The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (41 page)

They picked out Manzanillo for these very reasons, however; isolated, few Americans in the summer, off the tourist trail; secure desert island. Stranded in an uptight town; no roads leading north and no roads leading south; nine or ten hours of hell by bus to Guadalajara the only way to git back to the rest of the world; can't git out in the daytime and do anything because of the heat; can't git out at night because of the mosquitoes; the jungle beyond the Rat Shack filthy with cocoa palms and all sortsa jungle shit; itching crawling alive like a chigger-ridden groin; all manner exotic vermin; sting inflame chigger-blister mosquito heaven, with scorpions for good measure coming up outta the dung dust like lobsters as the crab louse is to the crab.

Standing dead still in this shit; jes waiting; for what; for bread, mainly; every day in supplication at the altar of the Telégrafo, for money from Stateside; Kesey's lawyers supposed to be hassling up money; and everyday some soul, like the chick Kesey picked up, Black Maria, down to the Telégrafo using an alias waiting for telégrafo coming from some lawyer in San Francisco; or from the Mexico City lawyer Kesey's stateside lawyers had gotten hold of to straighten things out with the Mexican police; he was called Estrella; for Star Lawyer? who the fuck knows; here on Devil's Island, us fugitives; no sense of time at all; unbelievable bad news is all that filters from the U.S.; Ron Boise, who had a rheumatic heart, has died of a heart attack at the age of thirty-two; Norman Hartweg in an accident on the drive east with Marge the Barge and Evan Engber, and he is in a hospital in Ann Arbor, almost completely paralyzed; unbelievable things out of the time-death Karma; and here
no time;
jes a dead still
now
stretching back eternally and forward eternally.

So Mountain Girl lies on the bed and stares up through the heat waves rising in the 110-degree mucus of Manzanillo; and she is not high on anything; maybe slightly out of her head, but not high; no, not even out of her head; but it's like that acid time-warp thing; like they're all thrust back permanently into a primitive time; this
is
permanent; Kesey can't go back ever; they will slam him away for good; meaning she can't go back ever, either; how? back to the bamboo cage to be clucked and lectured and blubbered over until she drowned?; none of them can go back; 'cause there is nothing to go back to; it is all here now; Mexico, even as Kesey foresaw that day in La Honda and she started learning Spanish; which none of them really know, however, except Black Maria; always in a cocoon shut off from the worthy up-tight nativos; only the Pranksters are the primitives; thrown back on their own resources; reliving the primitive life of man with only the dwindling hope of a bountiful miracle from the sacred Telégrafo to possibly break the spell... of 3,000 years ago.

Three thousand years ago Mountain Girl walks down to the water, the backwater, every day to wash clothes, diapers and sundry other shit; every day walking through the heat waves under the salty sun through the scrub grass and dung sand, to wash clothes, by the waters of the ... Nile and the daughter of Pharaoh came down to wash herself at the river; and her maidens walked along by the river's side; and when she saw the ark among the flags, she sent her maid to fetch it... it is as if she is walking down to the river and she is watching herself, a maiden, 3,000 years ago, walking down to the river, at the same time, in ... the Middle East; it is always the Middle East somehow, out of an old illustrated Bible; 110 degrees, bulrushes and the eternal laundry bummer; nothing to read here but
The Nova Express
by William Burroughs; the Nietzsche and Dostoevsky that Kesey has; and in the Bible; everybody goes through
Nova Express
in a couple of hours; but the Bible they can
linger
over ... and gradually without anybody hardly saying anything about it, without getting high even, they are in another time dimension; biblical tribe, biblical tribeswoman washing in the water; living like the children of Isaac and Rebecca in the First Book; even taking biblical identities; they each choose, become a character in the Bible;
in truth;
it
is
3,000 years ago, now stretching back infinitely to ... the very Genesis; to Esau; Kesey is Esau; the hairy one; and Esau was a cunning hunter; a man of the field; and Jacob was a plain man, dwelling in tents; 13. Did they grow up alike? Describe them.—Esau was a skillful hunter, and Jacob was a quiet man, fond of home; 14. Which was the first born?—Esau; 15. Did he value his birthright? The proof?—He sold it, when hungry, and faint, to Jacob for a dish of potted beans or other food. So thousands, for present pleasure, will risk or lose their souls; 16. To whom did he sell it, and for what?—See No. 15; 23. Whom did Esau choose as his wives?—Judith and Bashemath, Hittites. Gen. 26:34.; 24. Did his parents approve his choice?—No; they were grieved by it; and Bashemath bore Reuel... 3,000 years ago; for there is no time in this place; only an eternal now stretching on infinitely over the entire world and all the history thereof; for the world seeketh its own level; which is the sea; and all living creatures of the sea shall die; but the
Gymnodinium brevis,
which knoweth no time, except now, shall live forever; ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, The earth is round; but I say unto you . . .

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 Stone, 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.