The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (38 page)

"We'll do it in Sonoita, man," says Boise. "They don't give a shit there. Put down a couple of bucks and they can't see anything else."

Sonoita is almost due east of Tijuana, just south of the Arizona border. Kesey uses his good shuck ID there and all is jake in Sonoita. Fugitive!—real-life and for sure now.

Then south down so-called Route 2 and so-called Route 15, bouncing and grinding along through the brown dust and scrawny chickens and animal dung brown dust fumes of western Mexico, towns of Coyote, Caborca, Santa Ana, Querobabi, Cornelio, El Oasis, hee, Hermosillo, hah, Pocitos Casas, Cieneguito, Guaymas, Camaxtli, Mixcoatl, Tlazolteotl, Quetzalcoatl, Huitzilopochtli, Tezcatlipoca haunting the Dairy Queen Rat Queen crossroads in the guise of a Rat, a Popoluactli-screeing rat, Tetzcotl, Yaotl, Titlacahuan he whose slaves we are, Ochpaniiztl priesty Angel-freaked out in a motorcycle made from the vaseline skin of Gang Bang Girl Meets White Trash ... A confetti of skulls and death in western Mexico, the Rat lands. Not one inch of it is picturesque burros and shawls or nova Zapata hats or color-TV pink chunks of watermelon or water lilies or gold feathers or long eyelashes or high combs or tortillas and tacos and chili powder or fluty camote vendors or muletas or toreros or oles or mariachi bands or water lilies or blood of the dahlia or tinny cantinas or serapes or movie black marias with shiny black hair and steaming little high round pubescent bottoms. None of the old Mexico we know and love on the 21-day excursion fare. Just the boogering brown dust and bloated rat corpses by the road, goats, cows, chickens with all four feet up in the air at the Tezcatlipocan skull rot crossroads of Mexico.

To Kesey it was a hopeless flea-bitten desert he was fleeing into. But Boise made it bearable. Boise always
knew.
Boise was wizened and thin-faced and he had the awfulest New England high flat whine, and he didn't belong anywhere near here, but he was
here, now,
and he
knew.
The truck breaks down for the fourteenth time—

"No hassle, man. We just back it up on a rock, man ... Then we just take the tire off and fix it."

More flat, Rat country, mosquito and flea, into total nothing, like the lines of perspective in a surrealist painting, but Boise makes you realize it is all the same, here as anywhere. Boise lecherously scanning the streets as they bounce through the dead chicken towns just like it was only Saturday night on Broadway in North Beach, spotting a good looking gringa muchacha padding along the side of the road with honest calves,

25 SECONDS LEFT, FOOL!

and he says, "Shall we get her over and
ball
her, man?" all in the same New England whine, as if he were saying, Wanna Coke, or not? Kesey looks at Boise's lined face and his thin lips, looks ancient, only a glitter comes out of the eyes, nice and lecherous, dead certain and crazy alive at the same time. And Boise in that moment is in the tiny knot of Perfect Pranksters, the inner circle, ascending into the
sangha
for good.

In Guaymas, on the gulf, Jim Fish wants out.
An early attack of paranoia, Jim
Fish?
and catches a bus back to the U.S., leaving Kesey, Boise and Zonker and the equipment. But was it not ever so? You're either on the bus or off the bus. Kesey's spirits were picking up. Boise was pulling everything together ::: this crazy New Englander is
here
in these Rat lands.

"Hey, man ..." Boise points at a construction scene they're going by. "...
see that?"

as if to say, There's the whole thing, right there.

A whole gang of workmen are trying to put the stucco on the ceiling of a building they're finishing up. One fat man is mixing up the stucco in a washtub. One skinny one is scooping the stucco up out of the tub with a little trowel and pitching it up underhanded at the ceiling. A little of it sticks—and three or four guys stand on a plank scaffolding taking stabs at smoothing it out—but most of it falls down on the floor and three or four more are hunkered down there scraping it up off the floor and shoveling it back in the tub and the skinny guy skinnies up another little gob with his skinny trowel and they all stare again to see what happens. They are all hunkering around in huaraches, worthless flat Rat woven sandals, up on the scaffolding, down on the floor, waiting to see what happens, how fate brings it off with this little gob of nothing pitched up at the Rat expanse .. .

And it's all there—the whole Mexico Trip—

"They have a saying, 'Hay tiemp—' " Boise hooks the steering wheel to get around an ice-cream vendor in the middle of the road " '—o,' 'There is time.' "

20 SECONDS, IDIOT!

Huaraches, which are
the
Rat shoe. It all synches. Mexico is the Rat paradise. But of course! It is not worthless—it is perfection. It is as if the Rat things of all the Rat lands of America, all the drive-ins, mobile-home parks, Dairy Queens, superettes, Sunset Strips, auto-accessory stores, septic-tank developments, souvenir shops, snack bars, lay-away furniture stores, Daveniter living rooms, hot-plate hotels, bus-station paperback racks, luncheonette in-the-booth jukebox slots, raw-concrete service-station toilets with a head of urine in the bowl, Greyhound bus toilettes with paper towels and vomit hanging over the hockey-puckblack rim, Army-Navy stores with Bikini Kodpiece Briefs for men, Super Giant racks with matching green twill shirts and balloon-bottom pants for honest toilers, $8,000 bungalows with plastic accordion-folding partitions and the baby asleep in there in a foldaway crib of plastic net, picnic tables with the benches built onto them used in the dining room, Jonni-Trot Bar-B-Q

sandwiches with a carbonated fruit drink, aluminum slat awnings, aluminum sidings, lukewarm coffee-"with" in a china mug with a pale brown pool in the saucer and a few ashes, a spade counter chef scraping a short-order grill with a chalky Kitchy-Brik and he won't take your order till he's through, a first-come-first-serve doctor's waiting room with modest charwomen with their dresses stuck on the seats of shiny vinyl chairs and they won't move to get loose for fear you'll look Up their dress, plaid car coats from Sears and a canvas cap with a bill, synthetic dresses for waitresses looking like milky cellophane, Rat cones, Rat sodas, Rat meat-salad sandwiches, Rat cheezis, Rat-burgers—it is as if the Rat things of all the Rat lands of America had been looking for their country, their Canaan, their Is-ra-el, and they found it in Mexico. It has its own Rat aesthetic. It's hulking beautiful...

Then they reached Mazatlan, the first full-fledged resort you reach on the west coast of Mexico, coming down from the States. Everybody's trip was fishing in Mazatlan. Along the old Avenida

del Mar and the Paseo Claussen, white walls with nice artistic Rat fishing scenes and hotel archways with great shiny blue martins hanging inside the arches and gringos with duckbill caps here to catch some marlin. Mariachi music at last, with the trumpets always breaking and dropping off the note and then struggling up again.

Zonker has the bright idea of going to O'Brien's Bar, on the beach front, place he got beat up out back of once by thirteen Mexican fags. Zonker enjoys revisiting scenes of previous debacles.
Like also spends hours on the beach telling them how his true and
fiercest fear is of being attacked by a shark while swimming .
. .
as he picks flea-bite
scabs until his legs stream blood to the luscious world. . . then goes swimming.

O'Brien's brings on the paranoia right away. It is a break in the Rat movie. It is dark and a Mexican band plays—signaling to the Rat sensibility that it will cost too much. Rat souls everywhere fear dark, picturesque restaurant, knowing instinctively they will pay dearly for the bullshit ambiance, dollar a drink probably. O'Brien's was crowded, and then through the cocktail gloom:
heads.
A bunch of kids with the jesuschrist hair, the temple bells and donkey beads, serape vests, mandalas; in short, American heads. Zonker recognizes them immediately. They're not only American heads, but from San Jose, and some had been to the Acid Tests.
Just what the Fugitive
needs to blow the whole suicide ruse. "Guess who I saw in Mexico
..." Naturally, Zonk, with his zest for debacle, hails them over. Kesey is introduced as "Joe," and nobody pays him much mind except for one dark little girl, Mexican-looking, with long black hair.

"When were you born?" she says to Kesey. She doesn't sound Mexican.
She sounds
like Lauren Bacall speaking through a tube.

"I'm a Virgo."
No sense hitting a ball three bits you can see coming if you can cut
across the fourth.

"I thought so. I'm a Scorpio."

"Beautiful."

The black Scorpio obviously knows Zonk best. She knows him when. But Zonk belongs to the ages and it comes to pass that Zonk or no Zonk, she and Kesey relax out in the open air on the pier one night down by a Mazatlan Rat beach, all dirt and scrabble, but the waves and the wind and the harbor lights do it up right and the moon hits some kind of concrete shaft there, putting her in the dark, in the shadow, and him in the light, lit up by the moon, as if some designer drew a line precisely between their bodies.
Blacky Maria,
he decides.

So Black Maria joins the Fugitive band and they go off to Puerto Vallarta. Puerto Vallarta is out of the Rat lands. All picture-book Mexico. Paradise-blue Bandarias Bay and a pure white beach and white latino collages right up against the jungle, which is a deep raw green, and clean. Fat green fronds lapping up against the back of the houses on the beach. Macaw sounds, or very near it. Secret poisonous orchid and orange pops and petals winking out when the foliage moves. A nice romantic Gothic jungle. Zonker hassles with an oily little real-estate man and gets the last house on the edge of town for $80 a month. The rent is low because the jungle is too close for the tourists, the jungle and too many Mexican kids and chickens and the rural dung dust.

Boise heads back to the U.S. and Kesey, Zonker and Black Maria move in. They have the upper half of the house, one floor and a spiral staircase up to the roof. Up on the roof is a kind of thatched hut, the highest perch around, a perfect lookout post and a snug harbor. Kesey decides to risk a phone call to the States to let Faye and everybody know he's O.K. He goes into town and calls Peter Demma in the Hip Pocket Book Store in Santa Cruz. A little metallic clanking about by the telefonista señoritas down at central. And then,

"Peter?"

From many Rat miles away: "Ken!" Very surprised, naturally ...

So Kesey whiled the time sitting in the snug hacienda on the edge of Puerto Vallarta sipping beer and smoking many joints

and writing in a notebook occasionally. He wanted to get a little of all this down and send ii to Larry McMurtry.

"Larry:

"Phone calls to the states eight bucks apiece besides was ever a good board to bound my favorite ball of bullshit prose offen, it was you ..."

Like all about Black Maria. In many ways she was so great. She is quiet and has a kind of broody beauty. She cooks. She looks Mex and speaks Mex. She can even hassle Mex. She sounds out the Mayor of Puerto Vallarta as to how safe Kesey will be here in town. Hay tiempo, he says. The extradition takes forever. Very nice to know .

..

And yet Black Maria is not completely a Prankster. She wants to be a part of all this, she wants to do this thing, but
she does it without belief.
It is like the Mexican part of her Black Maria thing. She has all the trappings of Mexican—she looks it, she speaks it, her grandfather was even Mexican—but she is not Mexican. She is Carolyn Hannah of San Jose, California, under everything else, even the blood. He wrote in the notebook::Mev
ing the dark Indian

10 SECONDS LEFT, YOU FREAKING EE-JOT! ! ! !

body out of the Indian land weakened the Indian blood with chicken soup and matzoh
balls. So much of the fire concealed by the dark and broody beauty lies just that deep.

Because she does it without belief.
And yet it is very nice up here in this thatched perch atop the last house. A car heads up the street—Zonker and Black Maria coming back to the house. He peers over the edge at the car kicking up the dust, then writes in the notebook, it is a perfect lookout,
allowing me to see them, without them seeing me.

Many things. .. synch.

ZONKER AND BLACK MARIA DROVE DOWN THE ROAD, Scattering up the kids and the chickens and the dust, and Black Maria pointed up to the top of the house and said to Zonker:

"Look, there's Kesey." Then she looked out the window and stared at the jungle. "I bet he thinks we can't see him."

THE JIG IS UP. ZONKER BRINGS A TELEGRAM FROM PAUL

Robertson back in San Jose and it is a bear. It is not even a warning, it 5 SECONDS — 5 SECONDS LEFT — YOU REALLY JES GON’ SIT

THERE FOR THE SQUASH?

is final. THE JIG IS UP, is says. Meaning, it turned out, that the suicide ruse had been exposed and the cops knew he was in Puerto Vallarta.
Exposed?
—hell, the suicide prank had turned into a goddamn comic opera. For a start, Dee had pulled a sort of Dee-out, as Mountain Girl feared. Dee had driven up looking for a cliff near Humboldt Bay, about 250 miles north of San Francisco, up near Eureka, California, not far from the Oregon border in redwoods country. He got up to the last hill going up there and the panel truck wouldn't pull the hill. So he called into town for a tow truck and the garage man and the tow truck pulled the suicide vehicle up the last mile.

Hired and paid for and thanks a lot. Always nice to hire some help to commit suicide.

Next Dee dropped Kesey's distinctive sky-blue boots down to the shore below—but they hit the water instead and sank without a bubble. Next, the goddamned romantic suicide desolate foaming cliff was so goddamned desolate, nobody noticed the truck for about two weeks, despite the Ira Sandperl for President sign on the rear bumper.

Apparently people figured the old heap had been abandoned. The Humboldt county police finally checked it out on February 11. Next, the suicide note, which seemed so ineluctably convincing as Kesey and Mountain Girl smoked a few joints and soared into passages of Shelleyan
Weltschmerz
—it gave off a giddy scent of put-on, even to the straight cops of the Humboldt. There were certain inconsistencies. Like the part about the truck smashing into a redwood. Well—even in a Dee-out, Dee couldn't exactly ask the tow-truck man, Well, now that you've towed it up here, how about jamming it into a tree for me. Demma had really been bowled over to hear from Kesey. A lot of people, a lot of people who liked him, had really been worried that he was dead. And now here was Kesey calling him—
alive
—with a message for Faye and the whole thing. That was Saturday. The next night, Sunday, February 13, Demma dropped into Manuel's Mexican Restaurant in Santa Cruz, and there was his old friend Bob Levy. By way of making conversation, Levy says,