The Bladder Totem
F
OR TWO OR THREE DAYS IT WENT LIKE THAT FOR ME IN THE garage with the Merry Pranksters waiting for Kesey. The Pranksters took me pretty much for granted. One of the Flag People, a blonde who looked like Doris Day but was known as Doris Delay, told me I ought to put some more ⦠well,
color
⦠into my appearance. That hurt, Doris Delay, but I know you meant it as a kindly suggestion. She really did. So I kept my necktie on to show that I had pride. But nobody gave a damn about that. I just hung around and Cassady flipped his sledge hammer, spectral tapes played, babies cried, mihs got flipped out, bus glowed, Flag People walk, freaks loop in outta sunlight on old Harriet Street, and I only left to sleep for a few hours or go to the bathroom.
The bathroom; yes. There was no plumbing in the Warehouse, not even any cold water. You could go out into a little vacant lot next door, behind a board fence, and take a stance amid the great fluffy fumes of human piss that were already lifting up
from the mud, or you could climb a ladder through a trap door that led up to the old hotel where there were dead flophouse halls lined with rooms of a kind of spongy scabid old wood that broke apart under your glance and started crawling, vermin, molting underlife. It was too rank even for the Pranksters. Most of them went up to the Shell station on the corner. So I went up to the Shell station on the corner, at Sixth and Howard. I asked where the bathroom is and the guy gives me The Lookâthe rotten look of O.K., you're not even buying gas but you want to use the bathroomâand finally he points inside the office to the tin can. The key to the bathroom is chained to a big empty Shell oil can. I pick it up and walk out of the office part, out onto the concrete apron, where the Credit Card elite are tanking up and stretching their legs and tweezing their undershorts out of the aging waxy folds of their scrota, and I am out there carrying a Shell oil can in both hands like a bladder totem, around the corner, to the toilet, andâall right, so what. But suddenly it hits me that for the Pranksters this is
permanent
. This is the way they live. Men, women, boys, girls, most from middle-class upbringings, men and women and boys and girls and children and babies, this is the way they have been living for months, for years, some of them, across America and back, on the bus, down to the Rat lands of Mexico and back, sailing like gypsies along the Servicenter fringes, copping urinations, fencing with rotten looksâit even turns out they have films and tapes of their duels with service-station managers in the American heartland trying to keep their concrete bathrooms and empty Dispensa-Towels safe from the Day-Glo crazies â¦
Back inside the Warehouse. Everything keeps up. Slowly I am getting more and more of a strange feeling about the whole thing. It is not just the costumes, the tapes, the bus and all that, however. I have been through some crewcut college fraternity weekends that have been weirder-looking and -sounding, insane on the beano. The ⦠feeling begins when the Flag People start coming up to me and saying things like-well, when Cassady is
flipping the sledge hammer, with his head down in the mull of the universe, just mulling the hell out of it, and
blam
, the sledge hammer, he misses it, and it slams onto the concrete floor of the garage and one of the Flag People says, “You know, the Chief says when Cassady misses it, it's never an accidentâ”
For a start, the term the “Chief.” The Pranksters have two terms for referring to Kesey. If it is some mundane matter they're talking about, it's just Kesey, as in “Kesey got a tooth knocked out.” But if they are talking about Kesey as the leader or teacher of the whole group, he becomes the Chief. At first this struck me as phony. But then it turned to â¦
mysto
, as the general mysto steam began rising in my head. This steam, I can actually hear it inside my head, a great ssssssssss, like what you hear if you take too much quinine. I don't know if this happens to anybody else or not. But if there is something startling enough, fearful, awesome, strange, or just weird enough, something I sense I can't cope with, it is as if I go on Red Alert and the fogging steam starts â¦
“âwhen Cassady misses, it's never an accident. He's saying something. There's something going on in the room, something's getting up tight, there's bad vibrations and he wants to break it up.”
They mean it. Everything in everybody's life is ⦠significant. And everybody is alert, watching for the meanings. And the vibrations. There is no end of vibrations. Sometime after that I was up in Haight-Ashbury with some kid, not a Prankster, a kid from another communal group, and the kid was trying to open an old
secrétaire
, the kind that opens out into a desktop you can write on, and he pinches his finger in a hinge. Only instead of saying Aw shit or whatever, the whole thing becomes a parable of life, and he says:
“That's
typ
ical. You see that? Even the poor cat who designed this thing was playing the game they wanted him to play. You see how this thing is designed, to open
out
? It's always
out
, into, it's got to be
out
, into
your
life, the old bullshit
thrust
âyou
know?âthey don't even
think
about itâyou know?âthis is just the way they design things and you're here and they're there and they're going to keep coming
at
you. You see that kitchen table?” There is an old enamel-top kitchen table you can see through a doorway in there. “Now that's actually
better design
, it actually is, than all this ornate shit, I mean, I truly dig that kitchen table, because the whole thing is right
there
âyou know?âit's there to
receive
, that's what it's all about, it's passive, I mean what the hell is a table anyway? Freud said a table is a symbol of a woman, with her shanks open, balling it, in dreamsâyou know?âand what is this a symbol of?” He points to the
secrétaire
. “It's a symbol of fuck-you, Fuck
you
, right?” And so on, until I want to put my hand on his shoulder and say why don't you just kick it in the kneecaps and let it go at that.
But anyway this talk just flows. Everyone is picking up on the most minute incidents as if they are metaphors for life itself. Everybody's life becomes more fabulous, every minute, than the most fabulous book. It's phony, goddamn it ⦠but
mysto
⦠and after a while it starts to infect you, like an itch, the roseola.
There is also a lot about games. The straight world outside, it seems, is made up of millions of people involved, trapped, in games they aren't even aware of. A guy they call Hassler comes in out of the sunlight screen on Harriet Street and, zoom, he doesn't even wait for the metaphors. I never got into an abstract discussion with a total stranger so fast in my life. We began talking right away about the games. Hassler is a young guy, good-looking with a wide face and long hair with bangs just exactly like Prince Valiant in the comic strip and a turtleneck jersey on with metal stars. on it, of the sort generals wear on their shoulders, and he says, “Games so permeate our culture that ⦔ rumble rumble ego games judge everything screwed up brainwashing tell ourselves “ ⦠keep on oppositioning”âhere Hassler stiffens his hands and brings his fingertips together like a karate collisionâ
But my mind is wandering. I am having a hard time listening
because I am fascinated by a little plastic case with a toothbrush and toothpaste in it that Hassler has tucked under one thumb. It is shuddering around in front of my eyes as Hassler's hands opposition ⦠What a curious bunch of bohos. This guy with the generals' stars on his jersey is giving a kind of vesper service lecture on the sins of man andâa toothbrush!âbut of course!âhe brushes after every meal!âhe really does. He brushes after every meal despite the fact that they are living here in this garage, like gypsies, and there is no hot water, no toilet, no beds, except for a couple of mattresses in which the dirt, the dust, the damps, and the scuds are all one, melded, with the stuffing, and they stretch out on the scaffoldings, in the bus, in the back of a pickup truck, nostrils mildewingâ
“âbut you know what? People are beginning to see through the warf of the games. Not just the heads and everybody, but all sorts of people. You take in California. There's always been this pyramidâ”
Here Hassler outlines a pyramid in the air with his hands and I watch, fascinated, as the plastic toothbrush case shiny shiny slides up one incline of the pyramidâ
“âthey're transcending the bullshit,” says Hassler, only his voice is earnest and clear and sweet like a high-school valedictorian's, as if he just said
may next year's seniors remember our
motto
â“transcending the bullshitâ”
âa nice line of light there along the plastic, a straight rigid gleam from the past, from wherever Hassler came from. Now I'm doing it again, ah, that amiable itch, I just extracted a metaphor, a piece of transcendent bullshit, from this freaking toothbrush caseâ
“âtranscending the bullshitâ”
A TALL GUY COMES INTO THE WAREHOUSE WEARING SOME kind of blue and orange outfit like a mime harlequin's and with an orange Day-Glo mask painted on his face, so that he looks extraordinarily
like The Spirit, if you remember that comic strip. This, I am told, is Ken Babbs, who used to be a helicopter pilot in Vietnam. I get to talking to him and I ask him what it was like in Vietnam and he says to me, very seriously:
“You really want to know what it was like?”
“Yeah.”
“Come over here. I'll show you.”
So he leads me back into the garage and he points to a cardboard box lying on the floor, just lying there amid all the general debris and madness.
“It's all in there.”
“It's all in there?”
“Right, right, right.”
I reach in there and lift out a typewritten manuscript, four or five hundred pages. I leaf through. It's a novel, about Vietnam. I look at Babbs. He gives me a smile of good fellowship with his Day-Glo mask glowing and crinkling up.
“It's all in there?” I say. “Then I guess it takes a while to get it.”
“Yeah, yeah, right! right! right!” says Babbs, breaking into a laugh, as if I just said the funniest thing in the world. “Yeah! Yeah! Hah hah hah hah hah hah hah Right! Right!” with the mask glowing and bouncing around on his face. I lower the novel back into the box, and for days I would notice Babbs's novel about Vietnam lying out there on the floor, out in the middle of everything, as if waiting for a twister to whip it up and scatter it over San Francisco County, and Babbs would be somewhere around saying to some other bemused soul: “Yeah, yeah, right! right! right!”
The Merry Pranksters were all rapidly assembling, waiting for Kesey. George Walker arrives. Walker has on no costume. He is just like some very clean-cut blond college kid wearing a T-shirt and corduroy pants, smiling and outgoing, just a good West Coast golden boy except for a few random notes like the Lotus racing car he has outside, painted with orange Day-Glo so that it lights up at dusk, skidding around the corners of the California
suburbs in four-wheel drifts. And Paul Foster. Foster, I am told, is some kind of mad genius, a genius at computers, with all sorts of firms with names like Techniflex, Digitron, Solartex, Automaton, trying to hunt him down to lay money on him to do this or that for them ⦠Whether he is a genius or not, I couldn't say. He certainly looks mad enough. He is hunched over in a corner, in a theater seat, an emaciated figure but with a vast accumulation of clothes. It looks like he has on about eight pairs of clown's pants, one on top of the other, each one filthier than the next one, all black, sooty, torn, mungey and fungous. His head is practically shaven and he is so thin that all the flesh seems to be gone off his head and when he contracts his jaw muscles it is as if some very clever anatomical diagram has been set in motion with little facial muscles, striations, sheathes, ligaments, tissues, nodules, integuments that nobody ever suspected before bunching up, popping out, springing into definition in a complex chain reaction. And he contracts his jaw muscles all the time, concentrating, with his head down and his eyes burning, concentrating on a drawing he is doing on a pad of paper, an extremely small but crucial drawing by the looks of his concentration â¦
Black Maria sits on a folding chair and smiles ineffably but says nothing. One of the Flag People, a thin guy, tells me about Mexicans strung out on huaraches. Doris Delay tells meâ
“They're off on their own freak,” Hassler continues, “and it may not look like much, but they're starting to transcend the bullshit. There's this old trinity, Power, Position, Authority, and why should they worship these old gods and these old forms of authorityâ”
“Fuck God ⦠ehhhhh ⦠Fuck God ⦔
This is a voice behind a blanket curtain to one side. Somebody is back there rapping off what Hassler just said.
“Fuck God. Up with the Devil.”
It is a very sleepy, dreamy voice, however. The curtain pulls back and standing there is a wiry little guy who looks like a pirate. Behind him, back in there behind the curtain, all sorts of
wires, instruments, panels, speakers are all piled up, a glistening heap of electronic equipment, and the tape is back there going ⦠“In the Nowhere Mine ⦔ The guy looks like a pirate, as I said, with long black hair combed back Tarzan-style, and a mustache, and a gold ring through his left earlobe. He stares out, sleepily. In fact, he is a Hell's Angel. His name is Freewheeling Frank. He has on the Hell's Angels' “colors,” meaning a jacket with insignia, a jacket with the sleeves cut off and the skull with the helmet on it and the wings and a lot of other arcane symbols.