Prime Green : Remembering the Sixties
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those who experienced it. His ability to offer other people a variety of satisfactions ranging from fun to transcendence was not especially verbal, which is why it remained independent of Kesey’s fiction, and it was ineffable, impossible to describe exactly or to encapsulate in a quotation. Fitzgerald endowed Jay Gatsby with a similar charisma—enigmatic and elusive, exciting the dreams, envy, and frustration of those who were drawn to him. Charisma is a gift of the gods, the Greeks believed, but, like all divine gifts, it has its cost. (Kesey once composed an insightful bit of doggerel about his own promises to the seekers around him. “Of offering more than what I can deliver,” it went, “I have a bad habit, it is true. But I have to of- fer more than what I can deliver to be able to deliver what I do.” Kesey felt that his world was his own creature and, at the same time, paradoxically, inevitably, that he was an outsider in it, in dan- ger of being cheated of his own achievement. His forebears had feared and hated the railroads and the eastern banks. In their place Kesey saw New York, the academic establishment, Hollywood. When he was growing up in Oregon, I imagine, all power must have seemed to come from somewhere else. Big paper companies and unions, the FBI and the local sheriff’s department—he distrusted them all. While in New York to see the Broadway adaptation of Cuckoo’s Nest, Kesey had caught a glimpse of the preparations for the 1964 world’s fair. It didn’t take him long to dream up the idea of riding a bus to the fair, arriving sometime before the scheduled publication date for Sometimes a Great Notion. Somehow, he and his friends the sports car driver George Walker and the photographer Mike Hagen managed to buy a 1939 International Harvester school bus and refashion it prime green: remembering the sixties 95
into a kind of disarmed personnel carrier, with welded compart- ments inside and an observation platform that looked like a U-boat’s conning tower on top. It was wired to play and record tapes, capable of belching forth a cacophony of psychic disconnects and registering the reactions at the same time. There were movie cameras every- where. Everyone had a hand in the painting of the bus, principally the San Francisco artist Roy Sebern. A sign above the windshield, where the destination would normally be announced, proclaimed, FURTHUR. By then there were a number of footloose wanderers loitering around Kesey’s spread in La Honda, ready to ride as soon as the paint was dry—just waiting, really, for Kesey to tell them what to do next. It was said later that one was either on the bus or off the bus— no vain remark, mind you, but an insight of staggering profundity. It meant, perhaps, that some who were physically on the bus were not actually on the bus in spirit. It meant that millions were off the bus, but the bus was coming for them. If you were willing to enter- tain Kerouac’s notion that George Shearing was God, that bus was coming for you. 96 robert stone
NINE Early on a fall morning in 1963 I went to the Stanford clinic with what I thought was an errant eyelash. A thin crooked line was segmenting my field of vision, making it impossible to read or write anything. Before the day was out, an unwhole- some interior light was burning semaphores into the underside of my eyelids. After hours of huddling in darkened cubicles, following the light point, the bouncing ball, and the little green arrow with a swollen gaze, I was unwell. My eyes felt like a pair of grotesquely enlarged pinballs, poached and spinning, expanding and contracting like evil planets. I knew I would
never get any skin back down over the front side of them or get my pupils to stop flashing colors yet unborn. It was dismaying, and might well have been; according to the creepy invisible doctor who intoned my fate with what sounded like a smiley lisp, I was one unfortunate bozo. He asked me if I thought I had a tumor. No, I said, do you? I was not being impolite, I was asking his opinion. He failed to understand and became annoyed. Did I use drugs? What drugs? I asked, hoping to learn something I really didn’t want to know. What drugs did I think? he demanded, the voice from some phosphorescent swamp down south where dogs and dog boys scampered. The mortuary poetics in which he deliv- ered his take on my misfortune might have been consoling to a more philosophical or mature patient. It made the dull catalog of my sus- pected diseases sound not just terminal but weird, like the skeletal specimens of a mad collector. What drugs did I take? When I put the subject off he began to re- cite the possible effects of recreational drugs on the eyes like a hit man’s evil auntie calling down vendetta. The man was Poe-esque. He foresaw the need for an operation. He foresaw the likelihood of blindness and death. If I postponed an operation to prevent blind- ness, he said, I would still have to face it eventually. If I lived for six months I would only want to live another six months. The point seemed to be that it was time to surrender my will. “You have a beard,” he asked me, exploring the murk with one of his lights. “Why?” “It’s an affectation.” He switched on his desk lamp and shook his head in sympathy or incomprehension or something. This was my first clear look at him. He looked to me like a perjuring prosecution witness at a country murder trial. I felt like the defendant. 98 robert stone
“You’re aware it’s an affectation but you wear it anyway. Does that make sense?” This rhetorical question was presented with a thoughtful clinical inflection, as though to open the doors of my self-perception to in- sight. I told him I was writing a book, certainly a non sequitur and a dumb answer. I had made some kind of vow not to shave until the thing was finished. A strangely angelic nurse with golden ringlets at her brow ap- peared out of nothingness. Or else I had simply not noticed her in the darkness. The doctor addressed himself to her. “He’s writing a book. So he wears the beard.” The doctor, visible now as fanged and cross-eyed, allowed himself a chuckle. Suddenly he showed me a toothy leer like the Phil Silvers character in the Sergeant Bilko television show of the now long ago. My antagonism and suspicion grew by the moment. Paranoia helped me cope with the humiliation of it all. It helped persuade me that he was lying to me about my condition out of treachery and malice. He was my en- emy and I hated him. The nurse, or whatever she was, had appeared without entering, within a space that had not existed before she occupied it. It sug- gested the way Kafka’s characters in The Trial materialize instantly at the margin of chambers that all at once contain them. “He’ll have to shave it off for the mask,” she said with satisfaction. Then she turned to me and lowered her voice in a confiding manner. “You’ll look better.” Her looks were as disconcerting as her sudden appearance. Her eyes had the jaundiced and metallic shade of the background fram- ing Byzantine saints in Russian icons. The pupils never shifted to settle on a single object; they seemed not to focus. She looked blinded. prime green: remembering the sixties 99
I stood up to leave. “I’ll be back in six months,” I told them. “To see if I want to go on living.” “It’ll be too late,” the southern surgeon said. “Maybe I’ll finish my book.” The ethereal nurse began to say something but was silenced, I think, by a cool-it glance from the master. I left the form they of- fered me unsigned on his desk. That night I briefly tried not to tell my wife about the interview with Stanford’s phantom wizards. Janice and I had few secrets and these usually did not hold up very long. On this particular evening I was weak; I wanted some help in rejecting the eye people’s absurd prognosis, someone to complain to and offer something along the order of consolation. So before long I had frightened and distressed this tough-minded and courageous young woman to a point of some extremity. I had also assured myself of shame and remorse over not sparing the girl considerable anxiety that night for the rest of my life—which at least would turn out to be longer than six months. The only upside to this absurdity was a certainty I came to feel that I would never be readier to endure the business of dying than I was at that time. I thought I was handling it pretty well, except for telling her so precipitately about the doctor’s routines. Janice had plans to go back to New York early in 1964; she had enrolled in the spring semester’s classes at CCNY. And she was to carry my manuscript—all I had done on it—to Candida Donadio, reputed to be the hottest agent in New York at the time. We de- cided that the best way of e
ngaging fate was to continue with our plans and see how things turned out. That fall, the strange, evil weekend of John Kennedy’s murder took place. It charged our earthly paradise with a sense of fate and 100 robert stone
death and reversal of fortune. It was the stuff of children’s grief and liberal despair. The radicals at the union read their journals with wise, grimly knowing smiles. Conspiracy theories and sick jokes prevailed. Meanwhile in the quotidian realms of no significance my jagged line turned out to be a hemorrhage inside my eye. Feeling borne on the combined power of ill winds, I ended up in Palo Alto Stanford Hospital, though I never saw the doctor of darkness or his blind angel again. The less sinister experts with whom I now spoke offered scantily improved hope. Hemorrhages, it was thought, do not appear for no reason. There indeed was the possibility as suggested that I had a tumor, that soon I would be blind, and/or begging for six more months of life. However, the new team seemed to take less plea- sure in the fateful and to suggest a more agreeable situation all around. However, there were diagnostic problems. At this stage of med- ical history the CAT scan for intercranial examinations had not come into general use. The procedure to be followed was going to consist of two bore holes being drilled into my skull, a business often en- dured by injured downhill skiers and practiced by the surgeons who serviced them. As I understood it, the method derived from the “trepanning” methods of the pre-Columbian physicians of Mesoamerica and Peru. First the holes must be bored under local anesthetic. Following the procedures current at that time, air would be pumped into the cranial cavity to expedite an X-ray. If a growth or injury requiring surgery was identified, the surgery would come next, part of the same day’s work. The more intrusive part of the op- eration would require deep and total sedation, which was the reason that the exploratory part had to be done on a local. The procedure promised a long day, some risks, and possible surprises. I signed the prime green: remembering the sixties 101
necessary papers and Janice arranged to fly back west and stay with friends. Of Finnish descent, she might stay close and cast some wholesome sub-Arctic spells. It would be an expensive hassle and an academic inconvenience, because City College in those days was hard work—free of tuition, competitive, and notoriously demanding. As distraction from her anxieties she smoked a large and varied amount of marijuana before boarding the TWA flight which flew to San Francisco from the newly renamed John F. Kennedy Airport. I remember thinking about the new name at the time: that there was the least too much careless gallantry in it; that it lacked a measure of decent revulsion for ill luck and murder. It was my wife’s first flight, and I suggested she try to enjoy it by getting loaded. Friends in Cal- ifornia were bringing me some dope to the hospital, a risky business then as now, a time when you could get arrested on your funeral pyre for possession of weed. During what might have been my last night on earth I was con- fined in Stanford Hospital in company with a Mormon salesman with a hernia. He was watching television. I had papers to sign, many, and this time I cravenly signed them. I think one of them was a loyalty oath. “My goodness,” my roomie, the salesman, kept saying, “that Mitch Miller is a funny-looking fellow.” Meanwhile Janice, on runway 6 at the newly and ominously re- named airport, had forgotten her mission of mercy. Upgraded by an airline official to first-class, she thought she was on her way home from the opera and kept mistaking the runway lights for downtown Manhattan. We telepathized. I kept imagining her in her boots and deerskin britches, what the world then called “a hippie chick” about to become a cute curvy widow in tight pants high over the Big Sky country. Her new life was in the making, the future balanced liter- 102 robert stone
ally on a knife edge. I felt horny, jealous, and resentful, about to be cuckolded by death like the late president for whom Idlewild had been rechristened. The procedures I describe are as I remember them and as they were later explained to me, so I will try to render them as accurately as possible. In the operating theater, I was strung out half upside down on a monstrosity that resembled the Zeiss Stereoptical Projec- tor at the Hayden Planetarium on Central Park West. There were only three of these devices in the world and I was on one of them, a great honor. “I have to cut into you, Mr. Stone,” said the young doctor. “You’ll hear it. It’ll sound like a dentist drill. But it shouldn’t hurt.” My head was shaved, along with my beard. The doc gave me a couple of needles. He and his assistants took up their instruments— surgical knives, drills, hooks, and so on. What they were doing to me did not seem to hurt. As promised, the noise and the vibration suggested dentistry on a monster scale with your head as the tooth. In the mind’s eye you were watching someone work a pneumatic drill, waiting for your head to land in your lap. “I like to sing when I work,” the head surgeon said. “You don’t mind if I sing, do you, Mr. Stone?” The main female nurse was a kindly bespectacled English girl, a thinking man’s crumpet. I wanted to impress her favorably. “Under the circumstances, Doc,” I said, “I’ll take my pleasures where I find them.” My bon mot was a bit of a success. I was pleased but a bit sick at my stomach. Later on in the procedure, the director of the operation spoke to one of his assistants. “When you cut,” he addressed the man sternly, “cut away from the brain.” prime green: remembering the sixties 103
The procedure would leave me with two holes in my head, since healed but still palpable over forty years later. The reason for two holes rather than one was presumably based on the physical princi- ple that required us back then to make two perforations in a beer can rather than one. This is a principle I vaguely grasp and probably an- other indication of intelligent design at work on the big picture. Air, inserted and released through these taps, seemed to produce the notes of a steam calliope to replace the rattle of the drill. Maybe I imagined it. The matter of the mask and my beard never came up because there was no need to remove large pieces of cranium. The condition that had afflicted me was something known to medicine as benign acute intercranial hypertension. Pressure of obscure origin increases in the cranial cavity, causes an effect like a head injury or malig- nancy inside the cranial cavity, and can cause broken capillaries in places like the eye. The condition is or was sometimes referred to as a pseudo-tumor. No association between drugs and BAIH is known, which of course proves nothing. Anyway, the transformation of the patient’s skull into a ceramic flute resolves the pressure. A cure. Janice stayed in California with me for a while and then went back to New York and CCNY. I walked the streets of Palo Alto skin- headed, proceeding in little tiny steps which rattled every bone be- tween my toes and my molars. I was trying to finish the notorious first novel at an artists’ colony in Saratoga, California. By now, I was much encouraged by the fact that the famous Candida Donadio had contacted me. She would take me on as her client. Our relationship was to continue for more than thirty-five years. Neal Cassady, whom I then knew very slightly, was with his wife, Carolyn, in nearby Los Gatos in a house he had once shared with 104 robert stone
Kerouac. From time to time we would share the drive across the Santa Cruz Mountains to Kesey’s. The Santa Cruz were beginning to develop a sinister reputation at that time. In East of Eden Steinbeck had found them kindly moun- tains, compared to the range across the Salinas Valley, which he saw as menacing. The Santa Cruz were certainly beautiful, and magical too. You could pass through vales of fog as thick as woodsmoke and then suddenly come upon a sun-dappled mountain meadow to make your heart soar. In spring the wildflowers abounded as they would in the high peaks of the Cascades. The road between Saratoga and La Honda wound like a fairy-tale lane through redwoods, fields of tule grass, and live oak. Here and there it would pass through valleys filled with ferns that would haunt your dreams. Unfortunately, we were only a few years short of the Summer of Love, which would fuck everything. Our garden was too beautiful to ever have been free of serpents. Now things were emerging from be- neath the earth that created a phylogeny like that at the bottom of Monterey Bay; big ones or poisonous ones were eating little ones. Unlike that on the seafloor, this wa
s a pathological predation, inno- cence and delusion attracting and setting free murder. Police parl- ance adopted a sporting metaphor to describe the method of psychos in search of prey. They called it “trolling.” The kids talked about “bad vibes.” The Santa Cruz became a sinister lonely place. On reflection, I’m sure this amounts to exaggeration. However, people, especially the young, spoke and imagined in such terms. The fear and attraction became hippie lore, the stuff of urban legend, and so produced some quite real effects. Administrators and residents at my colony at the foot of the mountains became extremely concerned that the gates be locked at night. Returning late and leaving them prime green: remembering the sixties 105
unsecured was a major dereliction. This was described to me then as a recent development. Fewer and fewer people walked the extensive wooded trails in its arboretum. A young woman was murdered there, on the grounds. Still, I was not yet ready to abandon my sense of having discov- ered a new Eden in a condition toward which the entire world ought to aspire. I left for New York again that spring of 1964 because that was where my Heart’s Ease dwelled; regrets and dear friendships would not keep me away. Moreover, I thought we would soon be back in California. I resist the idea of ever having been so naive, but perhaps I thought we would return to find everything as we’d left it, waiting to be reclaimed. Maybe I believed that if you worked at it right you could have all the lives you wanted at once, all the loves, all the lights and music. One true thing about my life in those years was that I was ex- tremely fortunate in the friends and mentors with whose help we made our way. Mack Rosenthal had made me aware of the Stegner Fellowship and accompanied my manuscript with his recommenda- tion. And Wally Stegner arranged for me to meet Dorothy de Santil- lana, the renowned editor at Houghton Mifflin, when she visited California. She in turn arranged to get me the Houghton Mifflin fel- lowship for a first novel and a publication contract. When my pseudo-tumor pseudo-struck, occasioning medical bills that would have amounted to a year’s income for Darius the Great, Stegner arranged to extend my fellowship so that I was covered by Stanford’s health plan. (Wally’s recollection of the circumstances under which he worked this out differed from mine. I had hoped to impress this old-time westerner with my cool courage. What he mostly recalled, good-naturedly but not quite so favorably impressed as I had hoped, was my not having the tumor I had been so enthusiastically prom- 106 robert stone