The Purple Decades

by Tom Wolfe

  On into the flatlands of Mississippi and Alabama, Biloxi, Mobile, U.S. Route 90, the flatlands and the fields and the heat doesn’t let up ever. They are heading for Florida. Sandy hasn’t slept in days : : : : :how many:::::like total insomnia and everything is bending in curvy curdling lines. Sun and flatlands. So damned hot—and everything is getting torn into opposites. The dead-still heat-stroked summertime deep Southland—and Sandy’s heart racing at a constant tachycardia and his brain racing and reeling out and so essential to … keep moving, Cassady! … but there are two Cassadys. One minute Cassady looks 58 and crazy—speed!—and the next, 28 and peaceful—acid—and Sandy can tell the peaceful Cassady in an instant, because his nose becomes … long and smooth and almost patrician, whereas the wild Cassady looks beat-up. And Kesey—always Kesey! Sandy looks … and Kesey is old and haggard and his face is lopsided … and then Sandy looks and Kesey is young, serene, and his face is lineless, and round and smooth as a baby’s as he sits for hours on end reading comic books, absorbed in the plunging purple Steve Ditko shadows of Dr. Strange attired in capes and chiaroscuro, saying: “How could they have known that this gem was merely a device to bridge DIMENSIONS! It was a means to enter the dread PURPLE DIMENSION—from our own world!” Sandy may wander … off the bus, but it remains all Kesey. Dr. Strange! Always seeing two Keseys. Kesey the Prankster and Kesey the organizer. Going through the steams of southern Alabama in late June and Kesey rises up from out of the comic books and becomes Captain Flag. He puts on a pink kilt, like a miniskirt, and pink socks and patent-leather shoes and pink sunglasses and wraps an American flag around his head like a big turban and holds it in place with an arrow through the back of it and gets up on top of the bus roaring through Alabama and starts playing the flute at people passing by. The Alabamans drawn into the PINK DIMENSION do a double-freak take for sure and it is Too Much! as George Walker always says, too mullyfogging much. They pull into a gas station in Mobile and half the Pranksters jump out of the bus, blazing red and white stripes and throwing red rubber balls around in a crazed way like a manic ballet of slick Servicenter flutter decoration while the guy fills up the tank, and he looks from them to Captain Flag to the bus itself, and after he collects for the gas he looks through the window at Cassady in the driver’s seat and shakes his head and says:

  “No wonder you’re so nigger-heavy in California.”

  FORNIA-FORNIA-FORNIA-FORNIA-FORNIA-FORNIA-FORNIA-FORNIA as it is picked up inside the bus in variable lag, and that breaks everybody up.

  That was when it was good … grinding on through Alabama, and then suddenly, to Sandy, Kesey is old and haggard and the organizer. Sandy can see him descending the ladder down from the roof of the bus and glowering at him, and he knows—intersubjectivity!—that Kesey is thinking, You’re too detached, Sandy, you’re not out front, you may be sitting right here grinding and roaring through Alabama but you’re … off the bus … And he approaches Sandy, hunched over under the low ceiling of the bus, and to Sandy he looks like an ape with his mighty arms dangling, like The Incredible Hulk, and suddenly Sandy jumps up and crouches into an ape position, dangling his arms and mimicking him—and Kesey breaks into a big grin and throws his arms around Sandy and hugs him—

  He approves! Kesey approves of me! At last I have responded to something, brought it all out front, even if it is resentment, done something, done my thing—and in that very action, just as he taught, it is gone, the resentment … and I am back on the bus again, synched in …

  Always Kesey ! And in that surge of euphoria—Kesey approves!—Sandy knew that Kesey was the key to whatever was going right and whatever was going wrong on this trip, and nobody, not one of them who ever took this trip, got in this movie, would ever have even the will to walk up to Kesey and announce irrevocably: I am off the bus. It would be like saying, I am off this … Unspoken Thing we are into …

  Pensacola, Florida. 110 degrees. A friend of Babbs has a little house near the ocean, and they pull in there, but the ocean doesn’t help at all. The heat makes waves in the air, like over a radiator. Most of the Pranksters are in the house or out in the yard. Some of the girls are outside the bus barbecuing some meat. Sandy is by himself inside the bus, in the shade. The insomnia is killing him. He has got to get some sleep or keep moving. He can’t stand it in here stranded in between with his heart pounding. He goes to the refrigerator and takes out the orange juice. The acid in New Orleans, the 75 micrograms, wasn’t enough. It’s like he hasn’t had a good high the whole trip, nothing … blissful. So he hooks down a big slug of Unauthorized Acid and sits back.

  He would like something nice and peaceful, closed in softly alone on the bus. He puts on a set of earphones. The left earphone is hooked into a microphone inside the house and picks up Kesey’s Cousin Dale playing the piano. Dale, for all his country ways, has studied music a long time and plays well and the notes come in like liquid drops of amethyst vibrating endlessly in the … acid … atmosphere and it is very nice. The right earphone is hooked into a microphone picking up the sounds outside the house, mainly the barbecue fires crackling. So Dale concerto and fire crackle in these big padded earphones closed in about his head … only the sounds are somehow sliding out of control. There is no synch. It is as if the two are fighting for his head. The barbecue crackles and bubbles in his head and the amethyst droplets crystallize into broken glass, and then tin, a tin piano. The earphones seem to get bigger and bigger, huge padded shells about to enclose his whole head, his face, his nose—amok sound overpowering him, as if it is all going to end right here inside this padded globe —panic—he leaps up from the seat, bolts a few feet with the earphones still clamped on his skull, then rips them off and jumps out of the bus—Pranksters everywhere in the afternoon sun in red and white striped shirts. Babbs has the power and is directing the movie and is trying to shoot something—Acid Piper. Sandy looks about. Nobody he can tell it to, that he has taken acid by himself and it is turning into a bummer, he can’t bring this out front … He runs into the house, the walls keep jumping up so goddamn close and all the angles are under extreme stress, as if they could break. Jane Burton is sitting alone in the house, feeling bilious. Jane is the only person he can tell.

  “Jane,” he says, “I took some acid … and it’s really weird …” But it is such an effort to talk …

  The heat waves are solidifying in the air like the waves in a child’s marble and the perspectives are all berserk, walls rushing up then sinking way back like a Titian banquet hall. And the heat—Sandy has to do something to pull himself together, so he takes a shower. He undresses and gets in the shower and … flute music, Babbs! flute music comes spraying out of the nozzle and the heat is inside of him, it is like he can look down and see it burning there and he looks down, two bare legs, a torso rising up at him and like he is just noticing them for the first time. They exist apart from, like another human being’s, such odd turns and angles they take amid the flute streams, swells and bony processes, like he has never seen any of this before, this flesh, this stranger. He groks over that—only it isn’t a stranger, it is his … mother … and suddenly he is back in this body, only it is his mother’s body—and then his father’s—he has become his mother and his father. No difference between I and Thou inside this shower of flutes on the Florida littoral. He wrenches the water off, and it stops, the flute. He is himself again—hide from the panic—no, gotcha—and he pulls on his clothes and goes back out in the living room. Jane is still sitting there. Talk, christ, to somebody—Jane!—but the room goes into the zooms, wild lurches of perspective, a whole side of the room zooming right up in front of his face, then zooming back to where it was—Jane!—Jane in front of his face, a foot away, then way back over there on the sofa, then zooming up again, all of it rocketing back and forth in the hulking heat—“Sandy!”—somebody is in the house looking for him, Hagen? who is it?—seems Babbs wants him in the movie. Red-and-white striped Pranksters burning in the sun. Seems Babbs has an idea for a section of t
he movie. In this scene Babbs is the Pied Piper, tootling on a flute, and all the red and white striped children are running after him in colorful dances. They hand Sandy a Prankster shirt, which he doesn’t want. It is miles too big. It hangs on him in this sick loose way like he is desiccating in the sun. Into the sun—the shirt starts flashing under his face in the sun in explosive beams of sunball red and sunball silver-white as if he is moving through an aura of violent beams. Babbs gives him his cue and he starts doing a crazy dance out by a clothesline while the camera whirrs away. He can feel the crazy look come over his face and feel his eyeballs turning up and white with just vague flashes of red and silver-white exploding in under his eyelids … and the freaking heat, dancing like a crazy in the sun, and he goes reeling off to one side.

  It becomes very important that nobody know he has taken Unauthorized Acid. He can trust Jane … This is not very out front, but he must remain very cool. Chuck Kesey is marching around the yard blowing a tuba, going boop boop a boop boop very deep and loud, then he comes by Sandy and looks at him and smiles over the mouthpiece and goes bup bup a bup bup, very tender and soft and—intersubjectivity! —he knows and understands—and that is nice because Chuck is one of the nicest people in the world and Sandy can trust him. If only he can remain cool …

  There is a half pound of grass in a tin can by the bus and Sandy gets down on all fours to help and starts digging his playing in the sun, and he somehow kicks over the can and the grass spills all over this silty brown dirt. Everybody is upset and Hagen gets down to try to separate the grass from the dirt, and Sandy gets down on all fours to help and starts digging his fingers into the dirt to try to dig out the grass, only as he starts digging, the dirt gets browner and browner as he digs, and he starts grooving over the brownness of it, so brown, so deep, so rich, until he is digging way past the grass, on down into the ground, and Hagen says,

  “Hey! What the hell’s the matter with you?”

  And Sandy knows he should just come out with it and say, I’m stoned, man, and this brown is a groove, and then it would be all out front and over with. But he can’t bring himself to do it, he can’t bring himself all the way out front. Instead, it gets worse.

  Kesey comes over with a football and a spray can of Day-Glo. He wants Sandy to spray it Day-Glo, and then he and Babbs and some others are going to take it out near the water at dusk and pass the Day-Glo ball around, and Sandy starts spraying it, only it’s all one thing, the ball and Kesey’s arm, and he is spraying Kesey’s arm in the most dedicated, cool way, and Kesey says:

  “Hey! What the hell’s the matter with you—”

  And as soon as he says it, he knows, which is suddenly very bad.

  “I’m … stoned,” says Sandy. “I took some acid, and I … took too much and it’s going very bad.”

  “We wanted to save that acid for the trip back,” Kesey says. “We wanted to have some for the Rockies.”

  “I didn’t take that much”—he’s trying to explain it, but now a Beatles record is playing over the loudspeaker of the bus and it’s raining into his head like needles—“but it’s bad.”

  Kesey looks exasperated, but he tries some condolence. “Look—just stay with it. Listen to the music—”

  “Listen to the music!” Sandy yells. “Christ! Try and stop me!”

  Kesey says very softly: “I know how you feel, Sandy. I’ve been there myself. But you just have to stay with it”—which makes Sandy feel good: he’s with me. But then Kesey says, “But if you think I’m going to be your guide for this trip, you’re sadly mistaken.” And he walks off.

  Sandy starts feeling very paranoid. He walks off, away from the house, and comes upon some sort of greeny glade in the woods. Babbs and Gretchen Fetchin are lying on the ground in the shade, just lazing on it, but Babbs’s legs shift and his arms move and Gretch’s legs shift, and Sandy sees … Babbs and Gretch in a pond, swimming languidly. He knows they are on ground, and yet they are in the water—and he says,

  “How is it?”

  “Wet!” says Babbs.

  —and—marvelous—it is very nice—as if Babbs knows exactly what is in his mind—synch—and is going to swing with it. We are all one brain out here and we are all on the bus, after all. And suddenly there in the Florida glade it is like the best of the whole Prankster thing all over again.

  He came back to the house at dark, into the yard, and there were a million stars in the sky, like tiny neon bulbs, and you could see them between the leaves of the trees, and the trees seemed to be covered with a million tiny neon bulbs, and the bus, it broke up into a sculpture of neon bulbs, millions of them massed together to make a bus, like a whole nighttime of neon dust, with every particle a neon bulb, and they all vibrated like a huge friendly neon cicada universe.

  He goes down to the water where the Pranksters all are, a little inlet, and it is dark and placid and he gets in and wades out until the water laps almost even with his mouth, which makes it very secure and warm and calm and nice and he looks at the stars and then at a bridge in the distance. All he can see of the bridge is the lights on it, swooping strands of lights, rising, rising, rising—and just then Chuck Kesey comes gliding toward him through the water, smiling, like a great friendly fish. Chuck knows and it is very nice—and the lights of the bridge keep rising, rising, until they merge with the stars, until there is a bridge leading right up into heaven.

  A Problem in Etiquette

  In which the guest of honor, the famous architect, asked if he could “bring someone,” and the host and hostess try to decide if they dare seat Someone between Chuck Brassbender of Morgan Guaranty and Harmsden Grousestalker of Sullivan & Cromwell, as originally planned.

  THESE RADICAL CHIC EVENINGS

  k

  At 2 or 3 or 4 a.m., somewhere along in there, on August 25, 1966, his forty-eighth birthday, in fact, Leonard Bernstein woke up in the dark in a state of wild alarm. That had happened before. It was one of the forms his insomnia took. So he did the usual. He got up and walked around a bit. He felt groggy. Suddenly he had a vision, an inspiration. He could see himself, Leonard Bernstein, the egregio maestro, walking out on stage in white tie and tails in front of a full orchestra. On one side of the conductor’s podium is a piano. On the other is a chair with a guitar leaning against it. He sits in the chair and picks up the guitar. A guitar! One of those halfwitted instruments, like the accordion, that are made for the Learn-To-Play-in-Eight-Days E-Z-Diagram 110-IQ fourteen-year-olds of Levittown! But there’s a reason. He has an anti-war message to deliver to this great starched white-throated audience in the symphony hall. He announces to them: “I love.” Just that. The effect is mortifying. All at once a Negro rises up from out of the curve of the grand piano and starts saying things like, “The audience is curiously embarrassed.” Lenny tries to start again, plays some quick numbers on the piano, says, “I love. Amo ergo sum.” The Negro rises again and says, “The audience thinks he ought to get up and walk out. The audience thinks, ‘I am ashamed even to nudge my neighbor.’” Finally, Lenny gets off a heartfelt anti-war speech and exits.

  For a moment, sitting there alone in his home in the small hours of the morning, Lenny thought it might just work and he jotted the idea down. Think of the headlines: BERNSTEIN ELECTRIFIES CONCERT AUDIENCE WITH ANTI-WAR APPEAL. But then his enthusiasm collapsed. He lost heart. Who the hell was this Negro rising up from the piano and informing the world what an ass Leonard Bernstein was making of himself? It didn’t make sense, this superego Negro by the concert grand.

  Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. These are nice. Little Roquefort cheese morsels rolled in crushed nuts. Very tasty. Very subtle. It’s the way the dry sackiness of the nuts tiptoes up against the dour savor of the cheese that is so nice, so subtle. Wonder what the Black Panthers eat here on the hors d’oeuvre trail? Do the Panthers like little Roquefort cheese morsels rolled in crushed nuts this way, and asparagus tips in mayonnaise dabs, and meatballs petites au Coq Hardi, all of which are at this very moment being off
ered to them on gadrooned silver platters by maids in black uniforms with hand-ironed white aprons … The butler will bring them their drinks … Deny it if you wish to, but such are the pensées métaphysiques that rush through one’s head on these Radical Chic evenings just now in New York. For example, does that huge Black Panther there in the hallway, the one shaking hands with Felicia Bernstein herself, the one with the black leather coat and the dark glasses and the absolutely unbelievable Afro, Fuzzy-Wuzzy-scale, in fact—is he, a Black Panther, going on to pick up a Roquefort cheese morsel rolled in crushed nuts from off the tray, from a maid in uniform, and just pop it down the gullet without so much as missing a beat of Felicia’s perfect Mary Astor voice …

  Felicia is remarkable. She is beautiful, with that rare burnished beauty that lasts through the years. Her hair is pale blond and set just so. She has a voice that is “theatrical,” to use a term from her youth. She greets the Black Panthers with the same bend of the wrist, the same tilt of the head, the same perfect Mary Astor voice with which she greets people like Jason, John and D.D., Adolph, Betty, Gian-Carlo, Schuyler, and Goddard, during those après-concert suppers she and Lenny are so famous for. What evenings! She lights the candles over the dining-room table, and in the Gotham gloaming the little tremulous tips of flame are reflected in the mirrored surface of the table, a bottomless blackness with a thousand stars, and it is that moment that Lenny loves. There seem to be a thousand stars above and a thousand stars below, a room full of stars, a penthouse duplex full of stars, a Manhattan tower full of stars, with marvelous people drifting through the heavens, Jason Robards, John and D. D. Ryan, Gian-Carlo Menotti, Schuyler Chapin, Goddard Lieberson, Mike Nichols, Lillian Hellman, Larry Rivers, Aaron Copland, Richard Avedon, Milton and Amy Greene, Lukas Foss, Jennie Tourel, Samuel Barber, Jerome Robbins, Steve Sondheim, Adolph and Phyllis Green, Betty Comden, and the Patrick O’Neals …