Prime Green : Remembering the Sixties

by Robert Stone

  headquarters hard to locate, perhaps protected by the local crime lords. In fact, we were a cross between a Stanford fraternity party and an underfunded libertine writers’ conference. We had no nearby neighbors except the grocery store, and most people along the coast hardly knew we were there, at first. The Casa was far from town, and there was little traffic along the intermit- tently paved highway that wound over the Sierra toward Guadala- jara. It consisted mainly of the local buses, whose passengers might spot our laundry hanging in the salt breeze, or glimpse our puppy pack of golden-haired kiddies racing over black sand toward the breakers. Several times a day, the gleaming first-class coaches of the Flecha Amarilla company would hurtle past, a streak of bright silver and gold, all curves and tinted glass. With their crushed Air Corps caps and stylish sunglasses, the Flecha Amarilla drivers were gods, eyeball to eyeball with fate. Everything and everyone along the modest road gave way to them. In appreciation of the spectacle they offered, these buses some- times drew a salute from Cassady. He would stand on a ruined wall and present arms to the bus with a hammer, which for some reason he carried everywhere in a leather holster on his hip. How the middle-class Mexican coach passengers reacted to the random in- stant of Neal against the landscape I can only imagine. Sometimes he brought his parrot, Rubiaco, in its cage, holding it up so that Ru- biaco and the Flecha Amarilla passengers could inspect each other, as though he were offering the parrot for sale. Cassady in Manzanillo was extending his career as a literary character in other people’s work—Kerouac had used him, as would Kesey, Tom Wolfe, and I. The persistent calling forth and reinventing of his existence was an exhausting process even for such an extraordinary mortal as Neal. 152 robert stone

  Maybe it has earned him the immortality he yearned for. It certainly seems to have shortened his life. People who live in the tropics sometimes claim to have seen a gor- geous green flash spreading out from the horizon just after sunset on certain clear evenings. Maybe they have. Not I. What I will never forget is the greening of the day at first light on the shores north of Manzanillo Bay. I imagine that color so vividly that I know, by on- tology, that I must have seen it. In the moments after dawn, before the sun had reached the peaks of the sierra, the slopes and valleys of the rain forest would explode in green light, erupting inside a si- lence that seemed barely to contain it. When the sun’s rays spilled over the ridge, they discovered dozens of silvery waterspouts and dissolved them into smoky rainbows. Then the silence would give way, and the jungle noises rose to blue heaven. Those mornings, day after day, made nonsense of examined life, but they made everyone smile. All of us, stoned or otherwise, caught in the vortex of dawn, would freeze in our tracks and stand to, squinting in the pain of the light, sweating, grinning. We called that light Prime Green; it was primal, primary, primo. The high-intensity presence of Mexico was inescapable. Even in the barrancas of the wilderness you felt the country’s immanence. Poverty, formality, fatalism, and violence seemed to charge even un- inhabited landscapes. I was young enough to rejoice in this. On cer- tain mornings when the tide was low and the wind came from the necessary quarter, you could stand on the beach and hear the bugle call from the naval base in the city. Although it had a brief section that suggested Tchaikovsky’s “Capriccio italien,” the notes of the Mexican call to colors were pure heartbreak. They always suggested to me the triumphalism of the vanquished, the heroic, engaged in prime green: remembering the sixties 153

  disastrous sacrifice. Those were the notes that had called thousands of lancers against the handful of Texans at the Alamo, that had called wave after wave of Juárez’s soldiers against the few dozen Foreign Le- gionnaires at Camarón. Had the same strains echoed off the rock of Chapultepec when the young cadets wrapped themselves in the flag and leaped from the Halls of Montezuma to defy the Marines? Does any other army figure so large in the romantic institutional memories of its enemies? All those peasant soldiers, underequipped in everything but the courage for Pyrrhic victories and gorgeous sui- cidal gestures. Naifs led by Quixotes against grim nameless profes- sionals with nothing to lose, loyal to their masters’ greed. So our exile provided more than a hugely spectacular scenic back- drop. The human setting, never altogether out of view, was ongoing conflict. Quite selfishly, we loved the color of history there, the high drama—man at his fiercest. We imagined it all flat out, as presented by Rivera, Orozco, and the rest, the dark and light, La Adelita, El Grito, Malinche. Hard-riding rebeldes, leering calaveras, honor, be- trayal, the songs of revolution. We had ourselves an opera. Or, as someone remarked, a Marvel comic. The concept of real life was elu- sive. All this naturally gave our own lives a quality of fatefulness and melodrama. We were fugitives, after all—at least Kesey was. The thing we failed to grasp in 1966 was that Mexico was a na- tion at a turning point. Time and geography had caused it to require many things of the United States, but a band of pot-smoking, im- poverished existencialistas who danced naked on the beach and frightened away the respectable tourists was simply not one of them. Gradually, as our presence made itself manifest, it drew crowds of the curious. Young people, especially, were fascinated by the anar- chy, the lights and the music. The local authorities became watchful. At that time, marijuana was disapproved of in Mexico, associated 154 robert stone

  with a low element locally and with the kind of unnecessary gringos who lived on mangoes and whose antics encrimsoned the jowls of free-spending trophy fishermen from Orange County. From the start, I think, the authorities in the state of Colima understood that there was more hemp than Heidegger at the root of our cerebration, and that many of us had trouble distinguishing Being from Noth- ingness by three in the afternoon. At the same time, a sort of fix was in: Ken was paying mordida through his lawyers, enough to deter initiatives on the part of law enforcement. We were bearing witness, unwittingly, to a worldwide develop- ment that had begun in the United States. The original laws forbid- ding classified substances had been framed in the language of therapy, emphasizing the discouragement of such addictive nostrums as “tem- perance cola” and cocaine tonics. From the fright tabloid to the police blotter the matter went, providing the founding documents of a po- lice underworld, featuring informers, jail time, and the third degree. The resulting damage to American and foreign jurisprudence, the outlaw fortunes made, the destroyed children, and the gangsterism are all well known. What had been a way for Indian workmen to re- inforce the pulque they drank and sweated out by sundown, a dis- agreeable practice of the hoi polloi, became, once it was established as a police matter, Chicago-style prohibition on a global scale. Nothing, travelers found, so preoccupied stone-faced cops from Mauritania to Luzon as the possibility of a joint in a sock, hash in a compact. In Mexico, we failed to interpret the developments on the drug front to such a degree that when a Mexican plainclothes policeman—Agent Number 1, as he described himself—appeared to make awkward probing conversation with us in the local cantina, we were more amused at his stereotypical overbearing manner than alarmed. We should have seen the deadly future he represented. prime green: remembering the sixties 155

  Some twenty years earlier, Cassady had brought Kerouac down to Mexico and revealed it to him as the happy end of the rainbow. In On the Road, Kerouac records the dreamy observations of Cassady’s char- acter, Dean Moriarty, as he provides his compañero—Jack, in the role of Sal Paradise—with lyrical insights into a Land That Care Forgot, Mexico as a garden without so much as the shadow of a snake. Sal, I am digging the interiors of these homes as we pass them—these gone doorways and you look inside and see beds of straw and little brown kids sleeping and stirring to wake, their thoughts congealing from the empty mind of sleep, their selves rising and the mothers cooking up breakfast in iron pots, and dig them shutters they have for windows and the old men, the old men, are so cool and grand and not bothered by anything. There’s no suspicion here, nothing like that. Everybody’s cool, everybody looks at you with such straight brown eyes and they don’t say any- thing, just look, and in that look
all of the human qualities are soft and subdued and still there. In 1957, I had sat in the radio shack of the USS Arneb, a young sailor with my earphones tuned to Johnson and Winding, reading all this in the copy of On the Road that my mother had sent me. If it seems strange that my copy of this hipster testament came from my mother, it would have seemed far more improbable—at least to me—that I would one day be sharing the mercies of Mexico with some of the characters from the book. Nor would I have believed that anyone, anywhere, ever, talked like Dean Moriarty. I was twice wrong, and, as they say, be careful what you wish for. As we sat in the cantina, watching Agent Number I grow more drunk and less convivial with every round, I began to see that Dean 156 robert stone

  Moriarty and his author had been mistaken in some respects. In the bent brown eyes of the agent I beheld grave suspicion, and my own thoughts began to congeal around the prospect of waking up to breakfast in a Mexican jail. There were working-class taverns in Mexico (and some pretty fancy ones too) where the drinking atmosphere seemed to change over a few hours in a manner somewhat the reverse of similar estab- lishments in other countries. For example, a customer might arrive in the early evening to find the place loud with laughter and conver- sations about baseball or local politics and gossip, the jukebox blar- ing, the bartender all smiles. Then, as time progressed and the patrons advanced more deeply into their liquor, things would seem to quiet down. By a late hour, the joint, just as crowded, would grow so subdued that the rattle of a coin on the wooden bar might attract the attention of the whole room. Men who had been exchanging jokes a short time before would stand unsteadily and look around with an unfocused caution, as though reassessing the place and their drinking buddies. These reassessments sometimes seemed unfavor- able, at which point it was time to leave. Thus it went with Agent Number 1. He showed us his badge, and indeed it was embossed with the number 1, and he assured us that, as cops went, he was numero uno as well. He told stories about Elizabeth Taylor in Puerto Vallarta—how her stolen jewelry was re- turned at the very whisper of his name in the criminal hangouts of P.V. His mood kept deteriorating. He got drunker and would not go away. He told us that Mexico’s attitude toward marijuana was very liberal. His private attitude was too, though he never used drugs himself, no, no, no. Did we know that we were entitled to keep some marijuana for our own personal use? Quite a generous amount. I have come to recognize the phrase “your own personal use” em- prime green: remembering the sixties 157

  ployed in a tone of good-natured tolerance as a standard police trap around the world; whatever you admit to possessing is likely to get you put away. While I let the federale buy me drinks, my two companions teased him as though we were all players in Touch of Evil. Ken Babbs’s Viet- nam post-traumatic stress took the form of a dreadful fearlessness, which, though terrifying to timid adventurers like myself, would come in handy more than once. George Walker had a similar spirit. For my part, I went for the persona of one polite but dumb, an atti- tude that annoyed the agent even more than Babbs’s and Walker’s transparent mockery. For some inexplicable reason, I thought I could mollify him by talking politics. The agent was an anti- Communist and excitable on the topic. I now realize that in the con- text of Mexico in 1966 this portended no good. Eventually, having bought every round and rather fumbled his exploratory probe, Agent Number 1 climbed into his Buick and drove off toward Guadalajara. His hateful parting glance told us it was hasta luego, not adios. We reported our encounter to Kesey, who was philosophical; he had been brooding, wandering the beach at night. In the morning, he would come down to sleep, exhausted, looking for Faye to lead him to cool and darkness, shelter from the green blaze and the reen- actment of creation that could explode at any moment. What was happening to Kesey? He didn’t seem to be writing much. It was im- possible to tell if we were witnessing a stage of literary develop- ment, a personal Gethsemane, or an apotheosis. Some fundamental change seemed to be taking place in the world, and as he smoked the good local herb on the slope of the sierra and watched the light- ning flashes and the fires of the volcano, he pondered what his role in it might be. Before his flight to Mexico, he had attended a Uni- 158 robert stone

  tarian conference at Asilomar, on the California coast, during the course of which a number of people came to believe that he was God. He had spun their minds with unanswerable gnomic chal- lenges and imaginary paradoxes. Still, it was an especially heady compliment, coming from Unitarians. Kesey referred to the Unitar- ian elders, patrician world citizens in sailor caps and fishermen’s sweaters, as “the pipes” because they took their tobacco in hawthorn- and maple-scented meerschaums and used the instruments to punc- tuate their thoughtful, humane fireside remarks. “If you’ve got it all together,” Kesey asked one confounded elder, “what’s that all around it?” Local adolescents took to hanging out around the Casa. Some of them were musicians. On the anniversary of Mexican independence, we decided to hold what someone called an acid test. People ap- peared on the beach with rum and firecrackers. We put tricolor Mex- ican bunting up. By this point, Cassady had found it liberating to restrict his diet to methamphetamine. He went everywhere with Rubiaco, the parrot. So constant was their companionship, so exact was Rubiaco’s rendering of Cassady’s speech, that without looking it was impossible to tell which of them had come into a room. As for Cassady on amphetamine—he never ate, never slept, and never shut up. He also thought it a merry prank to slip several hundred micro- grams of LSD into anything anyone happened to be ingesting. No one dared eat or drink without secure refuge from Neal. To cap off our Independence Day celebration, a number of us went into the vil- lage market and bought a suckling piglet for roasting. Nothing roasted ever smelled lovelier to me than that substance-free piggy as we settled under the palms with our paper plates and bottles of Paci- fico. We were, unfortunately, deceived. Cassady had shot the crea- ture in vivo with a hype full of LSD, topped off with his choicest prime green: remembering the sixties 159

  methedrine. After two forkfuls of lechón, we were bug-eyed, watch- ing the Dance of the Diablitos, every one of us deep in delusion. How the parrot survived its friendship with Cassady is beyond me; as far as I remember neither he nor anyone else ever fed the bird. Twenty-five years later, on Kesey’s farm, Janice and I woke to Neal’s voice from the beyond. (The man himself had died by the railroad tracks outside San Miguel de Allende in 1968.) “Fuckin’ Denver cops,” he muttered bitterly. “They got a grand theft auto. I tell them that ain’t my beef.” We rose bolt upright and found ourselves staring into Rubiaco’s unkindly green eye. If, as some say, parrots live preternaturally long lives, it must be time for some literary zoologist to cop that bird for the University of Texas Library Zoo. The expatriation had to come to an end; Kesey would have to go back and answer to the state of California. In fact, his spell on the lam had been excellently timed. In 1966, the world, and especially California, was changing fast. The change was actually visible on the streets of San Francisco, at places like the Fillmore and the Avalon Ballroom. Political and social institutions were so lacking in humor and self-confidence that they crumbled at a wisecrack. The Esquire consciousness, however, held firm—they declined my copy. “For Christ’s sake,” an editor kept telling me, “tell it to a neutral reader.” They thought I had gone native on the story, and of course I had been pretty native to begin with. A few months later, Kesey crossed the border and went home. He was able to make a deal for six months at the San Mateo County sher- iff’s honor farm. No one can call another’s prison time easy, but it was less bitter medicine than Cassady’s two years at San Quentin. It 160 robert stone

  was also an improvement on five years to life, a standard sentence on the books for a high-profile defendant at the time of Kesey’s arrest. Over the years, my friend Ken became a libertarian shaman. Above all he loved performing; he loved preaching and teaching. He was a wonderful father, a fearless and generous friend, who always took back far less than he gave. Kesey was in love with magic. All his life, he was searching for the
philosopher’s stone that could re- turn the world to the pure story from which it was made, bypassing syntax and those damn New York publishers. He kept trying to find the message beyond the words, to see the words God had written in fire. He traveled around sometimes, in successors to the old bus, telling stories and putting on improvised shows for crowds of chil- dren and adults. If he had chosen to work through his progressively revealed mythology in novels, rather than trying to live it out all at once, he might have become a writer for the age. Life had given Americans so much by the mid-sixties that we were all a little drunk on possibility. Things were speeding out of control before we could define them. Those of us who cared most deeply about the changes, those who gave their lives to them, were, I think, the most deceived. While we were playing shadow tag in the San Fran- cisco suburbs, other revolutions were counting their chips. Curved, finned, corporate Tomorrowland, as presented at the 1964 world’s fair, was over before it began, and we were borne along with it into a future that no one would have recognized, a world that no one could have wanted. Sex, drugs, and death were demystified. The LSD we took as a tonic of psychic liberation turned out to have been developed by CIA researchers as a weapon of the cold war. We had gone to a party in La Honda in 1963 that followed us out the door and into the street and filled the world with funny colors. But the prank was on us. prime green: remembering the sixties 161