got out on bail
Kesey met a kid with magic fingernails.
“Take a lick,” said the kid
And everybody did.
They all licked his nails and blew their lids.
Twenty-seven psyches
Going off like Nike
Missiles through the lye-scoured
Concrete skyways of the San Francisco jail.
The kid had LSD on his magic fingernails.
Now—
Kesey told this story
To the local news reporters
Who pressed around him in the courtroom,
After the hearing on his bail,
Just to prove how hopeless
Was the drive to stamp out dope
With things like cops and jails.
Try and stop a kid with magic fingernails!
The headlines said
LSD ORGY IN THE SAN FRANCISCO JAIL!
Ah …
Certain local heads cried Judas.
Finked on a stash, this Judas!
While he himself so shrewdly
Copped out of jail, on bail.
A finking fingernail stash betrayal!
If the truth be known—
These good hearts flapped in fibrillation.
They feared the rogue vibrations
From the freaking Acid Graduation
Kesey and the Pranksters planned;
Their freaking Day-Glo last round-up in Winterland.
Like, I mean,
You know,
Can’t you see it coming:
Ten thousand children of the flowers and grass and acid, speed
and poppers, yellow jackets, amyl nitrate,
Ten thousand heads, freaks, beats, hippy-dippies, teeny-boppers
descending from the crest of Haight Street
Tinkling, temple bells, rattling, donkey beads, reeking, grass,
shuffling, elf boots, swarming prostrate
Before the returning Prophet in the bowels of Winterland.
All of psychedelphia moaning to the polyphonic droning of the
Merry Prankster band I
It’s too easy for this headline-blazing superhero
This amazing Cagliostro Elmer Gantry Day-Glo Nero—
ON THE TOP FLOOR OF THE RUSSIAN EMBASSY, IN AN EXTREMELY crummy brown room … It looks inflammable, or spontaneous-combustible, the next cough, maybe, and it’s all up in here. Jack the Fluke sits up in bed, namely, a mattress on the floor, with his back against the wall … wearing nothing except his cabbie’s cap and the grizzle on his face and the grizzle on his Camembert chest … a brown blanket pulled up to his waist … Take a look at that! if you want to know about Kesey. A large message tacked up on the wall on a sheet of drawing paper:
DEAR KEN,
THE BOYS IN THE
TANK SAY HELLO.
THEY WANT TO KNOW
ABOUT THEIR MONEY. SHOULD
THEY ASK YOU OR THE
JUDGE OR WHO?
Sandra, the girl from Bucks County, sits in a clump at the foot of the mattress. She is a very pale, tender little teenage clump. A single morsel, gone at one gulp, sitting under the room’s one article of furniture, a bridge lamp, no longer goofing off the radio, just sitting in a teenage clump and listening to Jack tell me about the letter:
“Oh man, there were a lot of good heads hassled and busted after Kesey told about that.”
“You mean the cops—”
“The very ones. It was a bad scene. Like there’s a lot of cats up here who are not enchanted with Ken Kesey. They sent him this letter.”
Well, obviously they haven’t, because there it is, up on the wall. But the thought is there …
Creaks on the inflammable stairs, and into the room sidles a dark little guy in a T-shirt and jeans carrying a round plastic box of cheese spread and a knife in a scabbard—
“Jack!” he says in this weird whisper
—one of those long knives with a lot of fancy mother-of-pearl on the handle that you see in a Chinatown souvenir shop.
“It was a bad scene,” Jack the Fluke tells me. He ignores the guy.
“Jack … look at this,” says the kid.
“That’s nice, Frenchy,” says Jack.
“Jack … it’s beautiful,” says Frenchy.
“Like there’s a lot of cats up here,” Jack says to me again—
“It’s beautiful,” says Frenchy. “Jack—you know where there’s any morphine?”
“No,” says Jack, then resumes: “Like there’s a lot of cats up here—”
“It’s a beautiful thing,” says Frenchy.
“—who are not enchanted with Ken Kesey and they sent him this letter.”
“Jack—”
And Frenchy hunkers down on the floor and opens the cheese spread and pulls the knife out of the scabbard and sinks the blade into it. Quite a blade! a foot long and engraved with Chinese demons. He wipes gobs of cheese spread onto his tongue with the blade. Sandra sits silent in a clump, grooving on the full life. Jack raps on about perfidy in high places …
I don’t know what the reference to money is—“hey want to know about their money.” But the gist of it is clear enough. Kesey has sold out to keep from getting a five-year sentence or worse. Next he’ll nail it down by calling all the kids to Winterland and telling them to stop taking LSD … Freaking copout …
It’s quite a mess for Kesey, of course. If he had lectured back at the judges like a Superhero, that would have been the end of everything, probably, with him salted away for many years. On the other hand, if he just stares back Orientally as the current fantasy of “beyond acid” is put forth, he looks like a cop-out in Haight-Ashbury …
All those good-loving heads … they’ve been having quite a time for themselves … a summer of euphoria, the millennium, in fact, LSD and hundreds of beautiful people already on the scene, and no more little games. They would just spread out like a wave over the world and end all the bull-shit, drown it in love and awareness, and nothing could stop them. I’ll have to hand it to the heads. They really want to end the little games. Their hearts are pure. I never found more than one or two cynics or hustlers among them. But now that the moment is at hand, everyone is wondering … Hmmmmmmm … who is going to lead the way and hold the light? Then just one little game starts, known as politics … Hmmmmm … As I say, their hearts are pure! Nevertheless, Chet Helms and the Family Dog have their thing, Bill Graham has his thing, the Grateful Dead have theirs, the Diggers have theirs, the Calliope Company have theirs, Bowen has his, even Gary Goldhill … It’s a little like the socialist movement in New York after World War I—the Revolution is imminent, as all know and agree, and yet, Christ, everybody and his brother has a manifesto, the Lovestonites, the Dubinsky Socialists, the CPUSA (Bolshevik), the Wobblies, everybody has his own typewriters and mimeograph machines and they’re all cranking away like mad and fuming over each other’s mistranslations of the Message … Not that the heads in Haight-Ashbury are wrangling with each other yet, but what do they do about Kesey? Just sit back and let him and the Pranksters do their thing? Let them try to turn a lot of impressionable kids off LSD, the way the newspapers say he intends? Or let him suddenly make a big power play at W
interland and take over the whole movement? Politics, in a word …
And the Pranksters … by and by … I find them in the Calliope garage on Harriet Street, the old garage, the ex-pie factory in the bottom of the old hotel. I kept peeking around in the crazy gloom of the place, amid all the scabid wood and sour corners and ratty blankets and scaffoldings and beat-up theater seats and the luminous bus hulking in its own grease and the rotting mattresses where people stretched out and slept and the Shell station up the corner where everyone copped urinations, and I couldn’t figure out what they had to be so exultant about. It beat me. As I look back on it, they were all trying to tell me … Hassler with his discourse on the world full of games and futile oppositioning and how the Pranksters meant to show the world how to live … with his toothbrush case shimmering … He was a kind man! He was trying to give me the whole picture at once. It wasn’t about cops and robbers in Mexico, it was about …
Pranksters arriving from far and wide … The old Schism forgotten … Paul Foster back from India, looking emaciated, his mustache and mutton chops gone, his head shaved, but with the great God Rotor roaring and digging away … Page telling me about huaraches … Mountain Girl, Doris Delay, The Hermit, Freewheeling Frank the Hell’s Angel, Cassady flipping his sledgehammer, Babbs, Gretch, George Walker … Zonker coming in with an Arab headdress as Torrence of Arabia … Finally Kesey pulling in, Faye and the kids coming out … The Flag People, the bus glowing, the mystic fog rising …
IN THE STUDIO OF JOHN BARTHOLOMEW TUCKER’S TELEVISION show, station KPIX, on Van Ness Avenue, I’m sitting in the studio audience up in the gloom behind the black backsides of the spotlights, the cameras, the dollies, the coils of wire … Well, this is going to be fun—