KESEY WOULD LIE OUTSIDE THE CASA GRANDE IN A HAMMOCK. Black Maria, in tight black slacks, would keep brooding, staring out to sea with her back to them, which annoyed everyone. They would occasionally snigger slightly, which made her more up tight, of course. Julius and Mike Hagen both had their casts painted most lurid and glorious Day-Glo in bus designs. Kesey lay in the hammock reading Nietzsche :::: who would have thought the old whiskered Valkyrie was such a head, into the pudding …
And little cycles within cycles. Hagen kept repeating traumatic injuries. In Barcelona he had a motorcycle accident and kept riding and ended up with a permanently injured shoulder. In Canada the same thing all over again. And now in Mexico with his broken leg in a Day-Glo cast he felt something … grisly … under there, and spied a tick, and cut open the cast and found two more and pus oozing under the cast. He closed the whole thing up by wrapping adhesive around the cast.
“Why’d you put that tape over your pretty cast, Mike?”
“Looking for ticks.”
Couple of days later he couldn’t even walk as far as the Rat Shack. Nothing to do but deliver himself up to the Rat ministry of the Hospital Civil.
“Give me some speed, Julius, so I can deal with the bastards.”
Kesey tries to cheer him up by telling him he can film the forthcoming wedding between Mountain Girl and George Walker.
“Hey!” says Hagen. “Maybe we can get the guy, the mayor jefe, to do the ceremony out here.”
Hagen begins to jack-leg around on the cast, snapping his fingers. The dexedrine is beginning to stir and tickle at the boy inside the cast.
“Fuck that,” says Mountain Girl.
“And a lot of flowers!”
“Fuck that.”
Mountain Girl looks like a great gorgeous Amazon—and very down-in-the-mouth, with her lurid Acid Test yellow hair hanging down to her waist but a little circle of black on top, like a cap where it is coming in natural at the roots. Like Mike, she’ll put off the mundane bullshit she loathes just so long as possible. We’ve known for three weeks that she’d love to be legally married, for her child to have legal Mexican rights and she’s known for nine months when that marriage deadline would have to be met.
George, Faye and Zonk come back from the market with food, George wearing Zonker’s blue velour pants, a shirt with broad orange and white vertical stripes, by Gretchen Fetchin, and knee-high boots he has painted in diagonal orange and white stripes, and his hair with orange tips from the Acid Test lurid bleach. All is arranged at city hall for the marriage, Miss Carolyn Adams and Mr. George Walker, and at the Hospital Civil for the baby.
“—and we’ll buy a cot of white—”
“Fuck that.”
“—and we’ll film it on the beach at sunset with microphones. Babbs can run a cable out and a speaker—and music—we can have Gretch on the organ with The Wedding March!”
“Fuck that,” says Mountain Girl.
SO MOUNTAIN GIRL AND GEORGE WERE MARRIED, QUIETLY, IN town. And Mountain Girl had the baby in the Hospital Civil, a healthy blond girl, whom she named Sunshine. At sea level …
Kesey in la casa grande—there’s always a taffy triangle being pulled at the house, what with four private rooms laced with endless variations on the Faye—me—George—Mountain Girl theme.
Mountain Girl is grimming on: “Look at this wall. It’s awful. No, I’m serious, look at it. I could scrabble through this wall in five minutes.”
“Whyn’t you go roll us a joint?”
“Can we smoke it in my room so I don’t have to keep jumping every time Faye bangs the door?”
“Hmmmm …”
“Never mind. That’s a tricky question. Besides it keeps me on my toes in here.”
SPIRITS PICKING UP SLIGHTLY IN THE RED TIDE TORPOR. Pranksters beginning to do small Prankster things. Hagen back from the Hospital Civil hobbling but hassling with the old sweet Vesper boy charm. No stereo rigs, projectors, video tapes to be hassled hereabouts on Devil’s Island, but he finds the biggest rig there is and hassles some poor local out of it—a turtle. A huge sea turtle, weighs about 50 pounds. Much jubilation over the monster, but nobody knows what to do with it, not even Faye, the pioneer wife and master cook, dietician, technician and mechanic. No caldron they are ever likely to get can deal with it. So they put a huge skull and crossbones in Day-Glo on its shell and put it back in the sea, thinking happily of another 200 years of life they have assured it. Nobody in Zecotopetl death-god Mexico will seek this one for his stewpot …
Babbs, after many days of glumming in his Purina Chow redoubt, strolls over, lewding out, “Hi, Je-e-e-ed!” to Kesey’s three-year-old son. Only Babbs in his Be-elzebabbs best could greet a three-year-old with such lewd lubricious loonacy.
Page Browning has pulled in, ready to go, enchanted with Huaraches and the Rat thing. Huaraches on every foot in Mexico! Zea-lot himself could not have devised a more devilish troublesome contrivance.
“They keep ‘em strung out on huaraches! You can’t run in ’em, you can’t walk in ‘em, they never fit, they hurt your feet. All you can do is sit tight. That’s how they keep this country straight. They keep ’em strung out on this bummer!” and so on.
Suddenly—Sandy Lehmann-Haupt turns up, back from way over the edge, on a motorcycle. He drove all the way from New York City on this motorcycle, halfway across the U.S.A. and all the way through the Rat lands to this southwesternmost edge of Mexico, no mean stint even for a Neal Cassady. Kesey looks at him and can’t believe it. He looks stronger, healthier, calmer, more confident than he has ever seen him. It gives him a foreboding that he can’t put a name on …
Even Bob Stone sails in, Bob Stone from way back from old Perry Lane days. He pulls in in a Hertz car. He flew into Mexico City, got a Hertz car. He has an assignment from Esquire to do a story on Kesey in Exile. Ah; so the old world still waits. Stone, still hypersensitive, seeing the FBI and Federales behind every cocoa palm—or else scorpions—and in that very moment, however, plunging head first, as always, into whatever chaos debacle any Prankster cares to dream up, crying lissen this is dangerous as he swandives off every handy cliff.
Hooking down dexedrine. Stone and Babbs go off in Stone’s car, high on pills, heading up Tepic way, in Rat country. Come back giggling and carrying on over weird experience with the Road Animal. They had driven through the dung dust, days without sleep and soaring on dex, scrub country and burros, and night fell and it got really weird. Stone sees little Mex bridges and they become gila monsters, and Babbs sees them, too. The road becomes the veriest little tightrope between the no-man’s land of the monsters, and then all at once the monsters take command of the road!—up ahead, the biggest road monster any man has ever seen, so huge it straddles the road, like a tarantula with legs 10 feet high, on the edges of the road, and its huge filthy body and jaws over the middle waiting for food and their car is bearing down toward it, don’t dare stop and don’t dare go on—
“No! Don’t go near it!” shouts Stone.
“No,” says Babbs, “we’ve got to. We’ve got to go through it.”
“Through it!!”
“We’ve got to,” says Babbs. “If we don’t, we’ll never make any progress.”
Suddenly it seems the most crucial thing in the history of the world that they make progress.
“I know! But it’s too—”
“Got to go through it!” says Babbs. They steel for the debacle, Armageddon, the end of all—
—and sail through it!—
—it’s a focking great road-building machine of some sort, tooling down the highway at Mex huarache speed, the mestizos up top look down bewildered at this car that just shot under them at 60 or 70 …
Stone and Kesey tooling up toward Sonora, nice and high on speed. Stone thinks he’s behind tinted glass in a cab, although he is doing the driving. So like a taxi! They pick up a kid, an American, hitchhiking back to California. They can take him as far as Sonora. We’re going to California, says Ston
e, and they gun off.
“Californee!” says Kesey, in the stupidest country way possible.
“Yeah,” says Stone. “I’m driving this fella here”—Kesey—“up to California to see the sun come up. He’s never seen the sun come up.”
“Awww,” says Kesey, “yer pullin my leg. Ain’t no sun come up.”
“I wouldn’t put you on,” says Stone. “The sun comes up and you’re going to see it.” Passing strange somehow to be riding in a taxi cab through the Mexican nowhere with Kesey, behind a tinted glass.
“Awwwww,” says Kesey. The kid, meanwhile, is deathly quiet.
“I’m not lying!” says Stone. “Look up there. There it is, the sun!”
“Uhhh, uhhhh, God, you was right, there it is, the sun! Why … it fi-i-i-i-lls the sky! It li-i-i-i-i-ights up the valley! It shii-i-i-ines upon the ocean!”
After a few miles the kid speaks up in a casual way, best he can, “Say, fellows, I think I’ll get out in Tepic instead of Sonora. I just remembered, I got to see somebody there.”
So he gets out.
Never trust a Prankster!
And Cassady—Cassady barreling onto the Rat strand in yet another Cassady vehicle, revved up revved up revved up at the eternal Cassady speed, with a new typical Cassady Excalibur. He has a four-pound sledge hammer with the handle wrapped in Day-Glo tape, which he throws about from noon to doom like an Indian club, flipping it up in the air and catching it, flipping it up in double spins, triples, quadruples, true spins, eccentric spins, sprocketing his shoulders his elbows his knees his feet about in the jerky beat. The Prank and the Schism are apparently long forgotten. If there’s any soul can break up this focking red tide and clear the mucus air sailing speedily on all channels, it is Cassady. So they smoke some grass and climb up on top of la casa grande and sit up there while Cassady circuses and sprockets with his sledge hammer off on his speedy trip just the barest 1/30th second from Now at dusk. Cassady does his wild American sledge hammer ballet by the side of a pool of backwater. and they can see Cassady’s reflection in the pool and their own reflection looking down at Cassady, but looking up in the pool in perfect asymmetric playback, winking Day-Glo and dusk, invoking apparitions from the past, a moon door, for the world in the immense act of contemplating itself, Domnu, sattva and rajas all at once, fons et origo, instant Movie—Now
Wet-handle Harry!
And the Halusion Gulp begins to shake its wings again like leather paddle flaps on the wheel o’ fortune carnival game, a Rat bird, but it knows the one hole in the sky. Kesey in la casa grande with the wind up and the sky cloudy, and the Gulp flapping, and the Rat plaster paneled with pages from out of Marvel comics, whole scenes of Dr. Strange, Sub Mariner, the Incredible Hulk, the Fantastic Four, the Human Torch—Superheroes, in short. All heads believe them to be drawn by meth freaks, because of the minute phosphorescent dedication of their hands. Superheroes! Übermenschen! It was passing strange that Nietzsche, that curious little Peter Lorre misanthrope with whiskers and a sour black Tübingen professorial frock coat on, should be into the essence of the thing—
—and Kesey can hear Bob Stone telling him, “Nietzsche is up in Heaven now, Ken, saying ‘I dig what you’re doing—but don’t read my books’”—
—yet the old Valkyrie was into the thing. The world not a line of cause and effect heading forward forever, but finite and ever-repeating, so that all that ever was and ever will be is caught up in now, in endless Recurrence, only waiting for the Superheroes to resurface; after which, a total revaluation. And combining Nietzsche’s inspiration with his own of at-present-best—of man forever watching his own movie and never being able to get to the paradise beyond the screen: as Nietzsche glimmered, life is a circle and so it is the going, not the getting there, that counts. Live in the moment. Lots of good heads said it. I tried. I devoted much time and much energy. To find that those good heads had been tricked—that simple trick of I was right about living in the moment but we can never get in the moment! Orggggggg!
Yet, as Pranksters and many close and near believe, he knows he has somehow caught sight of the great flapping beast and is somewhere beyond this side of the screen and into the true old full bare essence of the thing—he is onto what is popularly thought of as enlightenment … thinking back:
Nighttime and he had gone out to the water, high on grass, and sat down and the light from the electric signs—Coca-Cola? —in the town came across the bay, and every line of light came off straight, the primitive line, Stone Age, the line of grass
CUT TO
nighttime, same spot, high on acid, and the lines come off not straight but in perfect half circles, the acid line, the line of the present, the perfect circle, like the spiders they injected with acid, and they wove perfect little round webs
CUT TO
nighttime, same spot, high on opium, only time he ever took hard dope, and the lines came off starting into circles and instead finished with a little hook, like the little hook in the water of a Japanese print, like the little hook even in the lines of that strange comic strip, The Spirit, and this was the line of the future, completing the circle without having to go all the way every time, getting there by knowing the beginning of the trip
CUT TO
Nighttime and an electrical storm in the Mexican heat flashes, high on acid, the lightning breaking out—there!—there!—and the electricity flows through him and out of him, a second skin, a suit of electricity, and if the time was ever now it is—Now!—and he hurls his hand toward the sky to make the lightning break out where he points—Now!—we’ve got to close it, the gap between the flash and the eye, and make it, the reentry into Now … as Superheroes … open … until he falls to the beach and Mountain Girl finds him holding his throat and choking as if he is gagging on sand …
Beyond acid. They have made the trip now, closed the circle, all of them, and they either emerge as Superheroes, closing the door behind them and soaring through the hole in the sapling sky, or just lollygag in the loop-the-loop of the lag. Almost clear! Presque vu!—many good heads have seen it—Paul telling the early Christians: hooking down wine for the Holy Spirit—sooner or later the Blood has got to flood into you for good—Zoroaster telling his followers: you can’t keep taking haoma water to see the flames of Vohu Mano—you’ve got to become the flames, man—And Dr. Strange and Sub Mariner and the Incredible Hulk and the Fantastic Four and the Human Torch prank about on the Rat walls of la casa grande like stroboscopic sledgehammer Cassadys, fons et origo ::::: and it is either make this thing permanent inside of you or forever just climb draggled up into the conning tower every time for one short glimpse of the horizon :::::
chapter XXIV
The Mexican Bust
HAGEN, MEANWHILE, WAS MORE AND MORE … HAGEN. The irresistible charmer … and it seems some beautiful deb from California had insisted on following him to Mexico. Dear Dad. Don’t worry about me. I am in Mexico with some beautiful people … Her father sensed beatnik and dope right away, of course, and pulled all manner of strings to find out where she was and get her back. At least the Pranksters figured later that was what explained the mysterious debacle that came next, on the road to Guadalajara.
Hagen, Kesey and Ram Rod were driving up toward Guadalajara in a panel truck one night when they came upon a roadblock manned by Mexican Federales. What to do? Turn around? bust through? fake it? At the time, everything had been so cool with the local legals, they were feeling strong and confident, and so Kesey decided to stop and just do the old thing of draw them into the movie. God knows the Pranksters had coped with many cops before.
But—of course, they couldn’t speak Mexican, so they couldn’t even get the Movie going with these Federales. The Federales grabbed all three of them and searched the truck immediately for grass, which they found, and that wrapped that up. Out in the rain and the dark in the Rat lands. The Mexicans don’t hassle people over grass as much as the American cops, but they have the same kind of laws, and they are not delight
ed to have American heads guests of their country, and Kesey was “hot,” as they say. A certified debacle, in a word.
This Route 15 ran along the railroad tracks that come up from the Guatemalan border. Between the road and the tracks were the spiky dark clumps of a lot of high foliage, scrub and shit, thorns, razor leaves. Kesey smiles sadly and goes through a big well-you-got us, fellas, fair-and-square pantomine, that’s the way it goes. The Federales take his turista card, which is a fake. Yup-you-win-fellas, and say, Lemme just go over in them bushes a second before you haul us off. Fella has to take a leak; all men equal, gringos and Mex and whatever, when the piss call comes, right-fellas? So the Federales say O.K. and Kesey goes off in the scrub—