The Red Tide
F
OCKING RED TIDE, MAN, AND EVERYBODY IN MANZANILLO is up tight. Tropic of Cancer, heat 110 degrees, no wind, many mosquitoes, and the red tide killing the fish. Thousands, tens of thousands focking dead fish floating belly up in the red tide. The stench you would not believe, and there is something in the air spewed up from the ocean that makes your eyes smart. Some people they feel like they have it in the lungs, like the flu. There is no greater calamity than the red tide, because we live on the fishing here in Manzanillo. Unless it is the American crazies. On top of the red tide, appearing like they rose up out of the red tide itself, we have the American crazies. Focking plague themselves, riding about in a devilish criminal bus. They ride into the plaza, near the great jaracanda tree, in a devilish bus covered in crazed fluorescent cholera flowers, gaudier than the red blossoms of Manzanillo's great jaracanda tree
RED TIDE!
and old women and children say, “¡Diablo!”, and cross themselves,
which the American crazies think is very funny. We do not, however.
The biggest of them, with a great mocking grin and American lightbulb eyeballs and pants of many colors, comes into our marketplace with a blond woman whom he calls Gretch and a trail of blond children behind him, rolling his grinning head around until he sees that all the world is watching, and then he throws his great arms of an ape up into the air and turns his eyeballs up and shouts:
“¡EAT ALLEY! ¡EAT ALLEY! ¡TAKE ME TO EAT ALLEY!”
“You mean the
market,
señor?”
Then he grins and stares with an intensity at the poor mestizo as if he has just uttered the most penetrating remark in the history of all Mexico and says:
“Yeah! Yeah! Right! Right! Right!”
And all the world gives way, wondering, as this strange train goes escombering into the marketplace.
There is much talk here about the crazies. Many think that these people are Germans, refugees from a cabala that failed. They mistake their strange talk for German. Some people think that they are American gangsters, in hiding. But I think that they came up out of the red tide.
¡AGUAJE!
In truth! Out in the ocean, where the water was once deepest blue-green, or, at worst, yellow-green near the beach, there are now vast streaks of reddish water, as if there were a channel cutting through the ocean itself, stretching for miles, hot and turbid, thick as mucus. The fish die almost at once when they enter it. I have watched a mullet come upon it. She swam from the blue-green water into the red tide and suddenly she is keeling over, as if paralyzed, then struggling to come upright again, then thrashing about crazily as if dizzy, then heading for the surface, where she whirls, flashing in the sunlight, then collapses, keeling over on her side again, paralyzed, then sinks, and then, by and by, without doubt, floats back up, dead, to join the great stinking
school of dead fish, dead crabs, dead sea bass, mullets, thread herring, mackerel, shrimp, even barnacles, coquinas, sailfish, marlin, porpoises, turtles, huge gobs of reeking gluey tissue floating in a grisly death school on the red tide. Struck deadâ
âby what? By the plankton. All the world knows that the plankton cause the red tideâas if that could be called a cause. For the plankton are always there, millions of invisible animiculae, thousands to a cupful of seawater. It is they who reflect blue-green and give our ocean its color, although elsewhere they reflect red and make the Red Sea red, without harm to any animal, and the Vermillion Sea vermillion and the Lake of Blood a rose-red milk of sulphur. But here, off the placid Bay of Manzanillo in the Pacific Ocean, this little invisible ⦠um ⦠dinoflagellate,
Gymnodinium brevis,
just one cell to him and two whips, whipping and darting about, begins to multiply. And suddenly he appears to
explode,
should one look at him under a microscope, as Charles Darwin once did, and he divides into two dinoflagellates, and they divide into four, and so on, in a progression of utmost rapidity until there are in truth ten million of them in a cup of water, and the water turns red from their red pigment, which reflects light, until finally, from the focking millions of explosions, a poison as powerful as aconitine gives off into the waterâbut
why?
â
why
has it started
now
, this malignant explosion of the plankton intoâ
âone vast immortal Group Animicula, fifteen miles long and three miles wide, immortal, in truth. The first little
Gymnodinium brevis
still lives just as surely as the 128-billionth as the red tide spreads. For they increase simply by cell division. The great marlins die, the porpoises, all the creatures of the sea die, and the fishermen die, but the
Gymnodinium
is immortal, the instant brother of every
Gymnodinium brevis
who ever lived, no past, no future, only Now, and immortal, the little fockers. No
cause,
señor, no
starting point
in time, just the point at which your game intersected the 256-octillionth
Gymnodinium
and all his ancestors and successors in old Manzanillo and brought you up tight. We
know only that yesterday there were fish, and today the fish are dead and the poison plankton and the American crazies are alive, and tomorrow we must find out the cause and the cureâor could it
possibly
be that yesterday and tomorrow are merely more of Now stretching fifteen miles and three miles wide immortalâ
THEN, NOW, ESAU, JUDITH, BASHEMATH, REUEL, SUSPENDED in the mucus; what a bummer. Mountain Girl lies on the bed in her room; staring at the ceiling; a pisspoor job of plastering it is, too; and all of them suspended in 110-degree mucus. She; Kesey; Faye; their children; George Walker; the new chick, Black Maria; have a house by the beach; new; raw certified Rat construction; cinderblock and plaster; she could scrabble through it with her hands. Fifty yards away, across the beach road, The Rat Shack; this being a Purina Chow factory;
yep;
inhabited by Babbs, Gretchen Fetchin and Babbs's children; a curious little building empty of Purina Chow and glistening with tiles inside. All of them gittin stuck and stranded like flies in this 110-degree mucus of Manzanillo with the red tide stinking the place up for good measure; Hagen, with his leg in a cast; Julius Karpin, the Hardest Head in the West, from Berkeley, of the Prankster outer circle, here with
his
leg in a cast. 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.âEsau was a skillful hunter, and Jacob was a quiet man, fond of home; 14. Which was the first born?âEsau; 15. Did he value his birthright? The proof?âHe 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?âSee No. 15; 23. Whom did Esau choose as his wives?âJudith and Bashemath, Hittites. Gen. 26:34.; 24. Did his parents approve his choice?âNo; 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 â¦
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 â¦
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.