by Tom Wolfe
A precognitive Early Churchly Gnostic note: Ecstatic Peace!
Kesey knows precisely what he’s about! No motorcycle beatnik rout
But a trip more vital than all the Kantian prattle in the world.
He has reached the unreachable! Taught and learned from the unteachable!
The Young Turks owed it to the Church to give the Prankster trip a whirl.
Oh, the vi-bra-tions …
Oh, the Unitarians …
Apostate seminarians …
Grok the groovy
Pranksters and Hell’s Angels …
Whose Angels?—
Why the consternation?
Arise ye antediluvians,
Groove on
The Pranksters and Hell’s Angels …
Noah’s destination
Is where it’s at:
Now showing at the Mount Ararat,
Apis the Bull in Après le déluge,
Groovy movie with a thousand castoffs:
Whose Angels?—
Hell’s Angels …
Dear Lord, prepare to blast off
Into the Angel blue.
Oh, the vi-bra-tions …
So Kesey was invited to come take part in the annual California Unitarian Church conference at Asilomar, beautiful state park by the sea in Monterey. The theme this year was: “Shaking the Foundations.”
The fact that Kesey had lately been arrested on a narcotics charge couldn’t have mattered less to the Unitarians assembled on the greeny glades of Asilomar by the sea, not even the older ones. The Unitarians had a long tradition of liberalism in such matters and, in fact, were in the vanguard of the civil-rights movement in California. There was a good deal of civil disobedience and scrapes with the police in that fight; yes, sir. But this …
… this … The Unitarians were assembled there in Intellectual Sport Shirt multitudes—intellectuals Roughing-it, you understand, in short-sleeved sport shirts and casual Stretcheez trousers with roomy bottoms and waists up about the rib cage, drawing, casually, on pipes. And here came Kesey. But not alone, it so happened. He arrived on the bus, in a blur of Day-Glo swirls, with Pranksters in costume flapping out of every portal. Among the middle-aged Unitarians, ministers and laymen, tamping down their pipes for a nice relaxed Sport Shirt week, there was consternation written on practically every face as they watched the bizarre vehicle pitching and rolling into the camp grounds. Things were … up tight from the moment they got there.
I guess this is kind of rubbing their noses in it, thought Kesey. The Unitarians are people who stand up for the right to dissent and nonconformity and a lot of other good things, and we’re rubbing their noses in it—a bunch of dope fiends, a couple of ex-convicts, one homosexual, men and women living on a bus …
But the Unitarian … Youth, the teenagers weren’t up tight at all. They flocked around the bus as soon as it got there. Which only wound their parents up tighter, of course. By nightfall the Unitarian Church in California was divided into two camps: on the bus and off the bus.
Kesey’s very first appearance on the rostrum got three-fourths of the Sport Shirts so up tight, the conference was ready to fly apart. The main programs were held in a rustic summer-theater-type building on the camp grounds. Kesey appeared at the rostrum in a glowing Yin-Yang jacket. It was an iridescent jacket with a huge Yin-Yang symbol painted on the back in red, white, and blue.
“We’re going to be here seven days,” said Kesey, “so we’re going to try to work a miracle in seven days—”
—and not by talking about it, bub, but by doing it, all of us together, and not by me talking at you, either, but by all of us doing our thing out front and wailing with it.
Many of the women at the conference began to look, rapt, at this rugged, virile man of action who now manned the pulpit. The Sports Shirts did not fail to take note of that rapt gleam on their chops, either.
Paul Sawyer, in the front row, was aware of the tension building up; but so far, all to the good. “Shake the Foundations” was the name of the conference, and so let it be. Sawyer was sitting next to Mountain Girl. What an amazing creature!—sitting next to him here in a vast purple robe. By a remarkable coincidence—coincidence? —she had been brought up as a Unitarian herself and had been a member of the real hope of the church, the LRY, the Liberal Religious Youth. And now—but had she really strayed far from what the LRY ought to be? It was debatable …
Onstage, Kesey, not talking in any formal way, more like performing , working magic—telling of the kind of symbols we use and the games we’re in, and how you can’t really know what an emotion is until you’ve experienced both sides of it, whereupon he seizes the big American flag up on the stage and steps on it, grinds it into the floor—
—huge gasp from the crowd, many of whom are teenagers—
Sawyer is already into the thing, and he sees what Kesey is trying to do—don’t just describe an emotion, but arouse it, make them experience it, by manipulating the symbol of the emotion, and sometimes we have to come into awareness through the back door. Sawyer hears sobs, wheels around in his seat, sees a group of teenagers behind him, from Salt Lake City, looks into their faces, reads the horror that fills them—The Flag!—then feels the manic energy from the crazed thing that has been packed into these children even at this age like a time warp vibration from the Salem witch hysteria, the primordial cry of Die, Infidel—and yet he can’t leave them with that. So he rises up and faces the crowd and says,
—Now wait a minute. That flag is a symbol we attach our emotions to, but it isn’t the emotion itself and it isn’t the thing we really care about. Sometimes we don’t even realize what we really care about, because we get so distracted by the symbols. I remember when I was at school, we used to sing America the Beautiful and somebody would walk down the aisle carrying the flag. I always wanted to be the one who carried the flag down the aisle but I never was. Now, what was I really feeling? Patriotism? Or was it—
But he doesn’t get to finish. A voice cries: “Do it!”
—what?
“Do it!” It’s Mountain Girl, beaming at him from her folds of purple, quite delighted with the turn of events.
Before he knows it, he is leading them all in the singing of America the Beautiful, and O beau-ti-ful for spa-cious skies rings out in the hall—as he holds the flag staunchly in his hands and marches up the aisle and then down the aisle, signifying—what? Ne’mind! But exactly! Don’t explain it. Do it!
LIKE MOST CONFERENCES, THIS ONE HAD A CAREFULLY PREPARED and printed schedule of meals, talks, seminars, group activities. The Pranksters made a good quick hash of that. They had no schedule and intimated nobody else should, either. The Sport Shirts would have a big seminar planned to capture the imagination of the Youth—something on the order of Student Rebellion in an Age of Mediocrity: Challenge and Responsibility—only at the appointed hour the Youth, the student rebels in an age of mediocrity, would be down by the beach, down around the damnable bus, where the Pranksters had their own program, and no schedule, friends and neighbors, everything happens at the hour of Now and all can join in the game of Power:::::
Somebody wins the Power and orders a game of football to be played on the beach, only with the Hermit as the football. Presently a whole group, Pranksters, ministers, conferees, are picking up the giggling Hermit and handing him off like a quarterback would and scrambling for him like a loose football, and so on. But soon the grief of it—allegory!—begins to sink in, this making of a human being a counter in the power game, always the weakest … Ahhh! One of the young ministers, one of the Young Turks, now has the power, and he orders that all go into the surf of the Pacific and wash one another’s feet. Ritual of humility, allegory of life, but not a word of explanation need be spoken, and they all just sit down in the surf and wash one another’s feet, and the Hermit’s most meticulously, and the Pranksters really groove with this. They think this is great. And the kids now look at the Young Turk whose inspiration it was in
a new light. He has made it. The Pranksters approve of him!
The Young Turks spent more and more time with the Pranksters, late into the night, while the music played on the bus, and the Pranksters brought huge strands of kelp out of the ocean and flailed it about and beat the sides of the bus with it, like a huge drum, and played the Power game and took the Now Trip and played the non-games of life, and kept rapping away, but more than rapping, being, being alive—the Young Turks were truly on the bus. From the lack of sleep and the pace and weird shaking of the foundations, they began to feel the mysto thing most profoundly.
Paul Sawyer was walking back to go to bed about 7 A.M. one morning after an all-night stand with the Pranksters when he was met by a delegation of conference officials. They wanted to have it out. They wanted to ask Kesey and the Pranksters to leave. Kesey might be sincere, they said, and he might not. But in any case he was disrupting the conference and causing a schism in the conferees, and setting an atrocious example for the Youth. It seemed that Dr.—, one of the Church’s greatest liberals and a leader in the civil-rights movement, had already left the conference in protest and taken a couple of other ministers with him.
—Wait a minute, says Sawyer. We called this conference to shake the foundations. And, well, now they are beginning to shake, and it’s time to see whether we have the courage of our convictions.
—Well, yes, Paul, but there are these things they are doing, and the park officials are quite upset. First of all, there is a very strong suspicion that they are indulging in marijuana. There is a very peculiar smell around that bus. But let us leave that aside. In any case, the bus is a very definite health nuisance, all those people living together on that bus by the side of the water. It isn’t sanitary. But let us leave that aside, too. There is also the incident of the shower room. Park personnel caught two of these … Pranksters taking a shower together, a man and a woman, in the men’s shower room. Now we might overlook that sort of thing, but what kind of an example is that for the young people? And this one they call Mountain Girl. Every time she sees Dr. George Washington Henry, who is after all one of our most distinguished Negro ministers and thinkers, she yells out, “Watermelon Henry!”
—Watermelon Henry?
—Yes, it seems she saw him eating a watermelon the other day, and “enjoying it,” as she insists on saying, and so now, every time she sees him, she sings out, “Watermelon Henry!” And you know the kind of voice she has. I suppose that’s “bringing it all out front,” or whatever they call it—but really—Watermelon Henry—
The upshot is, they want to throw the whole bunch out. But Sawyer holds his ground and says that if Kesey and the Pranksters are expelled, he is leaving too. This posed the possibility of a walkout of the Young Turks, which might create an even worse schism. So the elders agreed to ride it out.
—We think you’re making a mistake, Paul, Kesey is manipulating this conference.
KESEY WAS, IN FACT, NOW TREMENDOUSLY INTERESTED IN THE whole phenomenon of … Control. He had discovered that the Pranksters had been able to control the flow of the conference, not by any Machiavellian planning, but simply by drawing the conference into their movie. The conference was on a schedule, but the Pranksters always arrived … Now, and in no time at all everyone had become a player in their movie. Kesey began to hold daily briefings for the Pranksters.
—From now on, he’s saying, we’ve got to stick to the same costume every day. Every Prankster’s got to have a clear identity to everybody here, so that everywhere you go and they see you, you’re on, it turns them on to your thing, the thing you’re doing.
Kesey has on the Yin-Yang jacket. Mountain Girl has on the purple robe. Babbs has on an incredible pair of pants of many-colored stripes, made by Gretch. And so forth.
Mountain Girl objects.
—I think we ought to forgit our own identity and the costumes and just do our thing and keep it open.
—That’s right, but that won’t do any good if they don’t have a clear idea of what our thing is.
So they stuck to the costumes and it worked. Hour by hour it became clear that the Pranksters were on to a secret of … Control, in each and every situation.
Kesey’s sense of timing was perfect. By Friday, Kesey had done a lot of talking, on stage, off stage, down by the bus, and things had gotten to the point where people might start saying, well, for a guy who says talking won’t get the job done, he has done an awful lot of talking. Kesey emerged from the bus that afternoon with a huge swath of adhesive tape plastered across his mouth. He went around the whole day like that, silent, plastered over, as if to say, I’m through talking.
All the kids at Asilomar thought this was great, too. More and more of them were hanging around the bus, while the Pranksters flung kelp about and played like very children themselves. Nighttime and one girl really feels into the thing, and she wants nothing more in this world than to go on an acid trip with the Pranksters. She has never taken acid before. So they give her some and a group of them take acid, down by the bus, by the ocean, and christ, she starts freaking out. She starts wailing away. That’s all they need. This one thing could wreck everything they’ve done. So Kesey quick says give her total Attention. So they gather around her, all the Pranksters, and bathe her in love and Attention and she breaks through the freakout, comes through the other side and starts grooving on it, and it’s beautiful. It’s like all the Pranksters’ theories and professed beliefs have been put to a test in the outside world, away from La Honda, and they’re working now, and they have … Control.
ON THE LAST DAY, SUNDAY, THE KIDS AT THE CONFERENCE PUT on a show, apparently a tradition at the conference. But this show is all about the Pranksters. They have a kid impersonating practically every Prankster. The best one they did was the Hermit, scuttling and sniggling and giggling around. But they also did Kesey and Babbs and some others. The grand finale of the show was a musical number, “Kelp I Need Somebody!”, sung to the tune of the Beatles’ song “Help!”
The Sports Shirts looked and endured. They had ridden it out and at least they had avoided a schism. Or had they? Hmmmmmm … .
Paul Sawyer looked at Kesey … and he saw a prophetic figure. He had not taught or preached. Rather, he had created … an experience, an awareness that flashed deeper than cerebration. Somehow he was in the tradition of the great prophets. The modern world knows prophets only in the stiff, reverent language of the texts and scholarly limnings of various religions. Somehow Kesey had created the prophetic aura itself, and through the Pranksters many people at the conference had not observed but experienced mystic brotherhood, albeit ever so bizarre … a miracle in seven days.
THE FOLLOWING YEAR THERE WERE TWO CONFERENCES OF THE Unitarian Church. One, as always, was at Asilomar. And the Sport Shirts were there, as always. The other was in the High Sierras. The Young Turks held their own conference, in the High Sierras, up in the thin air. Somehow it wasn’t quite what they expected, however. A certain psychic decibel level was lacking. Nevertheless, the age of bullshit was over. They were on the bus for good. The next year Sawyer spent a month living in Haight-Ashbury, to explore the possibilities of a new kind of ministry for the young people; on the bus, as it were.
OH, THE VI-BRA-TIONS …
IT SO HAPPENED THAT ONE OF THE FEMALE DELEGATES TO THE Unitarian conference at Asilomar had her own little résumé of the conference printed up, and she mailed it out. The Pranksters read it out loud in the living room at Kesey’s:
“So the Prophet Kesey came before us”—and did such and such.
“And the Prophet Kesey said”—this and that.
“And the Prophet Kesey made a sign”—signifying Christ knows what.
“And it was good, for as the Prophet Kesey says”—
—repeating this phrase, the Prophet Kesey, and adorning it with all the biblical rhetoric—only she was serious! straight! rapt! a true believer! and probably thought the Prophet Kesey would beam when he saw it.
So the P
ranksters all look at Kesey. He has his head down and he says in a melancholy way:
“We’re not on the Christ Trip. That’s been done, and it doesn’t work. You prove your point, and then you have 2,000 years of war. We know where that trip goes.”
All the same, it was a sensitive moment. The old girl had tried to put it all into so many words—Kesey’s role and the whole direction the Pranksters were taking. All the Pranksters—we’re on some kind of trip, Christ knows. They all had religion, all right. It was … like the whole Prankster thing was now building up some kind of conclusion, some … ascension, and no one could give it a right name and still be called sane. A great burning column, reaching about the western horizon, perhaps …
Kesey himself was like someone possessed. The goddamn scene here is enough to drive anybody off the freaking platter. It’s getting like a circus, every freak in California now showing up, heads, bums, students, raggy little girls come looking for excitement, looking to get spaced out on LSD or for Christ knows what reason. Even spades turning up, like Heavy, who rises up in the woods in the middle of the night among the tents croaking like a bullfrog: Have no worry, have no fear, hash-smokin’ Heavy’s here …
It’s even gotten to Babbs, this motley collection. “This is a zoo!” he’s saying to Kesey. “This is where the love stuff gets you!”
But Kesey says, “When you’ve got something like we’ve got, you can’t just sit on it. You’ve got to move off of it. You can’t just sit on it and possess it, you’ve got to move off of it and give it to other people. It only works if you bring other people into it.”
So everybody who wanted could stay, Prankster or not, and the more—who gives a shit. Kesey also had his court appearances to contend with and more lying, finking, framing, politicking by the constables than a body could believe—he looked like he had aged ten years in three months. He was now some indeterminate age between thirty and forty. He was taking a lot of speed and smoking a lot of grass. He looked haggard, and when he looked haggard, his face seemed lopsided. One day he came stumbling out of the backhouse and Sandy saw him and one eye seemed to be aimed one way and one the other, as if there had been a horrible wrench … although the grim shit was beginning to hit Sandy again, too …
