When I mentioned this incident to Steve Allen, he responded, “American reality has become part show biz through and through, whether you’re talking about politics, religion, the military, or whatever. The Jewish scriptures report God frequently doing tricks and schticks to get people’s attention.”
Twenty-two years after Tom Wolfe wrote The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, mythologizing the cross-country trip of Ken Kesey and his Merry Band of Pranksters, they were once again driving the psychedelic bus, Further, from the farm in Oregon to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. There would be various stops along the way. Tim Leary asked me to be sure to call him when the bus arrived in Los Angeles before heading east. Kesey told me that in Philadelphia, a troop of Girl Scouts with a hip scout leader was scheduled to board the bus.
“We’re calling it Cookies and Kool-Aid,” he said.
This was not the first time such a trip was planned. In 1974, a group of second-generation Pranksters were repainting the designs and symbols and inner-vision comic strip characters on Further, because there had been an inquiry from the Smithsonian. Kesey figured that if the outside of the rusting bus could be brightened anew, why, then, the inside would automatically work again and it could be driven all the way to Washington.
In 1984, the bus was still there on the farm. In fact, People magazine was planning to publish a special section on the sixties, and a photo of Further would be on the cover, with Wavy Gravy perched on the hood, Kesey and me sitting on each of the front headlights. Posing for the cover of People, I couldn’t resist holding onto my crotch with one hand. However, they made Michael Jackson the main story instead, and put his carefully chosen picture on the cover with his gloved hand grabbing his crotch. That photo of us on top of the bus was a full page on the inside, identifying me as “father of the underground press.” I immediately demanded a paternity test.
On a Saturday morning in November 1990, I flew to San Francisco so I could join the pilgrimage. I was on assignment from the Examiner. It had always been impossible for me to cover Kesey’s trip without getting personally involved, but this time I also found myself torn between reporting the truth—that this was not the original bus—or snitching on a friend. I had a slight conflict of interest.
Was my responsibility to reveal what I knew or to be loyal to Prankster tradition?The original bus, a 1939 International Harvester, was still resting in peace at Kesey’s farm, a shell of its former shell, metal rusting and paint fading, a psychedelic relic of countercultural history. But the bus I boarded now was a 1947 International Harvester. The Grateful Dead had donated $5,000 for a sound system, which was blaring out Ray Charles’s “Hit the Road, Jack” as we left San Francisco.
This version of Further had been deemed the Most Historical Float in an Oregon Fourth of July parade. It was painted by fifteen individuals starting in April. The result was a magnificent visual feast. A sun god with refraction discs so the eyes followed you. A totem pole and a tiger. Adam and Buddha. Pogo and Silver Surfer. A lizard following Dorothy and her companions down the yellow-brick road—referred to as the Lizard of Oz. A banner on the side of the bus warning never trust a prankster.
A helium tank on the back platform, so Kesey could blow up balloons and give them to kids. One parent offered him a quarter. “I’m an important author,” he explained with mock pride, “you can’t give me a quarter.” So now the parent wasn’t sure whether the balloon was free or she should give Kesey seventy-five cents.
Pedestrians flashed the V sign and the Star Trek signal as the bus continued on its way. Drivers waved and honked their horns. A police car was behind us, and the cop inside it used his megaphone to call out, “Good luck on your journey.” Our hood ornament was a beautiful sculpture of a court jester holding a butterfly net, named Newt the Nutcatcher, with a profile resembling Neal Cassady, legendary driver of the original Further.
On the inside, a picture of Cassady watched over the current driver, Kesey’s nephew, Kit, who refused to wear a taxicab cap. Kesey’s son, Zane, was also on the crew, so the trip had a strong sense of continuity. Altogether there were twelve males plus one female, a twenty-three-year-old Deadhead who got on the bus in Berkeley instead of going to a Halloween party dressed as Pippy Longstocking.
Lee Quarnstrom had quit his job as a reporter to join the original Pranksters, and he was covering this event for the San Jose Mercury-News. Since we were now in San Jose, the bus circled around the parking lot of the Mercury-News. Kesey quickly found a CD of sixties songs and played “Mr. Lee” by the Bobbettes over the sound system. Lee was sitting on the top deck of the bus as the editorial staff stood outside the building, cheering for him while the lyrics rang out: “One, two, three, look at Mr. Lee . . .”
Ed McClanahan had been a classmate of Kesey’s in the Stanford writing class where it all started. He gave up a chance to go on the original journey, regretted it for twenty-six years, and was now covering this trip for Esquire. “If the bus goes past the Esquire building,” he asked Kesey, “are you gonna play the theme from Mr. Ed?”
Later, I happened to overhear Quarnstrom whisper to fellow ex-Prankster Zonker, “Shhh, Paul doesn’t know.” There was some sort of hoax in the air. I was tempted to corner him and say, “Lee, I’ve trusted you till now,” but instead I decided to maintain conscious innocence and just allow events to unfold.
Quarnstrom and Kesey had something awful in common. They had each lost a son. Eric Quarnstrom had been shot in a meaningless street encounter. Jed Kesey was killed in an accident when the van carrying his wrestling team skidded off a cliff. I had just come offstage at the Wallenboyd Theater when my producer, Scott Kelman, said he had to tell me something. I assumed it was about my performance—Scott always gave me complete freedom and helpful feedback—but now he was telling me about Jed’s death. Scott had held back from telling me before the show.
I was shocked. Jed and I had a special relationship. I flew to Oregon. Faye was stalwart, but Ken was shaking with emotion as we embraced. “You were his favorite,” he sobbed. Kesey had always been against seat belts—“They sanction bad driving,” he claimed—but after this tragedy he would campaign for legislation that would require vehicles to have seat belts, the kind that could’ve saved Jed’s life. But now he had only unspeakable grief.
“I feel like every cell in my body is exploding,” he said.
During the reunion bus trip, Quarnstrom and Kesey talked with each other about their mutual tragedy for the first time, in the kitchen at Wavy Gravy’s house.
“I think about Eric every day,” said Quarnstrom.
Kesey said he thought about Jed every day, adding, “And it’s appropriate that we should.”
When his son died, Kesey confided in me, “I’m so sad about losing Jed, it made me realize that when I die, it’s gonna make a lot of people sad.” It turned out to be a true observation. When Kesey died on November 10, 2001, a lot of people were indeed saddened. Some were sad because they had been affected by the books he wrote. As for Cuckoo’s Nest, he told me, “I wasn’t trying to write a novel, I was trying to go all the way.”
Others were sad because they identified with and were inspired by the mission of Further and its inhabitants, the equivalent of wanting to run away with the circus. Still others were charmed by his charismatic zest for life. Family and friends loved him simply for who he was.
And then there was his little granddaughter.
“Now,” she asked plaintively, “who will teach us how to hypnotize the chickens?”
Meanwhile, a color photo of the bus had appeared in Time magazine, and an employee at the Smithsonian immediately recognized it as not being the original Further. Their spokesperson issued a statement: “The current bus is not even close to the original. Even if it were, the Smithsonian is not interested in a replica.” Kesey was aghast. He mused out loud:I don’t think of this bus as a replica. The Smithsonian—they want to clone the other one from the carburetor, which is about all that’s left of it—
the way they wanted to do in that Woody Allen movie, Sleeper, when they only had the nose for that. And they wanted to put on new metal, new chassis, new motor, and hire some artists to paint, you know, they’re going to restore it, and I thought, In what form?
Are they going to go back to when it was bright red and we all drove it into Berkeley on Vietnam Day with swastikas and Stars of David and American flags all over, with guns stickin’ out of the top? Or when we went to New York with Pop Art stuff on it? It’s had dozens of different permutations. If they really want to restore it, they’ll take it back to yellow.
But the thing about the Smithsonian is that I’ve never spoken to them. They’ve been dealing with some rich people up in Portland—they wanted me to give them the bus—they’re going to fix it up and donate it to the Smithsonian. My metaphor for this is that they’ve also been negotiating for Tom Selleck’s dick but they haven’t mentioned it to Tom.
We reporters had a discussion about journalistic ethics, specifically how we planned to handle any possible use of drugs on the bus. What with stomach paunches, gray hair, and bifocals, the drug of choice this time around could well be Metamucil. Kesey would permit neither cigarettes nor diet soda on the bus. In response to a decade of “just say no” propaganda, he advised, “Just say thanks.”
He was disinvited from a Nightline panel on drugs because he was pro-marijuana. He made a distinction between pot, mushrooms, LSD, psilocybin—“the organic, kinder, gentler, hippie drugs”—and cocaine, crack, meth—“drugs that make you greedy and produce criminals.” He called drugs “my church” and confessed that he had taken psychoactives “with lots more reverence and respect than I ever walked into church with.”
On Sunday morning in San Jose I ate a marijuana cookie. It was coming on powerfully just as the bus arrived at the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum. Appropriately, the painting on the back door of our bus was a splendid eye-in-the-Pyramid. Kesey’s video crew had been filming the reporters reading their articles aloud, and he wanted me to read mine from inside a tomb in the museum, the king’s sarcophagus.
“But I haven’t written anything yet,” I protested.
“You have twenty minutes,” Kesey said.
However, the marijuana cookie had an extraordinarily pleasant physical effect, and I was feeling very nonlinear. Instead of writing anything, I just stared at the mummies. There were framed X-rays in their cases to prove that actual human beings were buried with their arms crossed inside all that adhesive tape. Now the Pranksters were ready to bring me into the tomb, but I felt totally unprepared. My mouth was extremely dry, so I ingested another “drug,” a vial of Chinese herbal tonic labeled Deer’s Tail Extract.
Maybe they planned to seal me inside the king’s sarcophagus! Could that be the secret they weren’t telling me before? But with a leap of faith I lowered myself into the hole in one corner of the tomb. Only my face was now visible. Ordinarily I would get in trouble for this, but we were also being filmed by CBS, and the manager of the museum only wanted to know when it would be shown on TV. Kesey gave me the signal to start.
“Well, as Yogi Berra once said, this feels like déjà vu all over again. The last time I was in a sarcophagus was 1978, when we accompanied the Grateful Dead to Egypt, where they played the Pyramids, and won. But that time we walked there from the hotel. This time the bus brought us here, this bus that the Smithsonian doesn’t want because it’s not the original. You know, it’s not really Fonzie’s leather jacket at the Smithsonian—that was actually worn by Penny Marshall.
“And it’s not really Archie Bunker’s easy chair there, either—they just found it on some other set and said it was Archie’s. But this bus has been turning on whoever sees it, like a traveling oasis, transcending age, transcending gender, transcending race, transcending class. The Smithsonian doesn’t deserve this bus. A man from the Peace Center here in San Jose told me, ‘This bus was painted by the spirit of time.’ If God wanted the bus to be in a museum, God wouldn’t have given it an engine.”
When I finished babbling, Kesey directed me to disappear back into the tomb. But first I couldn’t resist saying, “And now I’d like to share with you the secret of eternal life.” Suddenly I began writhing around in agony and grabbed my throat—Aarrgghhh! Yaarrgghhh! Braagghhh!— then fell back into the sarcophagus, as my choking sounds continued until they finally faded out. I vowed to myself, “I surrender to the Unknown.” Then I emerged from the tomb, and Kesey’s fellow Prankster, Ken Babbs, announced, “As we say in Mummy Land, ‘That’s a wrap.’”
I called Holly to tell her that we were at the Rosicrucian Museum and that I had just been in the king’s sarcophagus.
“The king’s esophagus?” she said. “What were you doing in his throat?”
On Monday, we headed north for Stockton, where Kesey was scheduled to speak at the University of the Pacific. And the machinations of the prank began. I was the only one who didn’t know what the plan was. But while Kesey was inside speaking, Zane was drawing a chalk outline on the street around the perimeter of the bus. Inside, Kesey was finishing up his question-and-answer segment.
“Okay,” he finally said, “that’s enough. Now we will sing our national anthem.”
And he led the audience in the Grateful Dead song, “What a Long Strange Trip It’s Been.”
Outside, the crew made sure my bag was off the bus. They were staging a fake mutiny. Inside, Kesey left the stage.
He said to Zonker, “Why don’t you run out there and tell us the bus is missing?”
Zonker replied, “Because I didn’t know it was.”
Lee rushed in and reported, “Kesey, they done left us!”
Kesey shouted, “The bus is gone! The bus is gone!”
Where the bus had been, there was now only that chalk outline and a message in white tape spelling out: nothing lasts! The bus was on its way back to Oregon. Kesey and a couple of others would stay at a hotel in Stockton and take the train back. They had planned from the very start that the bus would not be driven to the Smithsonian.
“I always knew we wouldn’t carry this prank too far,” Kesey said, adding in mock shock, “That’s not the real Elvis!”
I called Tim Leary to inform him that the bus was not coming to Los Angeles after all. Leary had been in Europe, returning with an East German flag which he wanted to donate to the Smithsonian, but he didn’t say whether it was the original flag or just a replica.
Zonker offered to drive me to San Jose, where I could catch a plane back home the next morning. Before I went to get my bag from Kesey’s room, I told Zonker, “I hope I don’t come out of the hotel only to find a chalk outline of the car.” Kesey asked me to call Herb Caen at the Chronicle and tell him that Further had disappeared. I suddenly realized that I was experiencing the Stockton hostage syndrome. A hoax was played and, although I had been a victim of that hoax myself, I was now expected to help perpetuate it.
“Tell him there’s been a mutiny,” Kesey instructed me, “and that you’re an irate Prankster who’s been left behind.”
“What, and ruin my credibility?”
An obituary in the Los Angeles Times began: “Bernie Boston, the photojournalist who captured the iconic image of a young Vietnam War protester placing a flower in the barrel of a rifle held by a member of the Army’s Military Police Battalion, died . . . The photo known as Flower Power became Boston’s signature image and earned him acclaim in the world of photojournalism. Taken during an antiwar march on the Pentagon on Oct. 22, 1967, the photo was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.”
The protester, not identified, was Joel Tornabene. Earlier in this book, I described him as “an unheralded Yippie organizer known as Super-Joel. His grandfather was Mafia boss Sam Giancana.” In 2006, Joel’s sister, Fran, informed me, “Our grandfathers were a Sicilian doctor and a Norwegian Irish carpenter. I can’t imagine how anyone would actually believe that Giancana relationship.”
I contacted her immediately, apologizing “for passing on fal
se information.” I added, “Although I included that story in my autobiography, recently I’ve had the rights reverted back to me, and I plan to have it republished in an updated edition, so I will certainly include a postscript revealing that hoax.” She replied:I think that Joel must have had quite a good time with the “Giancana connection hoax.” I was first made aware of this story after his death in Mexico in 1993. His attorney, Dennis Roberts, came to Chicago to meet with my mother and our family. He seemed to be quite surprised to see a simple middle-class family home in Franklin Park, rather than a River Forest Mafia compound. I wasn’t aware of the extent of this story until Prairie Prince, who I know Joel was close to for years, asked me a few years ago which side of the family was Giancana. Since then, I’ve seen your tale regarding his being moved to the unindicted co-conspirator list due to the “grandfather connection.”
“I’m embarrassed to admit that I believed it,” I confessed, “simply because Joel was extremely convincing when he told me—so I’m a professional prankster who got pranked himself—but I really had no way of double-checking his personalized put-on.”
And I’m not the only one who’s been fooled like that. Another sister, Felicia, located an interview in which Tom Waits was asked who Joel is. Waits replied:He’s in the concrete biz. Mob guy. He was the grandson of Sam Giancana from Chicago. He did some yard work for me, and I hung out with him most of the time. He died in Mexico about five years ago. He was a good friend of [producer/composer] Hal Wilner, and he was a good guy. He had an errant—I don’t know how to put this—he used to go around, and when he saw something he liked in somebody’s yard, he would go back that night with a shovel, dig it up, and plant it in your yard.
We used to get a kick out of that. So I stopped saying, “I really like that rosebush, I really like that banana tree, I really like that palm.” Because I knew what it meant. He came over once with twelve chickens as a gift. My wife said, “Joel, don’t even turn the car off. Turn that car around and take those chickens back where you found them.” He was a good friend, one of the wildest guys I’ve ever known.
Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut Page 49
