Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters
Peter Paul Markin comment:
Everybody, well everybody who checks things out here, or on other sites that I am associated with, knows that I am dedicated to swapping lies about the old days. The old days in this case being the 1960s, and more specifically the 1960s old time corner boy days in front of Salducci’s Pizza Parlor in North Adamsville, my growing-up working class hometown. And, of course, if one wants to swap lies about those old days, or any days, then one needs a, well, foil, or foils. Needless to say, via the “miracle” of the Internet, in its various manifestations, all one has to do is latch onto some search engine, type in “corner boys,” “North Adamsville,” or some such combinations and, like lemmings from the sea, our homeland the sea, every surviving corner boy with enough energy to lift his stubby little fingers will be on your screen before you can say, well, say, be-bop night.
Frankie Riley, our lord and chieftain was the first, although he has lost much speed in his pitch since the old days. I won’t bore you with the details of his “exploits.” You can fumble through the archives here for that. Nor will I speak of fast-talking Johnny Silver, except to point out that he is the culprit, there is no other way to put it, who started the sexual revolution. No, no the real one that started with “the pill” in the early 1960s and continues through to today with the struggle for women’s liberation, liberation from all kinds of second-class citizen stuff from jobs and wages to help with childcare and housework. No, Johnny started the AARP-version of the sexual revolution-old geezers looking for love, looking for love in all the wrong places, if you ask me but nobody is, asking that is. Those gripping tales can also be found in the archives here.
All of this, of course, is prelude to the real subject here. Phil Larkin’s transformation from corner boy “Foul-Mouth” Phil (and he really was, as he would tell you in that moment of candor that he is occasionally capable of) in early 1960s North Adamsville to “Far-Out” Phil on one of the ubiquitous Merry Prankster-inspired converted yellow brick road school buses that dotted the highways and by-ways of the American be-bop heading west night from about the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s (maybe a little earlier in the ‘70s). (For those too young to know, those who have forgotten, and those who have conveniently feigned forgetfulness just in case some statute of limitations has not run out I have placed a link above to a Wikipedia entry for the Merry Pranksters with this post.)
When last we hear from Phil he was heading to Pennsylvania to meet up with some doctoral program research addict whom he “met” on Facebook. That tale, ah, can also be found in the archives here. However, unlike these seemingly endless “haunting the Internet” schoolboy antics from guys old enough, well I am no snitch, so let’s say old enough to know better, looking for the fountain of youth, or whatever this Phil transformation story actually interests me. And so here it is. As usual I edited it lightly but it is Phil’s story, and I am pleased to say a good one.
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Phil Larkin here. Jesus, The Scribe [Markin: Like I warned the other guys, Phil, watch on that scribe, or The Scribe thing] actually liked this idea of me telling about riding the, what did he call it, oh ya, the yellow brick road bus, back in my prankster days [Markin: Just to keep things straight, since Phil still likes to play a little rough with the truth, not the famous Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters bus made famous through Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, but certainly inspired by it]. I barely got by with my stories about real stuff that people want to read like the trials and tribulations of an older guy trying to “hook-up” with the ladies on what amounted to a sexless sex site and my rendezvous with Amy (and she is not a research addict, Markin, no way, although she is an addict another way but you don’t want to hear that real stuff story), my lovely sociology doctoral student down at Penn State (Go, Nittany Lions!). But he is all over, all f—king over, some little bit of “cultural history” stuff that nobody, except AARP-guys (and dolls) would do anything but yawn over. And those AARP-guys (and dolls) are too busy trying to “hook-up,” to grab some sex before is too late to spent more than two seconds on ancient history. So this one is strictly for The, oops, Peter Paul Markin.
What got the whole memory lane thing started was that somewhere Markin picked up, probably second-hand off of Amazon if I know him, a CD from Time-Life Music entitled something like Shakin’ It Up: 1966. Now the music on the compilation, the music in the post-British invasion, heart of acid rock night, was strictly for laughs. But the artwork on the cover (as Markin told me was true on other CDs in this expansive classic rock 'n' roll era series) featured nothing more, or nothing less, than a day-glo bus right out of my prankster days, complete with some very odd residents (odd now, not then, then they were righteous, and maybe, just maybe still are). That scene gave us a couple of hours conversation one night and jogged my memory about a lot of things. Especially about what Markin, hell, me too, called the search of the great American freedom night. (He put some colors, blue-pink like just before dark, dark out West anyway, in his but we, for once. were on the same page.)
Naturally, Markin as is his wont [Markin: “Wont” is my word not Phil’s. His, I prefer, strongly prefer, to not to post], once he played the CD and played me for information (I know this guy, remember) ran off like a bunny and wrote his version as part of a review of the CD. Of course, being, well, being Markin he got it about half-right. So let me tell the story true and you can judge who plays “rough” with the truth.
Markin at least had it just about right when he described that old bus:
“A rickety, ticky-tack, bounce over every bump in the road to high heaven, gear-shrieking school bus. But not just any yellow brick road school bus that you rode to various educationally good for you locations like movie houses, half yawn, science museums, yawn, art museums, yawn, yawn, or wind-swept picnic areas for some fool weenie roast, two yawns there too, when you were a school kid. And certainly not your hour to get home daily grind school bus, complete with surly driver (male or female, although truth to tell the females were worst since they acted just like your mother, and maybe were acting on orders from her) that got you through K-12 in one piece, and you even got to not notice the bounces to high heaven over every bump of burp in the road. No, my friends, my comrades, my brethren this is god’s own bus commandeered to navigate the highways and by-ways of the 1960s, come flame or flash-out. Yes, it is rickety, and all those other descriptive words mentioned above in regard to school day buses. That is the nature of such ill-meant mechanical contraptions after all. But this one is custom-ordered, no, maybe that is the wrong way to put it, this is “karma”-ordered to take a motley crew of free-spirits on the roads to seek a “newer world,” to seek the meaning of what one persistent blogger on the subject has described as the search for the great blue-pink American Western night.”
“Naturally to keep its first purpose intact this heaven-bound vehicle is left with its mustard yellow body surface underneath but over that primer the surface has been transformed by generations (generations here signifying not twenty-year cycles but trips west, and east) of, well, folk art, said folk art being heavily weighted toward graffiti, toward psychedelic day-glo splashes, and zodiacally meaningful symbols. And the interior. Most of those hardback seats that captured every bounce of childhood have been ripped out and discarded who knows where and replaced by mattresses, many layers of mattresses for this bus is not merely for travel but for home. To complete the “homey” effect there are stored, helter-skelter, in the back coolers, assorted pots and pans, mismatched dishware and nobody’s idea of the family heirloom china, boxes of dried foods and condiments, duffel bags full of clothes, clean and unclean, blankets, sheets, and pillows, again clean and unclean. Let’s put it this way, if someone wants to make a family hell-broth stew there is nothing in the way to stop them. But also know this, and know it now, as we start to focus on this journey that food, the preparation of food, and the desire, except in the wee hours when the body craves something inside, is a very distant concern for these “campers.” If food is what you desired in the foreboding 1960s be-bop night you could take a cruise ship to nowhere or a train (if you could find one), some southern pacific, great northern, union pacific, and work out your dilemma in the dining car. Of course, no heaven-send, merry prankster-ish yellow brick road school bus would be complete without a high- grade stereo system to blast the now obligatory “acid rock” coming through the radiator practically.”
That says it all pretty much about the physical characteristics of the bus but not much about how I got on the damn thing. Frankly, things were pretty tough around my house, things like no having much of a job after high school just working as a dead-ass retail clerk up at Raymond’s Department Store in Adamsville Plaza. Not really, according to dear mother, with dear old dad chiming in very once in a while especially when I didn’t come up with a little room and board money, being motivated to “better myself,” and being kind of drift-less with my Salducci’s Pizza Parlor corner boys long gone off to college, the service, or married, stuff like that. Then too I was having some girl trouble, no, not what you think girl baby trouble just regular the battle of the sexes stuff when my honey, Ginny McCabe, practically shut me off because I didn’t want to get married just then. But I knew something was in the air, something was coming like “the scribe” was always predicting. [Markin: I'll let that small case scribe pass, Phil] And for once I wanted in on that. But the specific reason that I split in the dead of the North Adamsville night was that I was trying to avoid the military draft, now that the war in Vietnam was escalating with nowhere else to go. I knew my days were numbered and while I was as patriotic (and still am, unlike that parlor pinko, commie, Markin) as the next guy (and these days, girls) I was not ready to lay down my life out in the boondocks right then. So I headed out on the lam.
[Markin: Phil, as he related this part of the story that night, had me all choked up about his military plight and I was ready to say brother, welcome to the anti-imperialist resistance. Then I realized, wait a minute, Phil was 4-F (meaning he was not eligible for drafting for military service due to some medical or psychological condition in those days for those who do not know the reference. A prima facie example, I might add, of that playing rough with the truth I warned you about before.]
Hey, I am no slave to convention, whatever the conventions are, but in those days I looked like a lot of young guys. Longish hair, a beard, a light beard at the time, blue jeans, an army jacket, sunglasses, a knapsack over my shoulder, and work boots on my feet.(Sandals would not come until later when I got off the road and was settled in a “pad” [Markin: house, rented or maybe abandoned, apartment, hovel, back of a “free” church, back of a store, whatever, a place to rest those weary bones, or “crash”] in La Jolla and were, in any case, not the kind of footwear that would carry you through on those back road places you might find yourself in, places like Deadwood, Nevada at three in the morning with a ten-mile walk to the nearest town in front of you). I mention all this because that “look” gave me the cache to make it on the road when I headed out of the house that Spring 1966 be-bop night after one final argument with dear mother about where I was going, what was I going to do when I got there, and what was I going to do for money. Standard mother fare then, and now I suppose.
So short on dough, and long on nerve and fearlessness, then I started to hitchhike with the idea of heading west to California like about eight million people, for about that same number of reasons, have been heading there since the Spanish, or one of those old-time traveling by boat nations, heard about the place. Of course, nowadays I would not think to do such a thing in such a dangerous world, unless I was armed to the teeth and that would take a little edge off that “seeking the newer world” Markin has been blabbing about since about 1960. But then, no problem, let’s get going. Especially no problem when just a few miles into my journey a Volkswagen mini-bus (or van, neither in the same league as the yellow brick road school bus, no way, that I will tell you about later but okay for a long ride, and definitely okay when you are in some nowhere, nowhere Nebraska maybe, back road, hostile territory dominate by squares, squares with guns and other evil implements and they, the VW-ites, stoned, stoned to the heavens stop to ask you directions because they are “lost” and invite you on board) stopped on Route 128, backed up, and a guy who looked a lot like me, along with two pretty young girls says, “where are you heading?” (Okay, okay, Markin, young women, alright.) West, just west. And then the beautified words, “Hop in.”
Most of the road until the Midwest, Iowa is the Midwest right, was filled with short little adventures like that. A mini-van frolic for a few hours, or a few days. Maybe a few short twenty-miles non-descript rides in between but heading west by hook or by crook. Did I like it? Sure I did although I was pretty much an up-tight working class guy (that was what one of those pretty girls I just mentioned called me when I “passed” on smoking a joint and, hell, she was from next door Clintondale for chrissakes) who liked his booze, a little sex {Markin: Phil, come on now, a little?], and just hanging around the old town waiting for the other shoe to drop. But I could see, after a few drug experiences, no, not LSD, that I was starting to dig the scene. And I felt every day that I was out of North Adamsville that I was finally shaking off the dust from that place.
Then one night, sitting in the front seat of a big old Pontiac (not everybody, not every “hip” everybody had the mini-bus, van or school bus handy for their “search” for the great American night), Big Bang Jane between us, the Flip-Flop Kid driving like god’s own mad driver, smoking a joint, laughing with the couple of in back, Bopper Billy and Sweet Pea, we headed into a pay-as- you go roadside camp near Ames out in Iowa. And at that campsite parked maybe five or six places over from where we planted ourselves was god’s own copy of that day-glo merry prankster bus I mentioned before. I flipped out because while I had hear about, and seen from a distance, such contraptions I hadn’t been up close to one before. Wow!
After we settled in, the Flip-Flop Kid (and the guy really could never make up his mind about anything, anything except don’t go too close to Big Bang Jane, no kidding around on that, no sir), Bopper Billy (who really thought he was king of the be-bop night, but, hell in the North Adamsville corner boy night Frankie Riley, hell, maybe even Markin, would have out be-bopped him for lunch and had time for a nap), Big Bang Jane (guess what that referred to, and she gave herself that nickname, but I never tried to make a move on her because she was just a little too wild, a little too I would have to keeping looking over my shoulder for me then, probably later too when things got even looser. And then there was the Flip-Flop Kid’s warning ), and Sweet Pea (and she was a sweet pea, if Bopper Billy wasn’t around, well we both agreed there was something there but in those 1966 days we were still half tied up with the old conventions of not breaking in between a guy and his girl, well that was the convention anyway whether it was generally honored or not, I did) we headed over once we heard the vibes from the sound system churning out some weird sounds, something like we had never heard before (weird then, little did we know that this was the wave of the future, for a few years anyway).
Naturally, well naturally after the fact once we learned what the inhabitants of the bus were about, they invited us for supper, or really to have some stew from a big old pot cooking on a fireplace that came with the place. And if you didn’t want the hell-broth stew then you could partake of some rarefied dope (no, again, no on the LSD thing. It was around, it was around on the bus too, among its various denizens, but mainly it was a rumor, and more of a West Coast thing just then. In the self-proclaimed, tribal self-proclaimed Summer of Love of 1967, and after that, is when the acid hit, and when I tried it but not on this trip. This trip was strictly weed, hemp, joint, mary jane, marijuana, herb, whatever you wanted to called that stuff that got you high, got you out of yourself, and got you away from what you were in North Adamsville, Mechanicsville or whatever ville you were from, for a while.
So that night was the introduction to the large economy size search for the freedom we all, as it turned, out were looking for. I remember saying to Sweet Pea as we went back to our campsite (and wishing I wasn’t so square about messing with another guy’s girl, and maybe she was too, maybe wishing I wasn’t square about it) that we had turned a corner that night and that we had best play it out all the way to the end right then for the chance might not come again.
The next day, no, the next night because I had spent the day working up to it, I became “Far-Out” Phil, or the start of that Phil. Frankly, to not bore you with a pipe by pipe description of the quantity of dope that I smoked (herb, hashish, a little cocaine, more exotic and hard to get then than it became later) or ingested (a tab of mescaline) that day, I was “wasted.” Hell I am getting “high” now just thinking about how high I was that day. By nightfall I was ready for almost anything as that weird music that crept up your spine got hold of me. I just, as somebody put a match to the wood to start the cooking of tonight pot of stew to keep us from malnutrition, started dancing by myself. Phil Larkin, formerly foul-mouthed Phil, a cagey, edgy guy from deep in corner boy, wise guy, hang-out guy, never ask a girl to dance but just kind of mosey up world, started dancing by himself. But not for long because then he, me, took that dance to some other level, some level that I can only explain by example. Have you ever seen Oliver Stone’s film, The Doors, the one that traced the max-daddy rocker of the late 1960s night Jim Morrison’s career from garage band leader to guru? One of the scenes at one of the concerts, an outdoor, maybe desert outdoor one, had him, head full of dope, practically transformed into a shaman. Ya, one of those Indian (Markin: Native American, Phil] religious leaders who did a trance-dance. That was me in late May of 1966, if you can believe that.
And see, although I wasn’t conscious of it first I was being joined by one of the women on the bus, Luscious Lois, whom I had met, in passing the night before. This Lois, not her real name, as you can tell not only were we re-inventing ourselves physically and spiritually but in our public personas shedding our “slave names” much as some blacks were doing for more serious reasons than we had at the time. [Markin: Nice point, Phil, although I already ‘stole’ that point from you in my review.] Her real name was Sandra Sharp, a college girl from Vassar who, taking some time off from school, was “on the bus” trying to find herself. She was like some delicate flower, a dahlia maybe, like I had never encountered before. I won’t bore you with the forever have to tell what she looked like stuff because that is not what made her, well, intriguing, maddeningly intriguing, like some femme fatale in a crime noir film that Markin, from what I can gather, is always running on about. She was pretty, no question, maybe even a dark-haired, dark-eyed beauty if it came to a fair description in the light of day but what made her fetching, enchanting, if that is a different way to say it, was the changes in her facial expressions as she danced, and danced provocatively, dance half-nakedly, around my desire. And I danced, shedding my shirt although I do not remember doing so, danced half-naked around her desire. Then, faintly like a buzz from some hovering insect, maybe a bee, and then more loudly I kept hearing the on-lookers, half-mad with dope and with desire themselves, yelling far out, far out. And Far-Out Phil was born.
Oh, as for Luscious Lois and her desire, well, you figure it out. I might not have been as wise to the ways of the Vassar world in those days when such places were bastions to place the young women of the elite and keep them away from clawing upstarts from the corner boy night as I should have been but the rest of my time on the bus was spend hovering around Lois, and keeping other guys away. I even worked some plebeian “magic” on her one night when I started using certain swear words in her ear that worked for me every Sunday after 8:00 AM Mass at Sacred Heart Catholic Church with foxy Millie Callahan, back in the day. Far-Out Phil got a little something extra that night, proper Vassar girl or not.
No offense against Iowa, well only a little offense for not being near an ocean, I think. No offense against the university there, well only a little offense for not being Berkeley but after about a week of that campsite and its environs I was ready to move on and it did not matter if it was with Flip-Flop and his crowd or with Captain Crunch (the guy who “led” his clot of merry pranksters, real name, Samuel Jackman, Columbia Class of 1958, who long ago gave up searching, searching for anything, and just hooked into the idea of taking the ride). Captain Crunch, as befitted his dignity (and since it was “his” bus paid for out of some murky deal, probably a youthful drug deal, from what I heard), was merely the “leader” here. The driving was left to another, older guy. This driver was not your mother-sent, mother-agent, old Mrs. Henderson, who prattled on about keep in your seats and be quiet while she is driving (maybe that, subconsciously, is why the seats were ripped out long ago on the very first “voyage” west) but a very, very close imitation of the god-like prince-driver of the road, the "on the road” pioneer, Neal Cassady, shifting those gears very gently but also very sure-handedly so no one noticed those bumps (or else was so stoned, drug or music-stoned, that those things passed like so much wind). His name: Cruising Casey (real name, Charles Kendall, Haverford College Class of ’64, but just this minute, Cruising Casey, mad man searching for the great American be-bop night under the extreme influence of one Ken Kesey, the max-daddy mad man of the great search just then). And Cruising was, being just a little older, and about one hundred years more experienced, also weary, very weary of co-eds, copping dope and, frankly, staying in one place for so long. He also wanted to see his girlfriend, or his wife, I am not sure which in Denver so I knew where we were heading. So off we go, let’s get going.
And the passengers. Nobody from the Flip-Flop Express (although Flip-Flop, as usual, lived up to his name and hemmed and hawed about it), they were heading back east, back into the dark Mechanicsville night. I tried, tried like hell, to get Sweet Pea to come along just in case the thing with Lois fell apart or she took some other whim into her head. See, re-invented or not, I still had some all-the-angles boyhood rust hanging on me. We did know for sure that Casey was driving, and still driving effortlessly so the harsh realities of his massive drug intake had not hit yet, or maybe he really was superman. Other whose names I remember: Mustang Sally (Susan Stein, Michigan, Class of 1959, ditto on the searching thing), Captain Crunch’s girl friend, (although not exclusively, not exclusively by her choice, not his, and he was not happy about it for lots of reasons which need not detain us here). Most of the rest of the “passengers” have monikers like Silver City Slim, Penny Pot (guess why), Moon Man, Flash Gordon (from out in space somewhere, literally, as he told it), Dallas Dennis (from New York City, go figure), and the like. They also had real names that indicated that they were from somewhere that had nothing to do with public housing projects, ghettos or barrios. And they were also, or almost all were, twenty-somethings that had some highly-rated college years after their names, graduated or not). And they were all either searching or, like the Captain, were at a stage where they are just hooked into taking the ride.
As for the rest. Well, no one could be exactly sure, as the bus approached the outskirts of Denver, as this was strictly a revolving cast of characters depending on who was hitchhiking on that desolate back road State Route 5 in Iowa, or County Road 16 in Wyoming, and desperately needed to be picked up, or face time, and not nice time with a buzz on, in some small town poky. Or it might depend on who decided to pull up stakes at some outback campsite and get on the bus for a spell, and decide if they were, or were not, on the bus. After all even all-day highs, all-night sex, and 24/7 just hanging around listening to the music is not for everyone. And while we had plenty of adventures, thinking back on it now, they all came down to drugs, sex, and rock and roll with a little food on the side. If you want to hear about them just ask Markin to contact me. The real thing though, the thing that everybody should remember is that dance night in Ames, Iowa when Phil Larkin got “religion,” 1960s secular religion. He slid back some later, like everybody does, but when he was on the bus he was in very heaven.
Markin note: No question that this story, except perhaps for hormonal adolescents, is better than those dreary old geezer searching for young love tales that he ran by us before. By the way Phil, you don’t happen to have Luscious Lois’, ah, Sandra Sharp’s, cell phone number or e-mail address. And don’t lie and say you don’t have it. You never crossed off a woman’s name from your book in your life. Give it up.
