The Electric Suit
T
HROUGH THE SHEET OF SUNLIGHT AT THE DOORWAY AND down the incline into the crazy gloom comes a panel truck and in the front seat is Kesey. The Chief; out on bail. I half expect the whole random carnival to well up into a fluorescent yahoo of incalculably insane proportions. In fact, everybody is quiet. It is all cool.
Kesey gets out of the truck with his eyes down. He's wearing a sport shirt, an old pair of pants, and some Western boots. He seems to see me for an instant, but there is no hello, not a glimmer of recognition. This annoys me, but then I see that he doesn't say hello to anybody. Nobody says anything. They don't all rush up or anything. It's as if ⦠Kesey is back and what is there to say about it.
Then Mountain Girl booms out: “How was jail, Kesey!”
Kesey just shrugs. “Where's my shirt?” he says.
Mountain Girl fishes around in the debris over beside a bunch of theater seats and gets the shirt, a brown buckskin shirt with an
open neck and red leather lacings. Kesey takes off the shirt he has on. He has huge latissimi dorsi muscles making his upper back fan out like manta-ray wings. Then he puts on the buckskin shirt and turns around.
Instead of saying anything, however, he cocks his head to one side and walks across the garage to the mass of wires, speakers, and microphones over there and makes some minute adjustment. “ ⦠The Nowhere Mine ⦔ As if now everything is under control and the fine tuning begins.
From out of the recesses of the garageâI didn't even know they were thereâhere comes a woman and three children. Kesey's wife Faye, their daughter Shannon, who is six, and two boys, Zane, five, and Jed, three. Faye has long, sorrel-brown hair and is one of the prettiest, most beatific-looking women I ever saw. She looks radiant, saintly. Kesey goes over to her and picks up each of the kids, and then Mountain Girl brings over her baby, Sunshine, and he picks up Sunshine a moment. All rightâ
Then Kesey loosens up and smiles, as if he just thought of something. It is as if he just heard Mountain Girl's question about how was jail. “The only thing I was worried about was this tooth,” he says. He pops a dental plate out of the roof of his mouth and pushes a false front tooth out of his mouth with his tongue. “I had the awfulest feeling,” he says. “I was going to be in court or talking to reporters or something, and this thing was going to fall down like this and I was going to start gumming my words.” He gums the words “start gumming my words,” to illustrate.
Three weeks later he was to replace it with a tooth with an orange star and green stripes on it, an enameled dens incisus lateral bearing a Prankster flag. One day at a gas station the manager, a white guy, gets interested in the tooth and calls over his helper, a colored guy, and says, “Hey, Charlie, come over here and show this fellow your tooth.” So Charlie grins and bares his upper teeth, revealing a gold tooth with a heart cut out in the gold so that a white enamel heart shows through. Kesey grins back and
then bares
his
toothâthe colored guy stares a moment and doesn't say anything. He doesn't even smile. He just turns away. A little while later, down the road, Kesey says very seriously, very sorrowfully, “That was wrong of me. I shouldn't have done that.” “Done what?” “I outniggered him,” says Kesey.
Outniggered him! Kesey. has kept these countryisms, like “the awfulest feeling,” all through college, graduate school, days of literary celebration â¦
“How did it happen?” says Freewheeling Frank, meaning the tooth.
“He got in a fight with a Hell's Angel,” says Mountain Girl.
“What!â” Freewheeling Frank is truly startled.
“Yeah!” says Mountain Girl. “The bastard hit him with a chain!”
“What!” says Frank. “Where? What was his name!”
Kesey gives Mountain Girl a look.
“Naw,” she says.
“What was his name!” Frank says. “What did he look like!”
“Mountain Girl is shucking you,” Kesey says. “I was in a wreck.”
Mountain Girl looks repentant. Angels' duels are no joke with Frank. Kesey breaks up ⦠the vibrations. He sits down in one of the old theater seats. He is just talking in a soft, conversational tone, with his head down, just like he is having conversation with Mountain Girl or somebody.
“It's funny,” he says. “There are guys in jail who have been in jail so much, that's their whole thing. They're jail freaks. They've picked up the whole jail languageâ”
âeverybody starts gathering around, sitting in the old theater seats or on the floor. The mysto steam begins risingâ
“âonly it isn't their language, it's the guards', the cops', the D.A.'s, the judge's. It's all numbers. One of them says, âWhat happened to so-and-so?' And the other one says, âOh, he's over in 34,' which is a cellblock. âThey got him on a 211'âthey have numbers for different things, just like you hear on a police radioâ'
they got him on a 211, but he can cop to a 213 and get three to five, one and a half with good behavior.'
“The cops like that. It makes them feel better if you play their game. They'll chase some guy and run him down and pull guns on him and they're ready to blow his head off if he moves a muscle, but then as soon as they have him in jail, one of them will come around and ask him how his wife is and he's supposed to say she's O.K., thanks, and ask him about his kids, like now that we've played the cops-and-robbers part of the game, you can go ahead and like me. And a lot of them in there go along with that, because that's all they know.
“When you're running, you're playing their game, too. I was up in Haight-Ashbury and I heard something hit the sidewalk behind me and it was a kid had fallen out the window. A lot of people rushed up and a woman was there crying and trying to pick him up, and I knew what I should do is go up and tell her not to move him but I didn't. I was afraid I was going to be recognized. And then up the street I saw a cop writing out parking tickets and I was going to go up and tell him to call an ambulance. But I didn't. I just kept going. And that night I was listening to the news on television and they told about a child who fell out of a window and died in the hospital.”
And that's what the cops-and-robbers game does to you.
Only it is
me
thinking it. Figuring out parables, I look around at the faces and they are all watching Kesey and, I have not the slightest doubt, thinking:
and that's what the cops-and-robbers game does to you
. Despite the skepticism I brought here,
I
am suddenly experiencing
their
feeling. I am sure of it. I feel like I am in on something the outside world, the world I came from, could not possibly comprehend, and it is a metaphor, the whole scene, ancient and vast, vaster than â¦
TWO GUYS COME IN OUT OF THE DAYLIGHT ON HARRIET Street, heads by the looks of them, and walk up to Kesey. One of
them is young with a sweatshirt on and Indian beads with an amulet hanging from the beadsâa routine acid-head look, in other words. The other one, the older one, is curiously neat, however. He has long black hair, but neat, and a slightly twirly mustache, like a cavalier, but neat, and a wildly flowered shirt, but neat and well-tailored and expensive, and a black leather jacket, only not a motorcycle jacket but tailored more like a coat, and a pair of English boots that must have set him back $25 or $30. At first he looks like something out of Late North Beach, the boho with the thousand-dollar wardrobe. But he has a completely sincere look. He has a thin face with sharp features and a couple of eyes burning with truth oil. He says his name is Gary Goldhill and he wants to interview Kesey for the Haight-Ashbury newspaper
The Oracle
, and when could he do thatâbut right away it is obvious that he has something to get off his chest that can't wait.
“The thing is, Ken”âhe has an English accent, but it is a middle-class accent, a pleasant sort of Midlands accentâ“the thing is, Ken, a lot of people are very concerned about what you've said, or what the newspapers say you've said, about graduating from acid. A lot of people look up to you, Ken, you're one of the heroes of the psychedelic movement”âhe has a kind of Midlands England way of breaking up long words into syllables, psy-che-delic move-mentâ“and they want to know what you mean. A very beautiful thing is happening in Haight-Ashbury, Ken. A lot of people are opening the doors in their minds for the first time, but people like you have to help them. There are only two directions we can go, Ken. We can isolate ourselves in a monastery or we can organize a religion, along the lines of the League for Spiritual Discovery”âthe League for Spi-ri-tu-al Dis-cov-eryâ“and have acid and grass legalized as sacraments, so everyone won't have to spend every day in fear waiting for the knock on the door.”
“It can be worse to take it as a sacrament,” Kesey says.
“You've been away for almost a year, Ken,” Goldhill says.
“You may not know what's been happening in Haight-Ashbury. It's growing, Ken, and thousands of people have found something very beautiful, and they're very open and loving, but the fear and the paranoia, Ken, the waiting for the knock on the doorâit's causing some terrible things, Ken. It's re-spon-si-ble for a lot of bad trips. People are having bad trips, Ken, because they take acid and suddenly they feel that any moment there may be a knock on the door. We've got to band together. You've got to help us, Ken, and not work against us.”
Kesey looks up, away from Goldhill, out across the gloom of the garage. Then he speaks in a soft, far-off voice, with his eyes in the distance:
“If you don't realize that I've been helping you with every fiber in my body ⦠if you don't realize that everything I've done, everything I've gone through ⦔
âit is rising and risingâ
“I know, Ken, but the repressionâ”
“We're in a period now like St. Paul and the early Christians,” Kesey says. “St. Paul said, if they shit on you in one city, move on to another city, and if they shit on you in that city, move on to another cityâ”
“I know, Ken, but you're telling people to stop taking acid, and they're not going to stop. They've opened up doors in their minds they never knew existed, and a very beautiful thing, and then they read in the papers that somebody they've looked up to is suddenly telling them to stop.”
“There's a lot of things I can't tell the newspapers,” says Kesey. His eyes are still focused long-range, away from Goldhill. “One night in Mexico, in Manzanillo, I took some acid and I threw the I Ching. And the I Chingâthe great thing about the I Ching is, it never sends you Valentines, it slaps you in the face when you need itâand it said we had reached the end of something, we weren't going anywhere any longer, it was time for a new directionâand I went outside and there was an electrical storm, and there was lightning everywhere and I pointed to the sky and
lightning flashed and all of a sudden I had a second skin, of lightning, electricity, like a suit of electricity, and I knew it was in us to be superheroes and that we could become superheroes or nothing.” He lowers his eyes. “I couldn't tell this to the newspapers. How could I? I wouldn't be put back in jail, I'd be put in Pescadero.”
ârisingârisingâ
“But most people aren't ready for that, Ken,” Goldhill says. “They're just beginning to open the doors in their mindsâ”
“But once you've been through that door, you can't just keep going through it over and over againâ”
“âand somebody's got to help them through that doorâ”
“Don't say stop plunging into the forest,” Kesey says. “Don't say stop being a pioneer and come back here and help these people through the door. If Leary wants to do that, that's good, it's a good thing and somebody should do it. But somebody has to be the pioneer and leave the marks for others to follow.” Kesey looks up again, way out into the gloom. “You've got to have some faith in what you're trying to do. It's easy to have faith as long as it goes along with what you already know. But you've got to have faith in us all the way. Somebody like GleasonâGleason was with us this far.” Kesey spread his thumb and forefinger about two inches apart. “He was with us as long as our fantasy coincided with his. But as soon as we went on further, he didn't understand it, so he was going against us. He had ⦠no faith.”
No faith!âbay fog turns steam, hissing in the old craniumâ
Faith! Further! And it is an exceedingly strange feeling to be sitting here in the Day-Glo, on poor abscessed Harriet Street, and realize suddenly that in this improbably ex-pie factory Warehouse garage I am in the midst of Tsong-Isha-pa and the sangha communion, Mani and the wan persecuted at The Gate, Zoroaster, Maidhyoimaongha and the five faithful before Vishtapu, Mohammed and Abu Bekr and the disciples amid the pharisaical Koreish of Mecca, Gautama and the brethren in the wilderness leaving the blood-and-kin families of their pasts for
the one true family of the sangha inner circleâin short, true mystic brotherhoodâonly in poor old Formica polyethylene 1960s America without a grain of desert sand or a shred of palm leaf or a morsel of manna wilderness breadfruit overhead, picking up vibrations from Ampex tapes and a juggled Williams Lok-Hed sledge hammer, hooking down mathematical lab drugs, LSD-25, IT-290, DMT, instead of soma water, heading out in American flag airport coveralls and an International Harvester busâyet for real!âamid the marshmallow shiny black shoe massesâ