by Tom Wolfe
Finally he takes out his camera and takes a picture of each of them.
Kesey says, “Why don’t you come to our party tomorrow night? A lot of people will be there.”
“Your party?”
“Yeah, we’re having a farewell party tomorrow night.”
“Farewell?”
“Yeah. We’re leaving Mexico and going back up to California, so we’re giving a farewell party.”
“Well, thank you, amigo. I weel be there.”
So began the first Mexican Acid Test.
AGENT NUMBER ONE WASN’T THE MOST BRILLIANT COP IN THE Americas, but time was obviously running out in old Mexico. It was time to get the Movie going on all projectors. And the bus. The new fantasy was to get on the bus and keep moving; roam through Mexico and give Acid Tests and be on the bus, keeping the Pranksters movie going at top speed at all times.
They held the Manzanillo Test in the courtyard of Babbs’s Rat Shack, under the aegis of the Purina Chow. It was a small one, with all random heads in the area welcome. No Grateful Dead, of course, so they gave the Polynesian restaurant latino combo ten bucks to come down the road and play during their intermissions. Between times the Pranksters themselves furnished the music, rolling all the fantastic coils of wire out, with Gretch on the organ, and the movies and lights and all the rest. The night was full of heat lightning, which was nice, and the Prankster musicians screeled their weird Chinese tones, wailing electronically in the Rat netherlands. But no Secret Agent Número Uno.
Kesey actually hoped the guy would turn up. He was just crazy enough to be adaptable for the Movie. He was a creature of fantasy himself. In any case, better him there gathering more data for his fabulous career than lurking in the cocoa palms working himself up to spring his ultimate cop fantasy on them. Well, if so, they would go out freaking and wailing on the shores of the red tide.
The Polynesian players came down the road again and played. It was nice to get freaked to latino syncopation. Then a lull, and then the shit—
¡HOY! ¡PRONTO!
—this piping shout from the other side of the Rat Shack. And where have I heard that cry before, Cosmo?
¡HOY! ¡PRONTO!
And all veer stroked out waiting for the pounce. More pounce to the ounce in a Mexican bust. Well, let’s have it—let’s see the Federales do their fantasy to mariachis, breaking on the high notes and struggling up again and huffing and galomphing with gold butts and stars in their teeth
¡HOY! ¡PRONTO!
Come on in, fellas, it’s strictly Dutch freak here inside—
—and around the corner comes only the owner of the Polynesian palace, pissed off because his combo is hung up on the crazies here long past intermission and he has enough problems in the red-tide doldrums without them malingering with the crazies.
“¡Hoy! ¡Pronto!” he keeps shouting. ¡Hurry up! Get your asses back to the store! prodding and herding them out of the Purina Chow palace delirium.
¡HOY! ¡PRONTO!
The heat freak lightning flashes crazy enough and it is a good sign. The Movie is going.
THE PRANKSTERS PULLED OUT OF MANZANILLO THE NEXT DAY without a word or a move from Agent Number One, big as life on the bus, plus a small caravan of cars. They headed to Guadalajara and gave an Acid Test in a restaurant there. The Test went on two nights and each night a well-dressed Mexicano with the gleaming nighttime Mexico white shirt over his staunch midriff turned up with a go-go girl and stayed right through, although they didn’t take acid. Smiled and danced and seemed to enjoy themselves. Turned out he was the local jefe of detectives. We are not alone.
The bus tooled into Aguascalientes, 364 miles northwest of Mexico City, loaded for Acid Tests. Aguascalientes is 6,000 feet up in tierras frescas with a paradise climate in late summer, a nicely weird city, built above a vast system of tunnels by … an unknown race … Pranksters in the time warp of many millennia ago. Suddenly Sandy was immensely enthusiastic. Sandy had packed his motorcycle onto the bus. He was getting more and more robust day by day, all for this Mexican adventure.
The mineral springs! said Sandy. You got to try them! A warm soothing mineral spring bath soaking late-summer paradise into every bone—Cleanliness is Next. Aguascalientes was what all these tierras del fuego were piled up rock by rock for, this little bit of Heaven in the upper altitudes.
Mountain Girl listened to all this and she knew, well, that would be that. They would hang around Aguascalientes the rest of the day. If there was one thing Kesey couldn’t resist, it was the prospect of a long warm soak. He would stay in a warm tub one hour any time, and the paradisiacal Aguascalientes were good for four or five hours, easy.
So Kesey and many Pranksters went off and immersed up to their chops in the warm springs. Hagen was delegated to stay behind and watch the bus and all the Acid Test equipment inside. Sandy went off to take a spin on his motorcycle.
Presently Sandy turned back up at the bus. He looked most big and bright. He had on an orange jacket gleaming Day-Glo and much orange Day-Glo on his bike and was looking strong. Sandy climbed up in the bus and went back in there and presently he emerged carrying the big Ampex.
“What are you doing with that?” says Hagen.
“I need something heavy to put on the back of my bike for a test run,” says Sandy. “I’m going to be carrying a lot of stuff back to New York and I want to find out how much I can maneuver with on this thing.”
“Well—I don’t know,” says Hagen. Man, there’s something wrong with this. “Prankster equipment isn’t supposed to leave the bus. You know what the Chief says.”
“It’s not leaving the bus,” says Sandy. “I just want to take it down a few blocks to see how the bike handles with a weight on it.”
All the time Sandy is tying the huge clump of equipment down on the back rider’s seat of the bike. It’s so heavy and bulky it doesn’t look like he could make ten miles with it.
“I don’t think you should,” says Hagen.
“I’ll be right back,” says Sandy—and he guns off, with the bike drooping in the back.
An hour goes by, two hours, and he isn’t back. Hagen is worried. Then Kesey shows up, back from the baths. Let’s go! says Kesey. He sees the whole thing right away. The fateful Ampex that Sandy had hassled over a year ago. The sombitch has split.
They jump in a car and take off up the highway north, toward Zacatecas. He has a big start but he won’t be getting very far with that back end loaded down like it is. They go barreling through the Coca-Cola and Carta Blanca crossroads of old Mexico, up past Chicalote and Rincn de Romos and San Francisco, everywhere stopping and shouting at the Mex drugstore cowboys on the corner.
“Hey! Have you seen a crazy gringo on a motorcycle—all dressed in orange?”
“No.” “No.” “No.”—the bastards, they’re too battened down in their huaraches to say so anyway—and they barrel on up through the dung dust but finally give up and trail on back to the bus.
“Shit,” says Mountain Girl, “that Ampex is the guts of the Acid Test.”
The whole complicated thing of the instruments, the variable lag, the synchronicity, the taping for the Archives—they can’t do it without the Ampex. Sandy has taken the Prankster Ampex—to the Pranksters there was not the slightest doubt in the world that the equipment was the Pranksters’. Not Prankster Sandy Lehmann-Haupt’s but the Pranksters’. The Prankster family, the Prankster order, superseded all straight-world ties, contracts and chattel laws and who is my mother or my brethren? And he looked round about on them which sat about him, and said, Behold my mother and my brethren! For whosoever shall do the will of God, the same is my brother, and my sister, and my mother.
And there was nothing left but the vision of the sombitch tooling up the Mexican National Highway, struggling on his Suzuki to haul … possessions back to New York. New York. So this was what he had built up the strength for. Six thousand freaking miles on a 250-pound motorcycle to seek out his electronic chattel and draggle
it back, freaking Day-Glo in the sundown toward the border.
ABOUT 4,500 FEET AWAY, SANDY RESTED IN THE SHADOW BEHIND a big corrugated tin shed. Out in the open sun there—the runway of the Aguascalientes airport with brown Mexicans in coveralls lollygagging around. Sandy had been a man of his word, up to a given point, so to speak. He had gone a couple of blocks, like he said. Then he took a right and rode on over to the city airport and parked behind the shed … and waited … and was Kesey really so far into Now, such a master precognition, that he would shoot the Zen arrow … or let him draw it, rather, and come straight there and hassle him upside the bus again and in that moment let him know irrevocably who has the Power, the control over his mind forever …
Strangely, the paranoia lasted only for a twinge as he caught his breath in the shade. In fact, he was strangely calm, as if the chase were now over, rather than begun. He had done it. It had been his movie. He had drawn them into his scenario. Mike Hagen. “We-e-e-e-ll,” he had said. “I don’t kno-o-o-ow. You know what the Chief says.” He knew. He had been on the bus for three years. The trip had been liberation and captivity all at the same time, liberation, power, will, the greatest in the world—and whose will? The group mind’s? Well, he had never had a dream war with the group mind, he had never been held in thrall by the group mind, he had never been subject to absolute judgment by the group mind, waiting for the one cryptic word that will say, It’s O.K., Sandy.
Naturally he could never haul the big Ampex 3,000 miles on a motorcycle. It would be a little pile of gleaming whimsy, like one of Paul Foster’s acid-bag transistor radios, by the time he reached the border, from the interminable bouncing. But he had that figured out. There was a Railway Express Agency in Aguascalientes. He would take the Ampex over there and ship it to New York collect and ride back on the motorcycle free as a bird. Which he did.
A YEAR LATER I TALKED TO SANDY IN CENTRAL PARK, DOWN BY the edge of the lake near Central Park South. He looked good, strong, calm. He was going with a good-looking blonde whom I had met. He had a job as a sound engineer with one of the recording companies. We got to talking for a long time about his adventures with the Pranksters, and dusk came on, and we related what we had each heard of Kesey recently, and it started getting dark, so we got up and left the park. And in all of it Sandy spoke with warmth, about Kesey, about the whole experience, with no traces of rancor. It started getting dark and we got up and walked out of the park. Just before we parted, Sandy turned to me and said, “You know … I’ll always be on the bus.”
“LEO! LEO! YOU ARE LEO, AREN’T YOU? DO YOU NOT KNOW ME any more? We were League brothers together and should still be so. We were both travelers on the journey to the East.”
THE PRANKSTERS MOVED ON TO MEXICO CITY AND ENVIRONS, giving a couple of Acid Tests, but without any astounding gusto. American heads from the Ajijic-San Miguel de Allende—Mexico City Circuit gathered proudly—Yeah—I ran into Kesey and the Pranksters in Mexico and we all got stoned. A few Indians came and got taciturnly freaked.
Meanwhile, Kesey’s lawyers were hassling with Mexico City immigration legals in Mexico City to see about getting him a proper visa for a long haul, and they blew hot and cool. And then cooler and cooler. They seemed to be followed, the Pranksters and the bus, by carloads of well-dressed Mexican dudes here and there. Stone saw more than anyone else but kept driving. Cassady hauling the bus over the Mexico tierras frías with his new goal up against now of going the length and breadth of Mexico without using the brakes and without stopping for anything, hauling off onto crumbling scrubroot shoulders rather than stop for carts or cars or animals, smoothing out his stroke, from the Joe Cuba spastokinetic jerk, the sudden straight lines, into a new line—the new line—Kesey can see it happening even in the eternal Cassady—but of course!—in him first of all—from Fire to Water, from the Stone Age into the Acid Age and in a moment—now—Furthur—
HAUL ASS, KESEY! IT WAS NOW TIME TO BRING THE FUTURE back to the U.S.A., back to San Francisco, and brazen it out with the cops and whatever else there. The Mexican legals were hinting at booting him out, maybe in a month, on the technicality of no visa. But the Rat lands were spent anyway. They had junked it through on the fabulous junk of Mexico. They had gorged it up. They had … in truth, Major, there were no more spas to water at in the Rat lands.
The current fantasy was to take the Outlaw prank to its ultimate, be a Prankster Fugitive Extraordinaire in the Baskin-Robbins bosom of the U.S.A. You have never seen a Prankster Fugitive? Now watch that movie; draws you right in …
Kesey had a good melodrama for going back in. Paint it big enough and bright enough, and they will never see you. He figured to sneak back in on the purloined-letter principle. If you are gross enough about the whole thing, they will never know it’s you.
Kesey picked Brownsville, Texas, for the reentry. It was the easternmost entry point on the Mexican border, practically on the Gulf of Mexico, and the least likely spot for heads to pick to go back in at. Most of the heads used the western end, the Tijuana end, because they were going back to California.
So he put on a cowboy hat and just before the U.S. Customs and Immigration Station at Brownsville raunched into view, he rented a Mexican’s swayback white horse and got on with his cowboy hat cocked on crazily, playing a guitar and lolling his head around like he was drunk. He came cross the border lurching along on an old white horse as “Singing Jimmy Anglund.”
“How long you been in Mexico?”
“Too damn long.”
“May I see your visa?”
“I don’t have it.”
“Where is it?”
Visa—how the hell did he know. Came down to play a country & western show in that fuckin Matamoros, and be damned if they didn’t get him drunk, them fuckin Mexes, their fuckin women and their margaritas, and they rolled his ass in the streets of Matamoros, took his money and his papers, cleaned him out, and he got drunker and he stayed drunker in this godderned Mexico, bricked up his bowels with terra cotta, and him just a good old boy from Boise, Idaho, and that’s where he’s going back, no more Mexico, no more Las Vegas—
“Have you got any identification?”
“All I got’s this here—”
—and he shows the browntrooper a credit card, Bank of America, reading James C. Anglund, Las Vegas, Nevada.
So they let him across and he headed down the road clawing on the guitar and lolling around on the back of the horse, although they retrieved the horse from him—can’t let any disease sneak across the border from the Rat lands, you understand—
Singing Jimmy Anglund started thumbing out in the dust with his Rat-tar under the other arm …
chapter XXVI
The Cops and Robbers Game
Singing Jimmy,
Hocking hoarse and phlegmy,
Sticks his grizzle
In the dust-muck Brownsville drizzle,
Starts to thumbing
Up the Texas belly bumming,
Heeee! the cops and robbers game.
Lone superhero,
Superhighway Cosmo hero,
Never lies.
Honesty’s the best disguise
In the cops and robbers game.
See, cop fellas?
Freaked-out head-buff Cercosporellas
Here’s my Rat-tar
And my buckskin cowboy suit.
Prankster red boots
From Guadalajara.
My cowboy hat
Shows you where I’m at
In the cops and robbers game.
I ain’t Clark Kent.
I ain’t Steve Lamb.
Popeye the Sailor I am what I am
In the cops and robbers game.
Came a car
Didn’t take him very far
In the cops and robbers game.
At the wheel
In this fuckedup dust-muck hitchhike deal
Was a Mississippi kite
With a smile of ebonite.
Inchy roa
d
Heavy duty, heavy load
In the cops and robbers game.
Shit.
The Cosmos Kid, he
Split
At the coffee-light eggs-lookin-atcha bus depot.
On the bus!
In the cops and robbers game.
Greyhound humid
Most mightily piss-fumid
All the way to Salt Lake City
On the bus
In the cops and robbers game.
Oh
Riding second class
With shock absorbers up my ass
Reminds me
Of the F.B. Eyes left behind me
Out front! superhero
Of the cops and robbers game.
Took a flight
To San Francisco late at night.
Cop alert?
For hero in a buckskin shirt?
Cocked to shoot?
At superdude in red dude boots?
Not hardly.
Official mind destroyer,
This prankster suit of flaming Orlon paranoia
Hardly visible,
This risible cowboy
Cardiac drummer
Marching to a different bummer
In the cops and robbers game.
From the airport
With creamy Prankster pudding escorts
Neal and Hugh
Day-Glo Marvel Comic crew
Commence the movie:
FREAK THE COPS!
Shuck the narcos
Shuck the Feds
Shuck the San Mateo Sheriff
Shuck the San Francisco Chief
Shuck the Judges in their chambers
We shall not flag or fail
We shall go on to the end
We shall shuck you on the beaches
