Prime Green : Remembering the Sixties

by Robert Stone

  “Are you talking to me?” “That’s right.” The Greyhound was getting into gear. I was holding my posses- sions in both hands. I set them down. There followed a pointless hostile exchange in the course of which we all moved from the path of an oncoming vehicle. This left us closer to the truck parking area. The first punch of the night got thrown, a sucker punch right out of the movies which was directed at me but missed. At this point I realized that the passing vehicle was what had been my bus. I saw the happy sailors and their mentor who gave me a series of triumphant grimaces, the touring South African, puzzled, and the concerned elderly ladies, wreathed now in fatso smiles. All gone, but leaving me without a bus and with a con- tingent of speed-addled drivers with a beef. “I seen you in Chester!” one of the drivers shouted. “You was with them niggers in Chester.” All I knew about Chester, excepting that I had never been there, was that it was somewhere outside Philadelphia in a different part of the state from Highspire. I later learned that there had been a demonstration there, an antiracist demonstration for jobs or hous- ing. As had happened down south, I was being mistaken for a more generous spirit, someone more actively concerned with justice than I seemed to be. At least I didn’t deny it. Denying it would not have bought much. Closer to the big trucks, on the teamsters’ turf, I was not doing well. My one scoring point, perfectly legitimate in parking lots, was an elbow to the mouth of a guy who was trying to steal my bag from between my feet. But that was it, from then on it was them over me and I was covering up, on one side with my knees up, my vital organs as secure as I could make them, clinging to the seabag that contained the prime green: remembering the sixties 117

  manuscript of the great work in progress. I was still getting kicked when it got light and the sun mounted the peaks of Highspire, PA. I thought it might be dark again before I put the goddamn place behind me. Forget hitchhiking; I had a ticket! Half a dozen times I had to read the small print on the ticket aloud into the life- embittered, overtrafficked face of some Greyhound jock before my blood-spattered, half-mad ravings persuaded one man he had better let me on his bus if living was what he had planned on. So we had to ask a very old non-English-speaking lady to change her seat, and the driver had to move his squared-away braided cap and his briefcase from the seat beside him, replacing them with me. I don’t remember much after that. Janice had got us an apartment on West Ninety-seventh in Manhattan. It had two windows on an alley and the services of a screeching maniac who sounded off about every four hours 24/7 and could freeze the blood of a naive subject in his or her veins. By a naive subject I mean a person who had never previously heard the madman report. Friends of ours tell us that the place was the ugliest apartment we or anyone they knew for that matter had ever lived in. This may be true. But I was very glad to see it and to see she who would for many years bear the burden of my sneering jokes at the sights it occluded and the sounds it would so regularly admit. Bear them as she had borne the two kiddies who were now jammed with us in the tiny pad. And on we went. My head healed from being drilled and kicked on. Janice got her degree cum laude and worked for the wel- fare department. And one day on the kitchen table, while Cousin Brucie was spinning the Zombies’ “She’s Not There” and the loony was sounding his four o’clock alarm, I finished the final pages of A Hall of Mirrors. 118 robert stone

  The USS Arneb, en route to the Antarctic, 1957. New Orleans, 1960. Near the Luxembourg Gardens, Paris, 1964. Seaman’s papers, PHOTOGRAPHIC INSERT

  Janice in 1964. Expatriated in London, 1969. Janice with our daughter, Deidre, in Menlo Park, California, in 1962.

  Playing with Ian. Ian and Deidre on the grass, and a curious bird. Me, Janice, and Deidre at San Gregorio Beach, California, in the summer of 1969.

  Ken Kesey at his writing desk in California. Proto-Pranksters feasting on Perry Lane, circa 1962. RON BEVIR T Kesey at his studies, during the bus trip to New York.

  Cassady, driving Furthur. The bus Furthur, with Kesey stationed on top, and Neal Cassady at the wheel. ALL PHOTOS THIS P AGE BY RON BEVIR T (2007 © RONALD BEVIR T) Pranksters at the Nut Shoppe in Manhattan: Dale Kesey, Ken Babbs, Ken Kesey, John Babbs (lighting cigars in back), Chuck Kesey, Neal Cassady, and Paula Sundsten.

  Jerry Garcia and Pigpen playing at San Francisco State University in 1966. Neal Cassady posing with service posters in Manhattan. ALL PHOTOS THIS P AGE AND F ACING P AGE BY RON BEVIR T (2007 © RONALD BEVIR T) Allen Ginsberg in the early sixties.

  George Walker in full psychedelic regalia. Ken Kesey (left), and Jack Kerouac (below): two American authors in a reflective mode.

  Prime Green : Remembering the Sixties

  At a New Orleans cemetery during the 1969 filming of the movie WUSA, based on A Hall of Mirrors. In the Jones Library at Stanford, 1963. ALL PHOTOS THIS P AGE BY RON BEVIR T (2007 © RONALD BEVIR T)

  TEN Like everything that was essential to the sixties, the Kesey cross-country trip has been mythologized. If you can remember it, the old saw goes, you weren’t there. But the ride in Ken’s multicolored International Harvester school bus was a journey of such holiness that being there—mere vulgar location—was instantly beside the point. From the moment the first de- mented teenager waved a naked farewell as Neal Cassady threw the clutch, everything entered the numinous. Who actually rode the bus, who rode it all the way to the world’s fair and all the way back, has become a matter of con-

  jecture. The number has expanded like the opening-night audience for Le Sacré du printemps, a memorial multiplication in which a the- ater seating eight hundred has come, over time, to accommodate several thousand eyewitnesses. Who was actually on the bus? I, who waited, with the wine- stained manuscript of my first novel, for the rendezvous in New York, have a count. Tom Wolfe, who did not see the bus back then at all but is extremely accurate with facts, has a similar one. Cassady drove—the world’s greatest driver, who could roll a joint while backing a 1937 Packard onto the lip of the Grand Canyon. Kesey went, of course. And Ken Babbs, fresh from the Nam, full of radio nomenclature and with a command voice that put cops to flight. Jane Burton, a pregnant young philosophy professor who declined no challenges. Also Page Browning, a Hell’s Angel candidate. George Walker. Sandy Lehman-Haupt, whose electronic genius was respon- sible for the sound system. There was Mike Hagen, who shot most of the expedition’s film footage. A former infantry officer, Ron Bevirt, whom everybody called Hassler, a clean-cut guy from Missouri, took photographs. There were two relatives of Kesey’s—his brother Chuck and his cousin Dale—and Ken Babbs’s brother John. Kesey’s lawyer’s brother-in-law Steve Lambrecht was along as well. And the beautiful Paula Sundsten, aka Gretchen Fetchin, Swamp Queen. To Ken, to America in 1964, world’s fairs were still a hot number. As for polychrome buses, one loses perspective: the Day-Glo vehicle full of hipsters is now such a spectral archetype of the American road. I’m not sure what it looked like then. With Cassady at the throttle, the bus perfected an uncanny reverse homage to On the Road, traveling east over Eisenhower’s interstates. Like On the Road, the bus trip exalted velocity. Similarly, it scorned limits: this land was your land, this land was my land—the bus could turn up any- 120 robert stone

  where. If the roadside grub was not as tasty as it had been in Ker- ouac’s day, at least the grades were better. Ken had an instinctive distaste for the metropolis and its preten- sions. He was not the only out-of-town writer who thought it a shame that so many publishers were based in New York, and he looked forward to a time when the book business would regionally diversify, supposedly bringing our literature closer to its roots in American soil. But the raising of a world’s fair in the seething city was to Kesey both a breath of assurance and a challenge. Fairs and carnivals, exhibitional wonders of all sorts, were his very meat. He wondered whether the big town would not trip over its own grandiose chic when faced with such a homespun concept. Millions were supposed to be coming, a horde of visitors foreign and domes- tic, all expecting the moon. The bus set off, sometime in June. Nineteen sixty-four was an election year.
To baffle the rubes along their route, Ken and Cassady had painted a motto over the psychedelia on the side of the bus—“A Vote for Barry Is a Vote for Fun”—hoping to pass for psychotic Re- publicans hyping Goldwater. The country cops of the highways and byways, however, took them for Gypsies and waved them through one town after another. Presumably, the vaguely troubled America that was subjected to this drive-by repressed its passing image as meaningless, a hallucination. Sometime around then someone of- fered a lame joke in the tradition of Major Hoople, something about “merry pranksters.” (Major Hoople—a droll comic-strip character at the time, the idler husband of a boardinghouse proprietress—was one of Cassady’s patron gods.) The witless remark was carried too far, along with everything else, and for forty years thereafter people checked for the clownish fringe at our cuffs or imagined us with red rubber noses. prime green: remembering the sixties 121

  Eventually, the bus pulled up in front of the apartment building on West Ninety-seventh Street, in New York, where Janice and I were living with our two children. Suddenly, the place was filled with people painted all colors. The bus waited outside, unguarded, broadcasting Ray Charles, attracting hostile attention with its de- mented Goldwater slogan. We and our kids took our places on top of the bus, ducking trees on our way through Central Park. Down- town, a well-fed button man came out of Vincent’s Clam House to study the bus and the tootling oddballs on its roof. He paused thoughtfully for a moment and finally said, “Get offa there!” That seemed to be the general sentiment. Other citizens offered the finger and limp-wristed “Heil Hitler”s. Later, the gang drove the bus to 125th Street. The street was going to burn in a few weeks, and, but for the mercy of time, some pranksters would have burned with it. There was the after-bus party where Kerouac, out of rage at health and youth and mindlessness—but mainly out of jealousy at Kesey for hijacking his beloved sidekick, Cassady—despised us, and wouldn’t speak to Cassady, who, with the trip behind him, looked about seventy years old. A man attended who claimed to be Terry Southern but wasn’t. I asked Kerouac for a cigarette and was refused. If I hadn’t seen him around in the past I would have thought this Kerouac was an imposter too—I couldn’t believe how miserable he was, how much he hated all the people who were in awe of him. You should buy your own smokes, said drunk, angry Kerouac. He was still dramatically handsome then; the next time I saw him he would be a red-faced baby, sick and swollen. He was a published, admired writer, I thought. How can he be so unhappy? But we, the people he called “surfers,” were happy. We left the party and drove to a bac- chanal and snooze in Millbrook, New York, where psychedelics had replaced tournament polo as a ride on the edge. 122 robert stone

  The bus riders visited the world’s fair in a spirit of decent out-of- town respect for the power and glory of plutocracy. They filmed everything in sight and recorded everything in earshot. Like most young Americans in 1964, they were committed to the idea of a world’s fair as groovy, which in retrospect can only be called sweet. Sweet but just the least bit defiant. Also not a little ripped, since driver and passengers had consumed mind-altering drugs in a quan- tity and variety unrivaled until the prison pharmacy at the New Mexico state penitentiary fell to rioting cons. And, of course, the fair was a mistake for everyone. Now we know that world’s fairs are always bad news. In 1939, the staff of a few na- tional pavilions in New York had nothing to tell the world except that their countries no longer existed. The hardware of national gee- gaws and exhibits went as scrap metal to the war effort. In 1964 the fair produced nothing but sinister urban legends in unsettling num- bers, grisly stories of abduction, murder, and cover-ups. Children were said to have disappeared. Body parts were allegedly concealed in the sleek aluminum spheres. It was the hottest summer in many years. Some of the passengers were so long at the fair that they went home without their souls. Jane, the philosophy professor, insists to this day that she made it to the fair only because she had lost her purse on the first day of the trip. Back in California, she became a mother and went to law school. Kesey and Cassady went home too. Fame awaited them, along with the same fascinated loathing that Kerouac and Ginsberg had endured. We couldn’t imagine it at the time, but we were on the losing side of the culture war. The sorry spectacle in Flushing Meadows in the summer of 1964 might be remembered as the last world’s fair. There were other, later, hyped-up gatherings of the sort, but 1964 was the one that some- how let the air out, the last attempt to generate enough fatuous fu- prime green: remembering the sixties 123

  turistic optimism to float such a promotion. The parched sweating queues, the sinister rumors and paranoia, the bad news from South- east Asia and America’s decaying cities, all seemed to underline in irony a message that “the world,” as an entity, had little incentive for self-celebration. In retrospect, it seems well that Janice and I chose that summer to get ourselves to Paris. Paris was where we would have gone a few years before, had we possessed the wherewithal. We had chosen New Orleans then, settling for a town that offered the advantage of being a Greyhound bus destination. By the summer of 1964 we had saved and borrowed the price of some transatlantic tickets. In July of ’64, along with several thousand other American tourists, we arrived at the Gare du Nord. Our college friend Michael Horowitz was beginning his career as a dealer in rare books and had a job at Paris’s premier English- language bookstore, known in those days as Le Mistral. Its propri- etor, George Whitman, was of that generation of Americans who had settled in Paris right after the Second World War, a group that included the founders of the Paris Review George Plimpton and Blair Fuller, and writers such as James Jones, William Styron, and James Baldwin. The bookstore commands one of the most outrageously ro- mantic locations in Europe, on the rue de la Boucherie across a little square from the Church of St.-Julien-le-Pauvre. Its windows face the river on the quai de la Tournelle, directly across from the flying but- tresses of Notre Dame. As some of us do, Michael fell heir to a destiny so incredibly un- likely that his future condition seemed to embody just about every element in American life that he then earnestly repudiated. In those days, however, he shuttled around Europe, buying first editions for the shop and sometimes literally minding the store when George was otherwise occupied. 124 robert stone

  Those of us who have the uneasy pleasure of knowing George Whitman are familiar with his mercurial disposition and his gen- erosity. When we arrived in Paris, through Michael, we were able to take up the offer that George sometimes extended to impecunious writers in the city, the use of a bed on the shop’s upper floor after its midnight closing time. The weeks we spent there were not many but they served as our introduction to what remained of the city people like us had so long daydreamed about. They also provided our slim but heartfelt claim on a little of the Paris nostalgia that should sweeten the youthful remembrances of any American writer. In the summer of 1964, opposing Algerian factions were still ac- tively planting bombs on their fellow countrymen. Charles de Gaulle had instituted the Fifth Republic, ruling in the name of or- der, and the gendarmes, their capes weighted with coshes like the flippers of homicidal penguins, turned out regularly to brawl with the students who turned out regularly to protest whatever you had got. One day an American poet friend turned up at the store shaken. He had just rescued his small daughter from in front of a police charge outside the Luxembourg Garden, where she had been licking an ice-cream cone, oblivious of the oncoming juggernaut of law en- forcement bearing down on her like the Wrath of God Express. It seems hard to believe that all this was something over forty years ago, as I write. If we could have looked back forty years then we would have seen the summer of 1924, Ernest and Hadley Hem- ingway visiting Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas on the rue de Fleu- rus, James Joyce dining at Lipp’s. But the Paris I remember from 1964 seems recognizably balanced between the way points, the decorous yet rakish city of the twenties expatriates and the steam- cleaned, expensive city of Diane Johnson’s marital narratives. About the time of our first stay George Whitman had changed prime green: rememb
ering the sixties 125

  the name of his establishment from Le Mistral to Shakespeare and Company. Quite appropriately he was assuming the imprint of Sylvia Beach’s bookshop on the rue de Seine which had played so im- portant a role in the expatriate scene of the nineteen twenties. As Shakespeare and Company, Whitman’s store has carried on Beach’s traditions, providing a hangout, sometime hostel, and lending li- brary for Anglophone writers and students of literature in English. For nearly fifty years Whitman’s Shakespeare and Company has been a daily destination for lonely English speakers making a home for themselves. Today the neighborhood behind the bookstore is quite gentrified and spiffy. In 1964 it was a raw, heavily immigrant part of town where Arab music could be heard far into the night in narrow courts. The rue de la Huchette was then as now a nighttime draw for traveling youth and the odd juvenile delinquent, but the fast-food and pizza joints were yet to come. The appearance and feel of the streets back from the river was still a touch medieval, the rooftops inclining to meet over cobblestone streets in a manner to intimidate and beguile the imagination. The blocks of the student quarter and the gray buildings of the Sorbonne stetched inland toward the Pan- theon and the place Maubert. All through this part of Paris were dozens of cut-rate hotels, some of them charging as little as two dol- lars a night, all of them packed during the summer with North Americans equipped with Arthur Frommer’s travel books that pur- ported to guide the purchaser through his days in Paris at the rate of five dollars. Some of these places were truly squalid and literally ver- minous but others were clean and cheerful. The nice ones seemed al- ways to employ middle-aged ladies in blue aprons who could be seen each morning, their hefty frames filling the narrow stairwells, trudging up the stairs one step at a time, maneuvering trays full of 126 robert stone