A Long Strange Trip (16 page)

10

The Bus Came By

(11/13/65–2/5/66)

Neal. Neal Leon Cassady, “Dean Moriarity” of
On the Road,
a fundamental document of the cultural odyssey that all the members of the Grateful Dead would travel. Having taken sex, car driving, drugs, stress, and torment well beyond the limits of human tolerance, Cassady was the “one hundred per cent communicator . . . the furthest out guy” Garcia would ever know. Neal had been an essential part of Garcia’s psychic life since Jerry had hit the North Beach Beat scene at age fifteen, but for his mates, school was about to begin.

The members of the Grateful Dead had taken their first steps. They had sampled psychedelia, played together night after night, and studied an adept in John Coltrane. Now they were about to undertake, many times, the acid test, and define themselves in an extreme psychedelic environment with a life master. The media, for instance Tom Wolfe, whose
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
was superior journalism but still the product of an outsider, would imagine that the scene centered on Ken Kesey. The Dead knew better. Disguised as a loony, mad-rapping speed freak, Neal Cassady was very possibly the most highly evolved personality they would ever meet, and was certainly among their most profound life influences other than the psychedelic experience itself. “He seemed to live in another dimension,” Weir said, “and in that dimension time as we know it was transparent.” Consciousness, Garcia thought, consisted of knowing when you’re on and when you’re off. To learn that, you adopt a discipline and focus on it. Neal’s practice was car driving, and there were dozens of witnesses who testified that from behind the wheel, Neal could see around corners and take his car through spaces that didn’t exist. Once, Lesh recalled, they were going up Highway 101 past San Francisco’s Candlestick Park as a ball game was letting out. Neal’s car simply flowed through the traffic in a series of waves, and by the time the city skyline appeared, Lesh felt that it was a privileged state of grace to be with him in action. Neal had his own art, his own medium, and it involved the way he moved through space. It was “an art form that hasn’t been discovered yet . . . something between philosophy and art,” thought Garcia, an action, not a meditation, but “a Western model for getting high.” He’d eliminated the tool of discipline and simply
was.
“If you imagine human beings as having many surfaces, all of his surfaces were on that edge of off-ness and on-ness and being conscious.”

Talk was one of his primary tools, and there were no simple chats with Neal Cassady. Stopped by the police, he’d bring out his wallet and begin to explain the rain of items pouring out. Before long, whatever reasons the officers had for initiating the encounter would be washed away. Standing in a circle at a party, he’d carry on a separate conversation with each person, going into the cultural image bank and relating the present to several other dimensions. His friend Paul Foster later wrote, “Others can talk fast but slowed down it’s poppycock . . . play Neal at 33 and it’s interesting, voluminous, humorous, often rhyming and intimidatingly encyclopedic in that he was enormously well read and he could handle simultaneously eight channels of audio interchange, including items from all radios and televisions he had turned on, random street noise, conversations within earshot and several secret thoughts, it would all enter the fabric, the nap of his rap.” Hunter once taped a conversation with Neal and then remarked, “I’d
swear
that every time I played [it] that there would be a different conversation with me on it. He was flying circles about me.” Kreutzmann thought of him as a “friendly swarm of bees all over your body that never bite. It was a little scary, but it never hurt—you were only feeling your own feelings.”

The son of an alcoholic Denver barber, Neal grew up, among other places, in a transients’ flophouse hotel. His teenage life combined multiple auto thefts with reading Proust and Schopenhauer. A Columbia University graduate, Justin Brierly, adopted him as a protégé and connected him with Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac in New York, and the life described in Kerouac’s
On the Road.
His other reality, that of marriage to Carolyn, their three children, a suburban home in Mountain View, and a steady job with the Southern Pacific Railroad, was shattered in 1960 when he was arrested for possession of two joints of marijuana and sentenced to two years in San Quentin. Years later Ken Kesey wrote of Neal that his was “the yoga of a man driven to the cliff edge by the grassfire of an entire nation’s burning material madness. Rather than be consumed by this he jumped, choosing to sort things out in the fast-flying but smog-free moments of a life with no retreat.”

Shortly after his release from San Quentin, Neal turned up at Kesey’s home on Perry Lane. He’d read
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
and felt a spiritual kinship with Randle Patrick McMurphy, the novel’s protagonist, and indeed there was a bond. “Speed Limit” became his nickname, and he became an integral part of Kesey’s circle.

In 1964 Kesey completed his second novel,
Sometimes a Great Notion,
and needed to go to New York on business. He happened to be encumbered with more money than he considered good for him, and he’d retained his profound interest in LSD. These facts revealed to him a new medium for his talents, one that was social and magical. The medium would coalesce in a journey to New York, the great bus trip of 1964, which one critic called his third novel. He and his friends, the Merry Pranksters, climbed aboard a 1939 International Harvester school bus with “Furthur” on the destination placard and crossed the country, Neal Cassady at the wheel (of course!).

It was not an ordinary bus. Wired inside and out, it could broadcast to the neighborhood over speakers, while microphones brought the outside world in, usually processed through time lag and electronic manipulation. The barrel of a Laundromat clothes dryer was welded on top to make a turret. A modestly understated sign reading “Caution: Weird Load” festooned the bus’s rear. Splashed in Day-Glo colors, it was not merely transportation but something more akin to Don Quixote’s steed Rosinante, for they were on a mythic quest, as Kesey said, to “stop the coming end of the world.” They also planned to film their quest. Mike “Mal Function” Hagen, Ken “the Intrepid Traveler” Babbs, Paula “Gretchen Fetchin’ ” Sundsten, Ken’s brother Chuck and his cousin Dale: they were “Astronauts of Inner Space.” They crossed the country, filming and recording their adventures, more interior than overt events, which ranged from a romp in a slimy pond to a truly loony day at the beach, the black section of a stretch of Lake Pontchartrain. Once in New York, one of their specific intentions had been to visit that year’s world’s fair in Flushing, Queens, and to chronicle their stoned interactions with the regular citizenry. As was so often the case with the Pranksters, they arrived, pranked around for the ten-minute duration of the first film reel, and then, while the camera was being reloaded, disappeared. On their return to California, they would discover that most of the film, shot with hands and eyes from another dimension, was blurred and unusable. The $70,000 spent on the odyssey left wonderful still pictures by Ron “Hassler” Bevirt and memories of a mythic journey that would reverberate through a large section of the American culture for the next decade.

Kesey’s place at La Honda was no ordinary California coastal range home. There were speakers in trees, Day-Glo paint was splashed everywhere, and the people were . . . different. One of them was Paul Foster, who’d been known to leap to his feet after a good performance of
As You
Like It
shouting, “Author, author,” and who once spent an entire summer wearing ice skates. “You’re either on the bus,” went the phrase from the summer of ’64, “or you’re off the bus.” The metaphorical bus began to take on more passengers. After their return from New York, Neal Cassady had met a striking young woman named Carolyn Adams, who would become a central figure of future events. The daughter of an entomologist and a botanist, she was a rebellious teen who’d moved to Palo Alto to live with her brother, who worked at Stanford. She’d been sitting in St. Michael’s Alley when she met Neal, who invited her to smoke a joint. They’d gotten into his car, and he’d backed up University Avenue to the railroad tracks, then driven to Menlo Park on the Southern Pacific rails, leaving the track at precisely the right time to avoid being demolished by a train. Neal was as attuned as ever to the rhythms of the world and of the S.P. Carolyn loved it, bursting into laughing hysterics. “Crazy people, oh boy!” She soon became part of the La Honda scene.

On August 7, 1965, some even weirder people showed up. Hunter Thompson was a Kentucky-born local journalist who’d been working on a book about the motorcycle club called the Hell’s Angels. Having more than an incidental interest in any form of derangement, chemical or social, he’d thought to introduce the Angels and the Pranksters. On August 7, a Cadillac showed up at La Honda, its muffler dragging in the dirt, bringing eight giant ogres, including Frisco Pete and Freewheelin’ Frank, to visit. With their badges, patches, tattoos, earrings, nose rings, and finger rings, “these guys were way further out than we were,” thought Carolyn, who’d by now acquired the nom de prank of “Mountain Girl,” or “M.G.” Allen Ginsberg and Ram Dass, the former Richard Alpert, who’d been Timothy Leary’s associate at Harvard and afterward, also attended the party, which despite the occasional tensions induced by the Angels’ propensity for violent physical solutions to disagreements, was a fabulous success.

Einstein had transcended Newtonian physics with another order of perception, and it seemed to the Pranksters that acid was doing the same to ordinary human social consciousness. The Pranksters were searching for a way to communicate the meaning of the new psychic world order. “Secret meanings hid coyly in bowls of alphabet soup and Major Clues hung on every tree just out of reach,” wrote Paul Foster. Or, as Kesey was wont to say, “We’re working on many levels here.” Since the Pranksters were also big fans of Saturday night parties, the bash that welcomed the Angels had many successors. There were those who suspected that Kesey wanted the parties to stop so that he could go back to writing, but no one would let him. Instead, the parties grew, and emerged into the larger world. The first of those special parties was at Ken Babbs’s place in Soquel, near Santa Cruz, on the coast south of Palo Alto, on November 27, 1965. Such public notice as there was of the event came through a posting at Lee Quarnstrom and Peter Dema’s Hip Pocket Bookstore in Soquel. The Pranksters were joined by Allen Ginsberg and his lover, Peter Orlovsky, and Garcia, Lesh, Weir, Sue Swanson, and Connie Bonner among others, and the night basically involved hanging out and tripping together.

Lesh would always recall the capsules they took that night, completely transparent except for the tiniest of scratches on the inner surface that marked the LSD that was their transport to another world. He spent much of the evening staring at the stars with Swanson, but at length decided that he’d like to play the electric guitar that Kesey was banging on. Kesey didn’t want to give it up, but Phil was not dissuaded, and learned one of his early lessons in the subtleties of tripping. He proceeded to gluehiseyesonKesey, and in a while Ken got up and shoved the guitar at him. “Here.” Weir, on the other hand, had another sort of adventure. Although he had read “Howl,” he did not recognize Allen Ginsberg, and saw only that he “was pretty damned amazing, the stuff he would say and do. So I figure, okay, I’m gonna sit next to this guy. Which was okay with him”—if not with Peter Orlovsky, who would be cautiously jealous of the utterly hetero Weir in the future.

A day or two later there was a Prankster meeting at La Honda attended by Phil Lesh and Bob Weir, representing the Dead. They sat around Kesey’s kitchen table and planned a somewhat larger party for the following Saturday in San Jose, one that would include the music of the Grateful Dead. They weren’t entirely sure what they were doing, beyond throwing a party and having a good time. Spreading consciousness of what LSD might teach you was one notion; getting good and crazy and spreading the virtue of
that
was another. Making money was definitely out. For the members of the Grateful Dead, it was first of all an opportunity to play the way they wanted. “We knew we had something,” Lesh said later, “but we didn’t know how deep it was. We directed and focused it through these parties.” By now, someone—no one recalled who—had designed ID cards for the sessions, with the traditional recruiting picture of Uncle Sam posing a new and dicey question: “Can YOU pass the Acid Test?” And so the parties became the acid tests.

The Dead sensed, quite correctly, that the Pranksters were onto something powerful. Kesey and Babbs were “living myths” to Lesh, and Neal Cassady, well, he was Neal Cassady. The Pranksters loved the Dead, seeing them as younger and slightly junior partners but definitely “on the bus.” “History had kicked [Garcia] between the eyes and you could see it,” said Kesey. “We always thought of the Grateful Dead as being the engine that was driving the spaceship we were traveling on,” thought Babbs. And the combination was much greater than the sum of its parts. “We plugged in to take it to the next level,” said Lesh, and thus Kesey came to call them the Faster-Than-Light Drive. The people producing the acid tests were not trying to be “far out.” They were going far in.

The second acid test took place on December 4 in the living room of a black man Kesey nicknamed Big Nig—Ken was always interested in obliterating expectations of correctness, political or otherwise—near the San Jose State University campus, and was not terribly successful, largely because the space was far too small. Everyone paid a dollar, including the members of the Dead and the Pranksters, and they communistically divvied up the take at the end of the night. Practical Bill Kreutzmann, recalled Weir, made sure the Dead did okay. Paul Foster was wrapped in gauze like a mummy and went about pouring sugar into people’s hands. They thought it was dosed with LSD, but it wasn’t. At one end of the living room was the Dead’s equipment, at the other the Prankster’s projectors, tape recorders, and electronics. “The idea,” Garcia said later, “was of its essence formless. There was nothin’ going on. We’d just . . . make something of it.” Coincidentally, the Rolling Stones were playing just down the street that night, and Sue Swanson, Connie Bonner, and Neal went off to “bring back the Stones.” Unfortunately, the girls rushed the stage in the general melee occasioned by Mick Jagger’s shirt coming unbuttoned, and were ejected. Sara Garcia would remember the night as frenetic, with people milling around a terribly loud environment occasioned by the Dead’s playing in too small a room. One thing was clear from this night: they needed a bigger place. A number of the attendees were relative strangers, including a U.C. Berkeley student and Daily Cal columnist named Jann Wenner. The grapevine had begun to function, and acid awareness was spreading.