by Tom Wolfe
That was it! How can you give a traffic ticket to a bunch of people rolling in the brown grass wearing Day-Glo masks, practically Greek masques, only with Rat phosphorescent élan, giggling, keening in their costumes and private world while the god Speed sizzles like a short-order French fry in the gut of some guy who doesn’t even stop talking to breathe. A traffic ticket? The Pranksters felt more immune than ever. There was no more reason for them to remain in isolation while the ovoid eyes of La Honda suppurated. They could go through the face of America muddling people’s minds, but it’s a momentary high, and the bus would be gone, and all the Fab foam in their heads would settle back down into their brain pans.
So the Hieronymus Bosch bus headed out of Kesey’s place with the destination sign in front reading “Furthur” and a sign in the back saying “Caution: Weird Load.” It was weird, all right, but it was euphoria on board, barreling through all that warm California sun in July, on the road, and everything they had been working on at Kesey’s was on board and heading on Furthur. Besides, the joints were going around, and it was nice and high out here on the road in America. As they headed out, Cassady was at the wheel, and there was Kesey, Babbs, Page Browning, George Walker, Sandy, Jane Burton, Mike Hagen, Hassler, Kesey’s brother Chuck and his cousin Dale, a guy known as Brother John, and three newcomers who were just along for the ride or just wanted to go to New York.
One of them was a young, quite handsome kid—looked sort of like the early, thin Michael Caine in Zulu—named Steve Lambrecht. He was the brother-in-law of Kesey’s lawyer, Paul Robertson, and he was just riding to New York to see a girl he knew named Kathy. Another was a girl named Paula Sundsten. She was young, plump, ebullient, and very sexy. Kesey knew her from Oregon. Another one was some girl Hagen of the Screw Shack had picked up in San Francisco, on North Beach. She was the opposite of Paula Sundsten. She was thin, had long dark hair, and would be moody and silent one minute and nervous and carrying on the next. She was good-looking like a TV witch.
By the time they hit San Jose, barely 30 miles down the road, a lot of the atmosphere of the trip was already established. It was nighttime and many souls were high and the bus had broken down. They pulled into a service station and pretty soon one of the help has his nose down in under the hood looking at the engine while Cassady races the motor and the fluorescent stanchion lights around the station hit the bus in weird phosphorescent splashes, the car lights stream by on the highway, Cassady guns the engine some more, and from out of the bus comes a lot of weird wailing, over the speakers or just out the windows. Paula Sundsten has gotten hold of a microphone with the variable-lag setup and has found out she can make weird radio-spook laughing ghoul sounds with it, wailing like a banshee and screaming “How was your stay-ay-ay-ay … in San Ho-zay-ay-ay-ay-ay,” with the variable lag picking up the ay-ay-ay-ays and doubling them, quadrupling them, octupling them. An endless ricocheting echo—and all the while this weird, slightly hysterical laugh and a desperate little plunking mandolin sail through it all, coming from Hagen’s girl friend, who is lying back on a bench inside, plunking a mandolin and laughing—in what way …
Outside, some character, some local, has come over to the bus, but the trouble is, he is not at all impressed with the bus, he just has to do the American Man thing of when somebody’s car is broken down you got to come over and make your diagnosis.
And he is saying to Kesey and Cassady, “You know what I’d say you need? I’d say you need a good mechanic. Now, I’m not a good mechanic, but I—” And naturally he proceeds to give his diagnosis, while Paula wails, making spook-house effects, and the Beauty Witch keens and goons—and—
“—like I say, what you need is a good mechanic, and I’m not a good mechanic, but—”
And—of course!—the Non-people. The whole freaking world was full of people who were bound to tell you they weren’t qualified to do this or that but they were determined to go ahead and do just that thing anyway. Kesey decided he was the Non-navigator. Babbs was the Non-doctor. The bus trip was already becoming an allegory of life.
Before heading east, out across the country, they stopped at Babbs’s place in San Juan Capistrano, down below Los Angeles. Babbs and his wife Anita had a place down there. They pulled the bus into Babbs’s garage and sat around for one final big briefing before taking off to the east.
Kesey starts talking in the old soft Oregon drawl and everybody is quiet.
“Here’s what I hope will happen on this trip,” he says. “What I hope will continue to happen, because it’s already starting to happen. All of us are beginning to do our thing, and we’re going to keep doing it, right out front, and none of us are going to deny what other people are doing.”
“Bullshit,” says Jane Burton.
This brings Kesey up short for a moment, but he just rolls with it.
“That’s Jane,” he says. “And she’s doing her thing. Bullshit. That’s her thing and she’s doing it.
“None of us are going to deny what other people are doing. If saying bullshit is somebody’s thing, then he says bullshit. If somebody is an ass-kicker, then that’s what he’s going to do on this trip, kick asses. He’s going to do it right out front and nobody is going to have anything to get pissed off about. He can just say, ‘I’m sorry I kicked you in the ass, but I’m not sorry I’m an ass-kicker. That’s what I do, I kick people in the ass.’ Everybody is going to be what they are, and whatever they are, there’s not going to be anything to apologize about. What we are, we’re going to wail with on this whole trip.”
Haul ass, and what we are, out across the Southwest, and all of it on film and on tape. Refrigerator, stove, a sink, bunk racks, blankets, acid, speed, grass—with Hagen handling the movie camera and everybody on microphones and the music blaring out over the roar of the bus, rock ’n’ roll, Jimmy Smith. Cassady is revved up like they’ve never seen him before, with his shirt off, a straw version of a cowboy hat on his head, bouncing up and down on the driver’s seat, shifting gears—doubledy-clutch, doubledy-clutch, blamming on the steering wheel and the gearshift box, rapping over the microphone rigged up by his seat like a manic tour guide, describing every car going by,
“—there’s a barber going down the highway cutting his hair at 500 miles an hour, you understand—”
“So remember those expressions, sacrifice, glorious and in vain!” Babbs says.
“Food! Food! Food!” Hagen says.
“Get out the de-glom ointment, sergeant!” says Babbs, rapping at Steve Lambrecht. “The only cure for joint glom, gets the joint off the lip in instant De-Glom—”
—and so on, because Steve always has a joint glommed onto his lip and, in fact, gets higher than any man alive, on any and all things one throws his way, and picks up the name Zonker on this trip—
”—De-Glom for the Zonker!—”
—and then Babbs parodies Cassady—
“—and there’s a Cadillac with Marie Antoinette—”
—and the speakers wail, and the mandolin wails and the weird laugh wails, and the variable lag wails-ails-ails-ails-ails-ails, and somebody—who? —hell, everybody wails.
“—we’re finally beginning to move, after three fucking days!”
On the second day they reached Wikieup, an old Wild West oasis out in the Arizona desert along Route 60. It was all gray-brown desert and sun and this lake, which was like a huge slimy kelpy pond, but the air was fantastic. Sandy felt great. Then Kesey held the second briefing. They were going to take their first acid of the trip here and have their first major movie production. He and Babbs and the gorgeous sexy Paula Sundsten were going to take acid—Wikieup!—and the others were going to record what happened. Hagen and Walker were going to film it, Sandy was going to handle the sound, and Ron Bevirt was going to take photographs.
Sandy feels his first twinge of—what? Like … there is going to be Authorized Acid only. And like … they are going to be separated into performers and workers, stars and backstage. Like … there is a
n inner circle and an outer circle. This was illogical, because Hagen and Walker, certainly, were closer to Kesey than any other Pranksters besides Babbs, and they were “workers,” too, but that was the way he feels. But he doesn’t say anything. Not … out front.
Kesey and Babbs and Paula hook down some acid orange juice from the refrigerator and wait for the vibrations. Paula is in a hell of a great mood. She has never taken LSD before, but she looks fearless and immune and ready for all, and she hooks down a good slug of it. They wait for the vibrations … and here they come.
Babbs has a big cane, a walking stick, and he is waving it around in the air, and the three of them, Babbs, Kesey and Paula, go running and kicking and screaming toward the lake and she dives in—and comes up with her head covered in muck and great kelpy strands of green pond slime—and beaming in a way that practically radiates out over the face of the lake and the desert. She has surfaced euphoric—
“Oooooh! It sparkles!”
—pulling her long strands of slime-slithering hair outward with her hands and grokking and freaking over it—
“Ooooooooh! It sparkles!”
—the beads of water on her slime strands are like diamonds to her, and everybody feels her feeling at once, even Sandy—
“Oooooooooh! It sparkles!”
—surfaced euphoric! euphorically garlanded in long greasy garlands of pond slime, the happiest slime freak in the West—
—and Babbs is euphoric for her—
“Gretchen Fetchin the Slime Queen!” he yells and waves his cane at the sky.
“Ooooooooh! It sparkles!”
“Gretchen Fetchin the Slime Queen!”
“It sparkles!”
“Gretchen Fetchin!”
And it is beautiful. Everybody goes manic and euphoric like a vast contact high, like they have all suddenly taken acid themselves. Kesey is in an athletic romp, tackling the ferns and other slimy greenery in the lake. Babbs and Paula—Gretchen Fetchin!—are yahooing at the sky. Hagen is feverishly filming it all, Sandy has a set of huge cables stretched out to the very edge of the lake, picking up the sound, Ron Bevirt is banging away with his camera. Babbs and Paula—Gretchen Fetchin!—and Kesey keep plunging out into the mucky innards of the lake.
“Come back!” Hagen the cameraman starts yelling. “You’re out of range!”
But Babbs and Paula and Kesey can’t hear him. They are cartwheeling further and further out into the paradise muck—
“It sparkles!”
“Gretchen Fetchin—Queen of the Slime!”
But meanwhile Hagen’s Beauty Witch, in the contagion of the moment, has slipped to the refrigerator and taken some acid, and now she is outside the bus on the desert sand wearing a black snakeskin blouse and a black mantle, with her long black hair coming down over it like a pre-Raphaelite painting and a cosmic grin on her witch-white face, lying down on the desert, striking poses and declaiming in couplets. She’s zonked out of her nut, but it’s all in wild manic Elizabethan couplets:
“Methinks you need a gulp of grass
And so it quickly came to pass
You fell to earth with eely shrieking,
Wooing my heart, freely freaking!”
—and so forth. Well, she wins Hagen’s manic heart right away, and soon he has wandered off from the Lake of the Slime Euphoria and is in a wide-legged stance over her with the camera as she lies declaiming on the desert floor, camera zeroed in on her like she is Maria Montez in a love scene—and now the Beauty Witch is off on her trip for good …
Back on the bus and off for Phoenix in the slime-euphoric certitude that they and the movie—The Movie!—many allegories of life—that they could not miss now. Hagen pressed on with the film, hour after hour in the bouncing innards of the bus. There were moments in the History of Film that broke everybody up. One was when they reached Phoenix. This was during the 1964 election excitement and they were in Barry Goldwater’s home town, so they put a streamer on the bus reading: “A Vote for Barry is a Vote for Fun.” And they put American flags up on the bus and Cassady drove the bus backward down the main drag of Phoenix while Hagen recorded it on film and the flags flew backward in the windstream. The citizens were suitably startled, outraged, delighted, nonplused, and would wheel around and stare or else try to keep their cool by sidling glances like they weren’t going to be impressed by any weird shit—and a few smiled in a frank way as if to say, I am with you—if only I could be with you!
The fact that they were all high on speed or grass, or so many combinations thereof that they couldn’t keep track, made it seem like a great secret life. It was a great secret life. The befuddled citizens could only see the outward manifestations of the incredible stuff going on inside their skulls. They were all now characters in their own movies or the Big Movie. They took on new names and used them.
Steve Lambrecht was Zonker. Cassady was Speed Limit. Kesey was Swashbuckler. Babbs was Intrepid Traveler. Hagen, bouncing along with the big camera, soaring even while the bus roared, was Mal Function. Ron Bevirt had charge of all the equipment, the tools, wires, jacks, and stuff, and became known as Equipment Hassler, and then just Hassler. George Walker was Hardly Visible. And Paula Sundsten became … Gretchen Fetchin the Slime Queen, of course …
A notebook!—for each of the new characters in The Movie, a plain child’s notebook, and each character in this here movie can write in his notebook himself or other people can pick up the notebook and write in it—who knows who wrote what?—and in Gretchen Fetchin’s it says:
Bury them in slime!
She cried, flailing about the garden—
With a sprig of parsley clutched in
her hands—which had always been
clamped in her hands.
This is strange business,
Gets weirder all the time,
She said, wrapping some around
her finger, for we are always
moist in her hand … “Naturally,” she
said, “The roots are deep.”
That was no surprise, but she
was mildly curious to
know what the hell is
THAT
Whereupon he got very
clumsy, giggled confidentially,
and tripped over her shadow,
carrying them both into
an unaccountable adventure.
Barely a week out and already beautiful ebullient sexy Gretchen Fetchin the Slime Queen, Gretch, is synched in. Kesey, the very Swashbuckler himself, makes a play for her, and that should be that, but she looks at—Babbs—who tripped over her shadow?—Hmmmmmmmm? So many shadows and shafts of Southwest sun bouncing in through the windows and all over the floor, over the benches over the bunk uprights bouncing out of the freaking roar of the engine bouncing two sets of Gretch eyes two sets of Babbs eyes, four sets of Gretch eyes four sets of Babbs eyes eight sets of Gretch eyes eight sets of Babbs eyes all grinning vibrating bouncing in among one another carrying them both into an unaccountable adventure, you understand. Kesey sulks a bit—Kesey himself—but the sulk bounces and breaks up into Southwestern sunballs. Drivin’ on dirt in Utah, a ’46 Plymouth with an overhead cam, says Cassady. The refrigerator door squeaks open, gurgle gurgle, this acid O.J. makes a body plumb smack his lips, Hagen and his Black Witch girl friend hook down a cup of acid orange juice apiece and Hagen’s sweet face spirals, turning sweet Christian boy clockwise and sweet sly Screw Shack counterclockwise, back and forth, and they disappear, bouncing, up the ladder, up through the turret hole and onto the roof where, under the mightily hulking sun of the Southwest and 70 miles an hour—Pretty soon Hagen is climbing back down the ladder and heading for the refrigerator and hooking down another cup of orange juice and smiling for all, Christian boy and Screw Shack sly, spiraling this way and that way —and climbing back up top the bus in order to—
MAL FUNCTION!
If only I had $10, then we
could split ½ a Ritalin order
with Margo—I eat
Ritalin like aspirin
Now, let’s charm Brooks Brothers—
impressed?
At night the goddamn bus still bouncing and the Southwest silvery blue coming in not exactly bouncing but slipping and sliding in shafts, sickly shit, and car beams and long crazy shadows from car beams sliding in weird bends over the inside, over the love bunk. The love bunk’ll get you if you don’t wash out. One shelf on the bunk has a sleeping bag on it and into this sleeping bag crawl whoever wants to make it, do your thing, bub, and right out front, and wail with it, and Sandy looks over and he can see a human … bobbing up and down in the sleeping bag with the car beams sliding over it and the motor roaring, the fabulous love bunk, and everyone—synch—can see that sleeping bag veritably filling up with sperm, the little devils swimming like mad in there in the muck, oozing into the cheap hairy shit they quilt the bag with, millions billions trillions of them, darting around, crafty little flagellants, looking to score, which is natural, and if any certified virgin on the face of the earth crawled into that sleeping bag for a nap after lunch she would be a hulking knocked-up miracle inside of three minutes—but won’t this goddamn bouncing ever stop—
This being a school bus, and not a Greyhound, the springs and the shock absorbers are terrible and the freaking grinding straining motor shakes it to pieces and hulking vibrations synched in to no creature on earth keep batting everybody around on the benches and the bunks. It is almost impossible to sleep and the days and nights have their own sickly cycle, blinding sun all day and the weird car beams and shadows sliding sick and slow at night and all the time the noise. Jane Burton is nauseous practically the whole time. Nobody can sleep so they keep taking more speed to keep going, psychic energizers like Ritalin, anything, and then smoke more grass to take the goddamn tachycardiac edge off the speed, and acid to make the whole thing turn into something else. Then it all starts swinging back and forth between grueling battering lurching flogging along the highway—and unaccountable delays, stopped, unendurable frustration by the side of the road in the middle of nowhere while the feeling of no-sleep starts turning the body and the skull into a dried-out husk inside with a sour greasy smoke like a tenement fire curdling in the brainpan. They have to pull into gasoline stations to go to the bathroom, cop a urination or an egestion—keep regular, friends—but 12—how many, 14?—did we lose somebody—did we pick up somebody—climbing out of this bus, which is weird-looking for a start, but all these weird people are too much, clambering out—the service station attendant and his Number One Boy stare at this—Negro music is blaring out of the speakers and these weird people clamber out, half of them in costume, lurid shirts with red and white stripes, some of them with weird paint on their faces, like comic-book Indians, with huge circles under their eyes, eyes red, noses not blue, not nearly blue enough, but eyes red—all trooping out toward the Clean Rest Rooms, already queuing up, practically—