The night before, we attended a massive Prankster party in San Francisco called “The Anon Salon,” after the Prankster, Anonymous. . Naked people with painted genitals circulated slowly and quietly through out the house. The party occupied four floors of some old institution, and each floor, by plan, or not, hosted different moieties of the culture. The basement swimming pool was a scene of free-form yoga sessions, Wat-Su massages, and rapidly progressing seductions. Behind closed doors on the main floor was a “Rave” room, with mostly younger folks dancing their inner ears to oblivion to window-rattling Heavy Metal. Upstairs, a serious-looking group of folks sat watching movies of the 64’ bus trip. Meanwhile the Pranksters put on an endless and incoherent comic skit featuring King Arthur (I assume) and a knight named “More-dread”.
At the climactic moment, King Arthur (Kesey) doffed his helmet and launched into a rap, at the top of his lungs, about psychedelic plants being put on Earth for a good reason and human society neglects them at great peril. Then the rap addressed how “Cream rises and Shit floats,” in which, for example, Stewart Brand and Elizabeth Kubler Ross were cream, while Tom Wolfe and Paul Newman were shit. Then Kesey waded into the audience of youngsters sitting on the floor and began reaching for hands, and grabbing elbows – dragging people to their feet, exhorting them to rise and join the good fight! I remember mostly surprised expressions – but smiles all around – as the audience struggled to begin taking all this seriously.
The street outside the party was lined with a dozen “art”-cars, as if Further had summoned a following of its own mechanical kind, and turned them all on to their own lurid and obsessively detailed personas. Next door to the party was some strange gathering of high-school age youngsters, which emitted no noise. The kids were quite normally dressed and queued-up on the sidewalk waiting to get in, and the line was parallel and rubbing shoulders with the line of costumed folks continuously streaming in and out of the Prankster party. There was no conflict and very little contact, as if some kind of surreal transpersonal lubricant was developing there.
As the Bus was leaving our house the next day, I was directing traffic on highway 84. “Futher,” was backing off the bridge, after breaking the long ribbon someone had tied from the bus to the deck railing – it was a symbolic cutting of the cord, I believe. – when one of the pranksters dabbed a little drop of liquid on my index finger – so what could I do? What was next? … I spent the next few hours witnessing a moving reunion between John and Jamie Cassady and Vic Lovell. The Cassady kids’ mom, Carolyn (who wrote “Off The Road,”) never let them accompany Neal to the house in the old days, but they had heard their dad talk about the scene, and of course they had read all about it – and they remembered what Neal Cassady said about Vic.
“Vic talks slow. I talk fast. I talk bullshit. What Vic talks, lasts.” And they wanted the full explanation.
