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 Excerpted
From Chapter 12
The
following material is copyrighted and may not be reproduced
in any
form without the express consent of the publisher.
It was a fast, dark drive over unpaved road and sand dunes. Raging
through the night, Nors squeezed my thigh. He was going to meet Dean
Moriarty, Kerouac's hero of On The Road. In real life, Neal
Cassady. I knew what that meant to him.
We disembarked in blackness and the sound of slapping sea. A
low-ceilinged house, Mexican/Eichler style, lots of rooms.
Apparently, everybody slept. Gordon Frazer led us to a right front bedroom.
"You kin use Mountain Girl's room tonight. She's with...she's
with George, man"--our new friend sounded hesitant, like we
shouldn't know that--"You'll have to ask her tomorrow."
Left alone in the room, we shied away from the bed where leftover
covers intertwined like sweating flesh. We stayed away from someone
else's love altar. Instead we unrolled our blanket near a wall and
lay still and separate in the buzzing, night heat.
In the morning, the main room filled with racing children, longhaired
men and women. The core group of Merry Pranksters. A woman plunked
peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on long tables.
The children ate in shifts. She left some for us too. Like we were
children. Nors wolfed his-- ambrosia.
Afterwards, Mountain Girl--six feet tall, two-toned hair--who just
had a baby rumored to be Ken's, even though he had a wife--led us
outside toward the Merry Prankster's bus. She didn't explain. We
followed her. By now I'd learned her real name was Carolyn Adams,
descendent of the presidential Adams.
Outside, Nors jostled my elbow. "Neal Cassady is here someplace!"
In the daylight we could see that The Merry Pranksters occupied two
houses separated by a wide expanse of sand. The bus--an old school
bus painted with psychedelic swirls--was parked midway, a gathering
place. Some days, Gordon had said, the Pranksters made attempts to
reflurbish it, 3/4 of them stoned at all times.
In the light, Mountain Girl seemed taller than her full--bodied
statuesque 6'. She toted her newborn infant daughter to the ocean,
bent and dangled towheaded baby Sunshine over the water, her own dyed
blonde hair coming in dark at the roots.
She rinsed a wad of brushes at the water's edge, came up on the sand
and oversaw the bus painting.
"You kin do this part." She shoved a small brush my way.
She didn't even look at me.
I accepted the brush like a scepter. Gordon, shining, handsome,
rocked, undulated up close to us, blowing a joint. On the hinge of a
sinewy arm he flipped the plump burning number into our faces. Nors
slipped his fingers around it and sucked it up between Julie Christie
lips, more energetically than I had ever seen anyone suck anything.
He gave it to me, eyes glittering like blue Christmas tree lights
with flecks of stroboscopic flash.
Gordon shimmied, a beach man snake. I grabbed the joint and sucked.
Left high to paint the bus, life under the brush got ugly. Every
stroke became choppy like the cacophonous arrhythmia of my heart.
What else was in the Pranksters' pot?
An overly long, metallic two hours later, Mountain Girl came back to
scrutinize. I saw her coming, stepped aside.
"Who did this?" she barked about the flap behind the front,
narrow, passenger-side window. "Look's like a kid did it."
She scowled.
Grateful for Mountain Girl's stoned memory loss--she should have
remembered it was me--I crouched like a kid, on the bus running
board, not saying a thing.
Two men emerged from behind the bus. Mountain Girl hailed them.
"Ken, Neal!"
"It's too hot to paint anymore now," she stopped us at the
men's arrival. "Do it later." The painting project
dismissed, she navigated from tall hips on long legs toward a meaty,
curly gold-haired man who slipped his arm around her waist.
This must be Kesey.
Nors dropped his brush on the fender. "Did she say Neal, too,
man?" he asked me.
"She said Neal."
Blushing, panting, Nors loped toward Mountain Girl and the golden
writer hero Kesey. I followed, hidden from Mountain Girl in Nors' shadow.
Nors looked past them for someone else, his eyes falling first upon a
clean-cut, black-haired, sky-blue-eyed Lancelot who'd come to join
Kesey on his right. Nors looked at me in triumph--he was in love.
"Neal Cassady?" He affirmed shyly.
"No," Mountain Girl shook her head. "That's only Babs."
Then a gaunt, grizzled, short 50's hair man who looked to be at least
sixty years old--twitching, talking to himself--bobbed and wove out
from behind Ken Kesey. I could see why it had taken him a long time
to walk a few feet with Kesey. The grizzled man rocked and tremored
from the shoulders like someone had held him there and was shaking
him out. He tremored toward us and clamped a skeletal hand on Nors'
shoulder, quipping, laughing, talking back to himself as he spoke.
"Who's asking?--Who's asking? Har, hah!"
Gordon prodded Nors in the ribs: "Nors, meet Neal--Dean Moriarty
from On The Road, to you."
Nors, befuddled, looked from the image of the first, hero-handsome,
deep blue-eyed guy on Ken's right, to the bobbing, irritated old man
who was everywhere at once.
Gordon, obviously embarrassed in front of Ken, his hero-- plunked
Nors' butt and pushed him out of the little circle toward the real
Neal, who'd released Nors and shook and shuddered in circles around
us, making speed-freak mouth noises like the bright weird kid with
the briefcase who'd slobbered and said "Beep, beep," to the
other boys in line at my junior high school.
"Ooooh!" Nors sucked in his breath and--to his
credit--switched dreams, and followed the old man who drew him,
vibrating down the beach, jabbing at the air with long bony fingers,
flapping leathery elbows, followed Neal Cassady who twisted and spun
like the eternal pied piper.
Neal Cassady in loose jeans and worn undershirt, impelled Nors along;
Nors who bared his smooth golden chest over rolled-up white
Navy-issue pants. Nors looked like an angelic choirboy following the
lead of the ferryman into the Underworld--compelled along behind him
in untied tennis-shoed feet, into a ghostly realm.
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