Kesey and Cowboy Neal on the Bus to Never Never Land.
[This was originally posted in 2008 or maybe 2007. At the time of the story's ultimate publication in 2008 I was recovering from cancer surgery. Fifteen years later that cancer has still not returned. There are certain graces we should thank the Divine for no matter what we conceive the Divine to be. The italics are from the preamble to the 2008 post.]
What I am posting was first put up about a year ago. This story was originally told to me by a friend of dubious character. I neither endorse any of the behaviors described by the storyteller, nor do I adopt his twisted world view. However, the tale told to me was a hoot and so I acted as the scrivener. The lurid details just had to be captured in print. The events clearly are a tad bit off center, I mean who would do such a thing? Still, the story just cried out to be told in a first-person voice and so I wrote it down that way. Resting around the house I simply have decided I need to get some new content up on the blog. Because of this inescapable period of inactivity my surgery has caused, I have had the chance revisit this and several other pieces.
The reason the earlier draft did not stay up is the same reason the current one will not stay up long. There are too many problematic elements in this narrative to leave exposed to public purview, especially in cyberspace.
Wild ideas abounded in the 1960s and early 1970s. In those years I was a young teen. You could find these exhortations and agitations in almost any LP that was released and in every new book that hit the shelves. Among those of my generation that chose to read, certain writers seemed to be touchstones. Vonnegut, Didion, Thompson, Pirsig and Wolfe were key crafters of the then modern cannon. Right or wrong, many of my peers attempted to live the realities detailed in the pages penned by these new apostles of hip and cool. It didn’t matter that these writers were simply chroniclers of the lives of iconoclasts who would have had no use for their books. Imitating what was said to be hip and cool was far easier than forging a strong truly individual personal style.
Tom Wolfe was one of the best writers of the era. In his appreciation of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test, Wolfe went on at length about a number of LSD fueled parties staged at Ken Kesey’s La Honda ranch. One of the wildest of these modern bacchanalias involved Kesey’s Pranksters hanging a huge banner out on the edge of highway that said WELCOME HELLS ANGELS not knowing if the wild bunch would show. But the Angels did show, fully clad in their leathers and just oozing with insanity. Make no mistake the Hell’s Angels were not nice people, not then and not now. However, in Wolfe’s recounting that night was serendipity to the maximum. Terrible and frightening monsters interacted with the generation of love, peace and astral projection all of them tripping and it ended blissfully.
I read the Acid Test when I was enjoying the summer between my 7th and 8th grades. Sitting by the pool I soaked all the stories of Kesey, Cassidy and the rest of the Pranksters in. It probably wasn’t the best choice of reading for such an impressionable mind as mine. The image of Neal Cassidy flipping his hammer again and again and trying to go further, to go beyond and break through the barrier that exists between true now and our perception of now was electrifying. The tales of acid use lingered in my brain. The conclusion I drew from Wolfe’s writing was a positive one, not a cautionary one.
As I remember, and it has been years since I have read the book, Cassidy was always trying to live totally and completely in the now. He believed that the time it took our neural networks to convey optical and aural information to our brain separated us from true now. To me Cowboy Neal’s eating of every drug possible to break the barrier down and move him as close to the now was righteous. Who knows, maybe he got there before the end. Four days short of his 42nd birthday, Cassidy was found dead next to a railroad track outside San Miguel D'Allende, Mexico. He had wandered out there in an altered state and died of exposure in the cold high desert night.
With what I had read in the Acid Test (and the mantra of the Grateful Dead’s The Other One playing nonstop in the background) I decided as a freshman in high school to take LSD. There had been a plan to make the experience as positive as possible. The plan was to spend the weekend with some friends, most of whom were not experienced but were ready to dip their toes in that swirling cosmic water, and drop acid for the first time together. One of our friends had just returned from Berkley with a belt filled with tons of orange sunshine. Sunshine was good clean shit and about the best that could be found anywhere at the time. I paid my money down and waited for the appointed weekend.
Isn’t it how it goes that the best laid plans of adventurers get waylaid? Due to my parents’ intervention, I was not going to get to experience tripping in the Leary way. Set and setting, friends, music and a controlled environment had been all planned out. Instead, it turned out that I had been signed up to go instead on a Baptist youth retreat with a hip young minister. My friends we not willing to wait an additional week to share their getting “experienced” with me so they gave me my hit to take with me and to do with as I pleased. In retrospect my choices made at this juncture were probably more in line with Kesey’s tactics than what was opted for by my friends.
This particular church retreat ran a Saturday afternoon and night in May at the beach home of one of the scions of our church. A big old early 20th century cedar shake covered place, the house had a large porch and faced the ocean a mere ½ block away. On a normal summer night, after the traffic died down and the rowdies went to sleep ,you could hear the ocean’ waves from the house’s open windows.
My memory is not strong but I think there were about twenty people on the trip excluding the hip young minister and some chaperones. The agenda was to spend some time on the beach, have a snack, hear a sermon and then go to the boardwalk for good clean Christian fun. This was Ocean City NJ mind you and there were no bars. Open intoxicants visible from the street were not permitted.
What to do, what to do? I had the power of the universe wrapped up in a small pill inside my pocket just waiting like an E ticket to be used at Disney. On the other hand, fire and damnation wrapped up in a fringe leather jacket was awaiting me in the speech of the hip young minister. This would be followed by a quasi-altar call. Acid or salvation, the lady or the tiger? About mid-evening on Friday night as our speaker was telling us about the evil of heroin, (he took it once and puked). What the fuck I thought and I dropped the tab. Quality control in the manufacture of LSD has always been a spotty affair. What I was about to discover was that I had taken a whole bunch of acid, enough for several people.
As I listened to exhortations for a submission to God’s will, the walls of that old beach house began to breathe. The breathing was slow at first but quickly picked up in pace. Then the textures of everything in the room seemed to take on an odd blurry but patterned quality. My tactile sense became confused. The carpet began to feel like gritty sand filled soft butter.
Raising his hands high the young zealot began to shout “Are you ready to commit your life to the love and care of Jesus Christ our savior?” (I think he was shouting). About this time my brain in its own special way began to scream MAJOR MALFUNCTION. I needed to get out of that room and into the night air RIGHT THEN. There wasn’t a straight line or a right angle left in that room anymore. Hell, there wasn't a solid object left in that room anymore. Damn, the air wasn’t really air anymore; it was more it was more of a velvety liquid. A viscous atmosphere didn’t frighten me but it was way beyond what I had previously thought was possible. Oh, I needed to be somewhere else, well anywhere else.
Clenching my rubbery knuckles, I made it through the rap. Despite the undulating waves of existence cresting over me I did not give in to the altar call and thus did not have to do one on one prayer and counseling with anybody. I bided my time as I waited for the promised trip up on the boardwalk.
The. sermon ended and we went outside. I was thankful to be outside, really thankful. Soon we would get our assigned rides up to the boards. At least I think it was outside. As if fate were truly just trying to fuck with me, I drew a ride up to the boardwalk with the impassioned twenty something one time heroin using seminarian in his Triumph Spitfire.
A Spitfire is a two-seater and sits really low to the ground. As a result, it seemed to travel like a rocket even at low speeds. Buildings were melting around me as we flew down the road. The minister and I engaged in what might have passed for casual conversation. Listening to his tale about the smack again, I interjected I had taken acid at some unspecific time in the past. He told me that the thought of dropping acid scarred him to death.
I watched the road in front of us that road turned into a snake, writhing and twisting and curling back to look me directly in my eyes. I remember muttering that LSD was scary stuff and that I would never take it again. The snake at this point in our conversation was looking at me with a bemused attitude. As we approached the boardwalk, the car slowed, then the snake evaporated.
Walking, well most likely shuffling up to the elevated boardwalk I took one look at the rides and knew I could not get anywhere near them, let alone on them. There was this gyroscope thing that had nine cars attached all twisting in circles. Three groups of seats would spin in a small circle and the bigger machine would spin the three sets of these seats in an even bigger circle. As I stood watching this machine lurch into faster and faster motions traces and lightning bolts were firing out everywhere. Surely all aboard that hell forged contraption would die and most likely I would be going with them when it crashed to the ground if I remained where I then stood. I staggered out onto the center section of the boardwalk. Sweating and cold at the same time I tried to put one foot in front of the other.
It was at this point reality came completely unhinged for me. Suddenly and without warning I was floating seven stories above my body. I could see for miles out over the ocean. I could look down and see my body making forward progress along the boardwalk. It suddenly became apparent to me that I had to control my body much a puppeteer manipulates a marionette and boy that sucked. I wanted to watch the seagulls circling so close that I could touch them. Suddenly I was everywhere and everything all at once and it made total sense.
On the other had as a puppeteer I was failure for I stubbed my toe and the moment of “all being” was over. Back in my body and barely avoiding a face plant on those creosote-soaked planks I realized that if I were to have any chance of surviving the evening I had to get back to the house. “Hey chaperone I have a stomachache so can I go back to the house?” At least that is what I think I said. Given what was going on in and out of my brain it could have been anything including mumbled non-words. Hell, for all I know I could have been breathing colors at him.
The rest of the evening had its moments. I tried to take a bath back at the house thinking cool water might help me hold my mental focus. As I sat in the bathtub for the life of me, I could not figure out how to use the stopper. Once out of the tub I decided to read but I kept falling into the cover of the book I had with me. The cover illustration was a psychedelic mandala. My consciousness was merging with the patterns on the book’s cover. And somehow before the night ended, I wound up biting somebody on the ass. We were fully clothed and there was no sexuality involved but it seemed like a good idea at the time.
The acid while of a high dose was clean. I think I fell asleep. Who knows I may have just gone into a restive semi-catatonic state. All I remember of this period was that I was mentally watching the witches from Macbeth stir phosphorescent orange cauldrons. When I came to (or reengaged in linear thought) sometime in the morning I went to the beach and watched the sun move across the sky. Inanimate objects were no longer breathing but at the time I was pretty sure the sun was what was left of a nuclear explosion. Yet, I was still alive.
Fuck Tom Wolfe that was some pretty scary shit.
The bottom line was that I didn’t feel enlightened. Hell, I didn’t feel like I had become one with the universe, but I was different and probably always would be from that moment on. To this day I wonder if there is a remnant of what my conscious self even left from the night before I took that dose. I am not sure but hey I am not unhappy with what I have become. But I may not have needed acid to get here. And you know what else; I don’t believe everything that I read anymore. And one last thing I am pretty sure if you are going to be a real individual it doesn’t come from trying to imitate someone else especially a Merry Prankster.
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