The Purple Decades

by Tom Wolfe

  “Wait a minute,” the guy says. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “Fill ’er up!” says Kesey, very soft and pleasant. “Yes, sir, she’s a big bus and she takes a lotta gas. Yep.”

  “I mean what are they doing?”

  “Them? I ’spect they’re going to the bathroom. Ay-yuh, that big old thing’s the worst gas-eater you ever saw”—all the time motioning to Hagen to go get the movie camera and the microphone.

  “Well, can’t all those people use the bathrooms.”

  “All they want to do is go to the bathroom”—and now Kesey takes the microphone and Hagen starts shooting the film—whirrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr— but all very casual as if, well, sure, don’t you record it all, every last morsel of friendly confrontation whenever you stop on the great American highway to cop a urination or two? or a dozen?

  “Well, now, listen! You ain’t using the bathrooms! You hear me, now! You see that motel back there? I own that motel, too, and we got one septic tank here, for here and there, and you’re not gonna overflow it for me. Now git that thing out of my face!”

  —Kesey has the microphone in the guy’s face, like this is all for the six o‘clock news, and then he brings the microphone back to his face, just like the TV interview shows, and says, “You see that bus out there? Every time we stop to fill ’er up we have to lay a whole lot of money on somebody, and we’d like it to be you, on account of your hospitality.” “It’s an unaccountable adventure in consumer spending,” says Babbs.

  “Get those cameras and microphones out of here,” the guy says. “I’m not afraid of you!”

  “I should hope not,” says Kesey, still talking soft and down-home. “All that money that big baby’s gonna drink up. Whew!”

  Sheerooooooo—all this time the toilets are flushing, this side and that side and the noise of it roars and gurgles right through the cinder block walls until it sounds like there’s nothing in the whole wide open U. S. of A. except for Clean Rest Room toilets and Day-Glo crazies and cameras and microphones from out of nowhere, and the guy just caves in under it. He can’t fit it into his movie of Doughty American Entrepreneur—not no kind of way—

  “Well, they better make it fast or there’s going to be trouble around here.” And he goes out to fill ’er up, this goddamn country is going down the drain.

  But they don’t speed it up. Walker is over to the coin telephone putting in a call to Faye back in La Honda. Babbs is clowning around out on the concrete apron of the gas station with Gretchen Fetchin. Jane Burton feels bilious—the idea is to go to New York, isn’t it? even on a 1939 school bus it could be done better than this. What are we waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting for, playing games with old crocks at gas stations. Well, we’re waiting for Sandy, for one thing. Where in the hell is Sandy. But Sandy—he hasn’t slept in days and he has an unspecific urge to get off the bus—but not to sleep, just to get off—for—what?—before:::::what? And Sandy is back over at the motel, inspecting this electro-pink slab out in the middle of nowhere—somebody finally finds him and brings him back. Sandy is given the name Dis-mount in the great movie.

  “There are going to be times,” says Kesey, “when we can’t wait for somebody. Now, you’re either on the bus or off the bus. If you’re on the bus, and you get left behind, then you’ll find it again. If you’re off the bus in the first place—then it won’t make a damn.” And nobody had to have it spelled out for them. Everything was becoming allegorical, understood by the group mind, and especially this: “You’re either on the bus … or off the bus.”

  Except for Hagen’s girl, the Beauty Witch. It seems like she never even gets off the bus to cop a urination. She’s sitting back in the back of the bus with nothing on, just a blanket over her lap and her legs wedged back into the corner, her and her little bare breasts, silent, looking exceedingly witch-like. Is she on the bus or off the bus? She has taken to wearing nothing but the blanket and she sheds that when she feels like it. Maybe that is her thing and she is doing her thing and wailing with it and the bus barrels on off, heading for Houston, Texas, and she becomes Stark Naked in the great movie, one moment all conked out, but with her eyes open, staring, the next laughing and coming on, a lively Stark Naked, and they are all trying to just snap their fingers to it but now she is getting looks that have nothing to do with the fact that she has not a thing on, hell, big deal, but she is now waxing extremely freaking ESP. She keeps coming up to somebody who isn’t saying a goddamn thing and looking into his eyes with the all-embracing look of total acid understanding, our brains are one brain, so let’s visit, you and I, and she says: “Ooooooooh, you really think that, I know what you mean, but do you-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-ueeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee”—finishing off in a sailing tremolo laugh as if she has just read your brain and it is the weirdest of the weird shit ever, your brain eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee—

  STARK NAKED!

  in a black blanket—

  Reaching out for herself,

  she woke up one morning to

  find herself accosted on all

  sides by

  LARGE

  MEN

  surrounding her threatening her

  with their voices, their presence, their always

  desire reaching inside herself

  and touching her obscenely upon her

  desire and causing her to laugh

  and

  LAUGH

  with the utter

  ridiculousness

  of it …

  —but no one denied her a moment of it, neither the conked-out bug-eyed paranoia nor the manic keening coming on, nobody denied her, and she could wail, nobody tried to cool that inflamed brain that was now seeping out Stark Naked into the bouncing goddamn—stop it!—currents of the bus throgging and roaring 70 miles an hour into Texas, for it was like it had been ordained, by Kesey himself, back in San Juan Capistrano, like there was to be a reaction scale in here, from negative to positive, and no one was to rise up negative about anything, one was to go positive with everything—go with the flow—everyone’s cool was to be tested, and to shout No, no matter what happened, was to fail. And hadn’t Kesey passed the test first of all? Hadn’t Babbs taken Gretchen Fetchin, and did he come back at either one of them uptight over that? And wasn’t it Walker who was calling La Honda from the Servicenters of America? All true, and go with the flow. And they went with the flow, the whole goddamn flow of America. The bus barrels into the superhighway toll stations and the microphones on top of the bus pick up all the clacking and ringing and the mumbling by the toll-station attendant and the brakes squeaking and the gears shifting, all the sounds of the true America that are screened out everywhere else, it all came amplified back inside the bus, while Hagen’s camera picked up the faces, the faces in Phoenix, the cops, the service-station owners, the stragglers and the strugglers of America, all laboring in their movie, and it was all captured and kept, piling up, inside the bus. Barreling across America with the microphones picking it all up, the whole roar, and microphone up top gets eerie in a great rush and then skakkkkkkkkkkkkkk it is ripping and roaring over asphalt and thok it’s gone, no sound at all. The microphone has somehow ripped loose on top of the bus and hit the roadway and dragged along until it snapped off entirely—and Sandy can’t believe it. He keeps waiting for somebody to tell Cassady to stop and go back and get the microphone, because this was something Sandy had rigged up with great love and time, it was his thing, his part of the power—but instead they are all rapping and grokking over the sound it made—“Wowwwwwwwww! Did you—wowwwwwww” —as if they had synched into a never-before-heard thing, a unique thing, the sound of an object, a microphone, hitting the American asphalt, the open road at 70 miles an hour, like if it was all there on tape they would have the instant, the moment, of anything, anyone ripped out of the flow and hitting the Great Superhighway at 70 miles an hour—and they had it on tape—and played it back in variable lag skakkkkkk-akkk-akkkk-akkkoooooooooooo.

  oooooooo
oooooooooooooooo—Stark Naked waxing weirder and weirder, huddled in the black blanket shivering, then out, bobbing wraith, her little deep red areolae bobbing in the crazed vibrations— finally they pull into Houston and head for Larry McMurtry’s house. They pull up to McMurtry’s house, in the suburbs, and the door of the house opens and out comes McMurtry, a slight, slightly wan, kindly-looking shy-looking guy, ambling out, with his little boy, his son, and Cassady opens the door of the bus so everybody can get off, and suddenly Stark Naked shrieks out: “Frankie! Frankie! Frankie! Frankie!” —this being the name of her own divorced-off little boy—and she whips off the blanket and leaps off the bus and out into the suburbs of Houston, Texas, stark naked, and rushes up to McMurtry’s little boy and scoops him up and presses him to her skinny breast, crying and shrieking, “Frankie! oh Frankie! my little Frankie! oh! oh! oh!”—while McMurtry doesn’t know what in the name of hell to do, reaching tentatively toward her stark-naked shoulder and saying, “Ma’am! Ma’am! Just a minute, ma’am”—

  —while the Pranksters, spilling out of the bus—stop. The bus is stopped. No roar, no crazed bounce or vibrations, no crazed car beams, no tapes, no microphones. Only Stark Naked, with somebody else’s little boy in her arms, is bouncing and vibrating.

  And there, amid the peaceful Houston elms on Quenby Road, it dawned on them all that this woman—which one of us even knows her?—had completed her trip. She had gone with the flow. She had gone stark raving mad.

  Stark Naked; Stark Naked; silence; but, well … That this or a couple of other crackups in the experience of the Pranksters had anything to do with that goofy baboon, Dope, was something that didn’t cross the minds of the Pranksters at that point. Craziness was not an absolute. They had all voluntarily embarked upon a trip and a state of consciousness that was “crazy” by ordinary standards. The trip, in fact the whole deal, was a risk-all balls-out plunge into the unknown, and it was assumed merely that more and more of what was already inside a person would come out and expand, gloriously or otherwise. Stark Naked had done her thing. She roared off into the void and was picked up by the cops by and by, and the doors closed in the County psychiatric ward, and that was that, for the Pranksters were long gone.

  The trip had started out as a great bursting forth out of the forest fastness of La Honda, out into an unsuspecting America. And for Sandy, anyway, that was when the trip went best, when the Pranksters were out among them, and the citizens of the land were gawking and struggling to summon up the proper emotion for this—what in the name of God are the ninnies doing. But the opposite was happening, too. On those long stretches of American superhighway between performances the bus was like a pressure cooker, a crucible, like one of those chambers in which the early atomic scientists used to compress heavy water, drive the molecules closer and closer together until the very atoms exploded. On the bus all traces of freakiness or competition or bitterness or whatever were intensified. They were right out front, for sure.

  Jane Burton, who was now known as Generally Famished, and Sandy—Dis-mount—took to going off whenever they could, like in Houston, for a square meal. Square on every level, Tonto. They would just go right into one of those Square American steak houses with the big plate-glass window with the corny little plastic windmill in the window advertising Heineken’s Beer and the Diners Club and American Express stickers on the plate-glass door and go in and have a square steak and square French fries and boiled bland peas and carrots and A-I sauce. Jane, now ravaged from lack of sleep, and ravenously hungry, generally famished, or slightly bilious the whole time, wondering what the hell they were now doing on the southern rim of the United States when New York was way up there. Sandy—with this subliminal urge to get off the bus, and yet be on the bus—on that level—and neither of them knowing what to make of Kesey—always Kesey …

  And the heat. From Houston they headed east through the Deep South, and the Deep South in July was … lava. The air rushing into the open windows of the bus came in hot and gritty like invisible smoke, and when they stopped, it just rolled over them, pure lava. The rest in Houston didn’t do too much good, because the heat just started it all again, nobody slept, and it was like all you could do to cut through the lava with speed and grass and acid.

  New Orleans was a relief, because they got out and walked around the French Quarter and down by the docks in their red and white striped shirts and Day-Glo stuff and the people freaked over them. And the cops came while they were down by the docks, which was just comic relief, because by now the cops were a piece of cake. The city cops were no more able to keep their Cop Movie going than the country cops. Hassler talked sweet to them like the college valedictorian and Kesey talked sweet and down-home and Hagen filmed it all like this was some crazed adventure in cinema verité and the cops skedaddled in a herd of new Ford cruisers with revolving turret lights. Sayonara, you all.

  They just kept walking around New Orleans in their striped shirts and wearing shorts, and they could all see Kesey’s big muscular legs, like a football player’s, striding on up ahead like he owned the place, like they all owned the place, and everybody’s spirits picked up. So they head out to Lake Pontchartrain, on the northern edge of New Orleans. They all took acid, but a small dose, about 75 micrograms—everybody happy and high on acid, and rock ‘n’ roll records blaring, Martha and the Vandellas and Shirley Ellis, all that old stuff pounding away. Lake Pontchartrain is like a great big beautiful spacious—space! —park on the water. They pull the bus up in a parking area and there are nice trees round and all that endless nice water and they put on their bathing suits. Walker, who has a hell of a build, puts on a pair of red, yellow, and black trunks, and Kesey, who has a hell of a build, puts on a pair of blue and white trunks, and Zonker, who has a hell of a build, only leaner, puts on a pair of orange trunks, and the blue of the water and the scorched-out green of the grass and the leaves and—a little breeze?—it is all swimming in front of their old acid eyes like a molten postcard—water! What they don’t know is, it is a segregated beach, for Negroes only. The spades all sitting there on benches sit there staring at these white crazies coming out of a weird bus and heading for New Orleans 30th-parallel Deep South segregated water. Zonker is really zonked this time, and burning up with the heat, about 100 degrees, and he dives in and swims out a ways and pretty soon he sees he is surrounded by deep orange men, Negroes, all treading water around him and giving him rotten looks. One of them has a gold tooth in the front with a star cut out in it, so that a white enamel star shows in the middle of the gold, and the gold starts flashing out at him in the sun—cheeeakkk—in time with his heartbeat which is getting faster all the time, these goddamn flashes of gold and white star after-images, and the Golden Mouth says, “Man, there sure is a lotta trash in the water today.” “You ain’t shittin’, man,” says another one of them.

  “Lotta fuckin’ trash, man,” says another one, and so on.

  Suddenly Golden Mouth is speaking straight to Zonker: “What’s all this trash doing in the water, man?”

  Zonker is very nonplused, partly because the whole day has turned orange on him, because of the acid—orange trunks, orange water, orange sky, orange menacing spades.

  “Boy, what you doing here!” Golden Mouth says very sharp all of a sudden. Orange and big and orange hulking fat back big as an orange mantra ray. “Boy, you know what we gonna do? We gonna cut yo’ little balls off. We gonna take you up on that beach and wail with you!”

  “Heh-hehhhhhhhhhhhh!” The others start this wailing moaning laugh.

  For some reason, however, this makes Zonker smile. He can feel it spreading across his face, like a big orange slice of orange sugar-jelly candy and he is suspended there treading water and grinning while the Golden Mouth flashes and flashes and flashes.

  Then the Golden Mouth says, “Well, it sure is some kinda trash,” and starts laughing, only amiably this time, and they all laugh, and Zonker laughs and swims back to shore.

  By this time a big cr
owd of Negroes has gathered around the mad bus. Funky music is blasting off the speakers, a Jimmy Smith record. Zonker gets on the bus. It seems like thousands of Negroes are dancing around the bus, doing rock dances and the dirty boogie. Everything is orange and then he looks at the writhing mass of Negroes, out every window, nothing but writhing Negroes mashed in around the bus and writhing, and it all starts turning from orange to brown. Zonker starts getting the feeling he is inside an enormous intestine and it is going into peristaltic contractions. He can feel the whole trip turning into a horrible bummer. Even Kesey, who isn’t afraid of anything, looks worried. “We better get out of here,” Kesey says. But squeezed out? —in bummer brown peristaltic contractions? Luckily for Zonker, maybe for everyone, the white cops turn up at that point and break up the crowd and tell the white crazies to drive on, this is a segregated beach, and for once they don’t pile out and try to break up the Cop Movie. They go with the Cop Movie and get their movie out of there.