Yet Again Further In-With Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters And The Yellow Brick Road School Bus In Mind

Yet Again Further In-With Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters And The Yellow Brick Road School Bus In Mind

 

By Sam Lowell

 

Maybe it had been the time of Josh Breslin’s time, the time of his now more nomadic life since he had moved back to his Maine growing up town of Olde Saco and had retired, well sort of, retired from the hurly-burly pressure of getting out an assortment of by-lines for half the unread small publications and journals in America.(That assortment of publications driven by the need for hard currency, cash, checks as the financial end of his three, count them, three failed marriages, the alimony, child support and college education tuitions for his brood of children that nearly broke him rather that any overwhelming loyalty to the publications since half the time he could have given a rat’s ass, his works, about the publication or the subject matter he was writing about.) Maybe it had been the very hard to fathom fact that after a lifetime of writing, drivel or star quality, whatever music, whatever beat, beat in his head mostly from being immersed early on in in late 1950s Jack Kerouac, king of beats be-bop beats when he wrote, had driven him to write for those unread small publications and journals over the years had deserted him of late, that he had been flat, had been recycling in different scenarios the same old stuff.

Maybe though if you wanted to get closer to the truth of the matter it had been “karma.” world-spirit, something in the air that all came together the day that he was driving down the Maine Turnpike toward Boston where he was to deliver a small article about a film noir, an old film noir, the classic B-noir Kansas City Confidential he had reviewed for yet another small artsy publication-Film Noir Finale listening to a CD titled Bleecker Street on the car CD player, a compilation of covers of 1960s folk music standards done by later well-known artists who had been inspired by the music in their own up and coming careers. Bleecker Street in New York, one of the central arteries of the coffeehouses that spawned the 1960s folk minute that he had recently endlessly wrote about from about every possible vantage point. With the Bleecker Street CD or rather a cover of Phil Och’s 1960s anti-war, war-resister, draft resister classic  I Ain’t Marching Anymore playing Josh noticed a school bus in the distance. Not just any school bus though but what he would have called back in that beat-driven youth when all things were possible and he had to rein in his writing, or rather what his late old friend Peter Markin would have called a “yellow brick road school bus.”

From the speed with which Josh caught up with the bus hunkered down in the extreme right lane it seemed to be going too slow though to be carrying school children and in any case school was out for the summer so that it was unlikely to be carrying children. As he got within eyesight though the bus was nothing but an old time relic from the 1960s school bus converted to be a home for the travelling gypsy wanderers of that good night. In the year 2015! He at first he thought that maybe he had had a retro-flashback, that LSD he had drunk in Dixie cups of Kool-Aid or licked off some Owsley blotter had finally reared its ugly head like all the parents, pastors, professors, panic-mongers had predicted would occur of the youth nation succumbed to demon drugs. He could not believe his eyes, thought that he had been transformed to an earlier time in some time machine, to the time when he himself had been a wanderer gypsy out in the high holy California night aboard Captain Crunch’s version of that very same vehicle  for almost two years in the days when being a member of such a travelling home made you one of the brethren (a common sight then out on the Pacific Coast Highway if not so much in the East until after the first one, Ken Kesey’s Further In crewed by his Merry Pranksters got written up by Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson).            

All Josh could do at the time he saw the sight since he was on a fast-moving traffic highway not close to an exit had been to beep the beep of recognition and solidarity and accept the wave of the grey-bearded driver who looked at least at window view like he too had come out of some time machine. Josh thought later once he got to Boston after delivering his article and hence it was too late that he should have somehow gotten the bus to stop and grabbed the stories he knew were jam-packed in that vehicle along with the assorted mattresses, mismatched pots, pans, dishes and silverware, odd-end chairs, and master of the universe sound system that he knew was standard for such homes, some of which he could see had been attached to the roof of the bus. But that was later when the journalist instinct in Josh was in high dudgeon.

What he thought on the seventy or eighty mile trip left before Boston though was a different matter. Josh had only one thought-what would his late friend Markin make of such a sight. Markin who had brought Josh into the tribe, who had  given Josh his first joint up on Russian Hill in San Francisco in the summer of love 1967 when all things were possible, or maybe under the rages of youth nation trying to jail-break from a world it hadn’t created and had no say in, impossible. He could hardly wait to tell the surviving members of the group, mostly Markin’s old growing up corner boy friends who had stuck together all these years after Markin’s demise down in forlorn mysterious Sonora, Mexico in the mid-1970s. They would periodically meet at Jack’s over in Cambridge and swap stories and other lies but just then he was in a somber mood thinking about his and Markin’s now forever lost youth.       

Yes, all roads led back to Markin, Markin and his search for the great blue-pink American West night as he called it, and as he, Josh, and the other corner boys from his youth Markin introduced to him along the way and who formed the coterie that gathered at Jack’s on occasion also got caught up in before the night-takers and who knows maybe their own hubris took command and burned what they thought they were creating to the ground. Fifty years later the night-takers were still throwing oil on the flames, still trying to stamp out the embers as a look at the news on any given day painfully demonstrated. How was Josh to know that some fifty years later he would still be etched by that experience, that experiment in a new way of living, a new way of thinking all because he like lots of others in the summer of love, 1967, had the wanderlust, had let whatever gypsy, traveler nation, genes in his DNA package (a scientific term he had never heard of then but appropriate just now) run amok.       

Who knew that the simple act of asking for a joint, you know, marijuana, dope, then getting a huge boost among the younger, non-junkie tribe gathering out West, on a then unknown hill in San Francisco from a long-bearded, long-haired, long gone daddy guy sitting on the ground beside an old-time yellow brick road school bus would lead to a few thousand thought flash-backs now. That in all simplicity had been how it all started. Well, maybe there had been a little more than that. Josh had just finished high school at Olde Saco that year and had been kind of restless, had been kind of thinking he had some time on his hands before he headed to State U in the fall to start his freshman year. He was supposed to work for the summer as a janitor in the now long gone and converted to condominiums MacAdams Textile Mills along the Olde Saco River. His father who had worked there since his discharge from the Marines after World War II had gotten him the job through some pull he had with the plant superintendent in order for Josh to made some cash for expenses at school since his family was rock bottom poor what with five kids in the family and only his father working then.

Josh would be the first member of his extended family to go to college so this was important to his parents. (His father had been brought up in coal country Kentucky where the boys went to the mines for their educations early and his mother’s people had come down from the farms in Quebec to get work in the factories rather than starving on the land.) One day in very early summer Josh had met a guy on Olde Saco Beach who had just come back from California, had come back to Maine on some family errant after staying around Big Sur, staying in a canyon called if you can believe this Todo el Mundo, the whole wide blessed world who told him some exciting stories about dope, women and the new dispensation. That conversation had decided him on his course for the summer. He was heading west, would wind up taking his first hitchhike expedition west and let loose that bebop wanderer’s beat that had been in his head since the late 1950s when he had finally heard about the “beats” who were trying to do their own thing, and MacAdams be damned. Not without some bitter family controversy, especially from his enraged father, he left one morning on a Trailways bus to head to Boston as a first stop. That guy on the beach at Olde Saco had told him Boston, Cambridge really, was the best place to start since hitchhiking West there was a huge truck depot in back of the Coca-Cola plant right near the Massachusetts Turnpike there and lonely for company or fast talking truckers were usually a good source of rides.

And so he went, went out to the Coast pretty uneventfully, at least uneventfully enough to not be able to think back now to what it was really like since over the course of the next two years he would travel back and forth across the country about six times before the deluge hit in the early 1970s. What is more important is what he did when he got to San Francisco the first time. He had been told by a young guy who looked from the way he was dressed like Buffalo Bill he had met on Post Street to go to Golden Gate Park to search for whatever he was looking for. He had been left off on his last truck ride on famous Market Street (where the ancient trolleys still ply their trade for the tourist who flock there to ride up and down the hills) and had originally asked for directions to Mission Street. Those direction were off, the giver of them probably like Josh among the thousands of new comers to the city once word got out that a new nation, youth nation was a-borning and he wound up on Russian Hill where he saw his first yellow brick road bus and decided to test the waters asking for some dope. And hence his first meeting with Markin.

Something about Markin demeanor and Josh’s response to it just seemed to mesh from the get-go although Markin had already been on the yellow brick road since the previous summer after, unwisely as it would turn out, dropping out of college in Boston to “find himself” out in the wilderness. He was also a few years older than Josh. Maybe it was the similar working-class backgrounds, no, desperate working poor, a notch below working class, backgrounds, Josh’s already mentioned precarious textile mills in Olde Saco and Markin’s dying shipbuilding industry a precursor to the deindustrialization of America in North Adamsville down south of Boston. Those resulting “wanting habits” they would spent endless dope high nights trying to control, trying too to make sense out of tightened their bond. Maybe too it was their mutual love of the sea put paid to by being in another ocean scene. Maybe it was their love of language when later both would dip their respective pens in the inkwell of literary life. But as Josh thought about that first encounter up on Russian Hill it had probably been a little thing like after Josh, who didn’t know Markin from Adam, asked him for a joint, a blunt, Markin had passed it along without a thought to a guy he didn’t know from Adams with the already classic line “don’t bogart that joint” meaning keep the residue for the start of another joint, meaning too that any guy with the audacity to ask for joint in the middle of nowhere was already a kindred spirit.

And so they were, kindred spirits, until the bitter end, the time a few years later when Markin had gone over the edge and wound up in a very dark place in sunny Mexico. But that later stuff the stuff after the bus caravan disbanded was a story for another day. Josh’s thoughts were about the couple, almost three years, he spend alongside Markin on Captain Crunch’s yellow brick road traveling caravan bus, The Living End. A bus very similar to the one he had seen on that Maine highway.

Now this bus stuff, the Further In, made famous by author Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters and recorded for eternity later by the writer Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test was in 1967 still something of an oddity, especially on the East Coast. Josh until he ran in Captain Crunch’s The Living End had only heard about them as he headed west and when he approached Markin that was the closest he had ever been to such a vehicle. Over the next couple of years as youth nation gathered itself along the Pacific Coast Highway for adventures it would be almost impossible to go ten miles without seeing one, or of dropping into any campsite, rustic or full service without at least one “freak” bus disturbing the mental space of the square regular campers. They were of a piece usually and were distinct from the ubiquitous Volkswagen buses both in size and purpose. The “school day golden rule day” seats a lot of youth nation knew from riding in the damn things endlessly during their school days had been ripped out and replaced by layers of mattresses, boxes of camping materials, boxes of dry goods, knapsacks and whatever any current traveler had for personal effects topped off by a sound system worthy of a concert hall to give the beat once the drug intake reached nirvana proportions. Captain Crunch’s bus layout was no different except it had a compliment of folding chairs and a folding table for eating purposes, if anybody was interested in culinary delights. Go to it.

Despite Josh’s best efforts he had been unable to unravel how or why Captain Crunch, real name, Samuel Malone, a college graduate, Michigan, Class of 1954, so older than his fellow travelers for the most part, had given up his career in Mad Man Manhattan Madison Avenue advertising and headed west, began to hang around the haunts of North Beach when that was the time when the beat Jack, beat Allen, beat Neal, beat Gregory were social lions and kings in the late be-bop 1950s cool jazz breeze that swung through the land and landed in Frisco town before heading out to the Japan seas. Word around was that he had become a tea devotee (now in the new dispensation called grass, herb, ganja but it all came down to marijuana and plenty of high-grade dope too) it in the Village and that tripped him west. Word around was that he had been left money by some wealthy uncle and indifferent to the wiles of advertising when he had free-flow dough he split the New York scene. Word around was that in the Village he had met a girl, a woman from Vassar really, Susan Stein, Class of 1958, who persuaded him to go west with her and see what was what on the West Coast. That seemed to be the best version since Susan now known among the bus occupants as Mustang Sally was riding alongside the Captain as he made his way up and down the Coast, looking, looking for his (and her, he was very jealous of an independence on her part and he went silently crazy when she developed a taste for rock and roll band members of the new acid rock groups that were starting to emerge creating a distinct rock sound to go with the new dope-induced lifestyle), well, looking for something. Word had also been around that the Captain who knew everybody, was connected in with a serious dope-line that put him in touch with the Kesey crowd in La Honda and he had traded a bag of dope, a big humongous bag of dope for the bus but that was in the realm of urban legend. All Josh figured out after giving up trying to get a scoop on what was going on was take the ticket, take the ride as Doctor Gonzo, Hunter Thompson would say when he coined the phrase.         

As Josh looked back to those days he thought how easy it had been to become a “member” of this Living End war circus-commune-ghost dance-beat-hippie bandwagon. Of course there was no official membership people just kind of came on board and left as they desired. The Captain was pretty liberal in letting people stay with the caravan as long as they didn’t freak out from the dope too much and need hospitalization, didn’t hog the dope, drink, food, didn’t trash wherever they were camped and didn’t steal from or lay “bummers,” a term of art for a bad scene, anybody on board. Although not everybody was built for the road over the long haul like Josh and Markin, some people just gravitated to the bus in say Golden Gate Park and stayed around as long as the bus stayed and then left. Others took the ride for a few days and then headed home and back to the old life or to somewhere else for whatever it was they were looking for. Not much stealing or hogging of dope in the early days, or ever on the Living End although later on other buses and the whole scene in Haight-Ashbury and elsewhere there was plenty of  bummer material once the less idealistic pioneers drifted back  to where they came from and the lumpen crazies and batos locos reared their ugly heads.     

Josh had been welcomed aboard pretty easily on the basic of Markin’s “good vibes” about him. After that introductory joint Markin had invited him to stay for the party that was going to happen later in the day and through the night. It had been a great party although Josh was now very vague about what had happened except that having stayed through the night and having found himself on a big old fluffy mattress in the bus Markin had said that morning after that he was “on the bus,” meaning that if he wanted to stay with the group he was in. He decided that he would stay, stay until the end of the summer, maybe a week before Freshman Orientation at State U in early September and then head back. That part was simple. The part that had been hard was when the end of summer came and the bus was camped at Todo el Mundo south of Big Sur he had to make a big decision about whether he wanted to go back to Maine or do as Markin suggested and play his hand out on the Coast and go back some time later. Aside from where that would have left Josh in draft land status since the war in Vietnam was raging out of control and eating up men and materials at a prestigious rate requiring more draftees than ever he had to face the issue of his parents and their rages against the night if he told them he was going to forego being the first in the family to go to college for a lark. He did choose to stay, did it but not without the rancor that would alienate him from his parents for many years thereafter, had never really gotten back on an even keel with them before they passed away.      

Of course a lot of that family business, a lot of that worry about the draft, a lot of that what would he do in life if Josh didn’t go to college right away and lose his place in the rat race was later time rationalizations. The real reason that he stayed, or the primary reason why he stayed after the end of summer was that he was “married” to Butterfly Swirl. Butterfly Swirl, real name, Carol Clark, a surfer girl from Carlsbad down in Southern California near San Diego who had broken loose, who had run a “jail-break” from her golden boy surfer boy when she heard about what was happening in the summer of love up north in Frisco town and had taken the Greyhound bus up to see what it was all about. Somebody had directed her to Golden Gate Park and after checking out a few other scenes along the way wound up in front of The Living End with some guy who knew one of the “passengers” on the bus. She too had just finished high school but somehow she gravitated toward Markin although he was far from interested in surfer girls as could be. (Markin who, by the way, was always called “the Scribe” in those days on the bus, a moniker he had carried with him from the East from his corner boy days in North Adamsville and not laid on him out West like with so many others who were trying to escape their old names, their old slave names to hear them tell it just like blacks like Malcolm X and Mohammed Ali who had shed their slave names with much greater justification.)

But those were odd times, times when hardened corner boys from nowhere in the East in places like Olde Saco and North Adamsville could hook up with surfer girls, JAPs, Native Americans, then still called Indians, brown skinned daughters of the braceros and batos locos and black as coal women from everywhere then called negroes. And so Butterfly Swirl and the Scribe “played house” together until, well, until Josh hit the scene looking for that vagrant joint at the end of Markin’s hand. The night of that first party had been the night when Butterfly made her play for Josh, wound up next to him on that mattress “on the bus.”

Now we are talking about people, young people, who were trying to turn the world upside down, get away from their family value values, get away from some straight-jacket existence in Elmira, Evanston, East LA, and so it was considered corny, old-fashioned to take umbrage if your girl, or guy, took off with somebody else. That was the way it was, everything, everybody free. But as in the case of Captain Crunch who saw red, or some evil color whenever Mustang Sally went off with some young rocker the Scribe was bitched out for a while over the new combination of Butterfly and his new friend Josh. But those were the days when everybody was looking for new “family” and so after sulking for a couple of days Markin finally gave his “blessing” to the pairing, finally “married” them and became the “patriarch” of his little family.

Although the “marriage” ceremony was performed by Captain Crunch in his role as leader of the ship it was the Scribe who gave Josh his new name “Prince of Love” that he carried with him for the two almost three years he traveled up and down the Coast with The Living End. Needless to say also as a sign of the times after Butterfly and Prince had their “honeymoon,” taking their first hits of acid, LSD, at a Jefferson Airplane and going down the coast for several months Butterfly decided that she was not cut out for the vagabond life and went back to her surfer boy life. But by then the Prince was totally into the alternative lifestyle scene provided by the Scribe and the other passengers on the bus.

Many nights Markin would regale his “family,” Butterfly and Prince, as well as whoever else sat around the fireplace wherever they were camped eating whatever hell-broth olio concoction somebody who was hungry enough to do so started to throw in the big metal bucket of a pot that most stews started in, with stories of his corner boy days, of his long-time corner boys. Mostly about, Frankie, now a lawyer, now Josh’s lawyer along with most of the other old-time corner boys who needed his services for whatever reason, Frankie Riley, the acknowledged leader of the crew who gave Markin him the moniker “the Scribe” since he was always writing something, something about Frankie and after a while, became his “flak.”  What Markin called Frankie’s Boswell although nobody knew or gave a rat’s ass about the analogy with Doctor Johnson’s biographer except Markin. Markin was a pip that way as everybody on the bus would find out eventually if they stayed long enough.  He relished the fact that he knew about two thousand arcane pieces of information like that Boswell thing.

Markin also mentioned guys like Jack Callahan, the great football player and now Mister Toyota of Eastern Massachusetts, the hooligan Jimmy Jenkins who developed the five finger discount, the “clip” into an art form, now a dentist, Sal Russo who laid his head down for his country for no good reason down in the Mekong Delta in Vietnam and whose name is now etched in granite on the North Adamsville memorial to the Vietnam war dead of the town and down in D.C. too but in black marble,  Bart Webber, who became a printer, now retired after turning the business over to his youngest son, Alex Johnson, a musician, now passed  away after years of heavy drug addiction and horror, Sam Lowell, also a lawyer but who unlike Frankie who ran a mid-level law office in Boston ran a small two man operation in his old hometown and is now semi-retired, and Frank Jackman, who went into writing advertising for a big Boston public relations firm and had been doing penance for that career recently by writing stuff about the old days which many people are very eager to read.  

The reason Josh thought of these names is that they were all still familiar to him, the ones still alive since with the exception of Sal Russo whom he never met before the reports of his death got transmitted to Markin.   Josh had met each and every one of them out on the West Coast when Markin, after have made a beachhead told them that they had better get there asses out to the Coast because the big tidal wave sea-change that he had been predicting, had been boring them to tears, boring them until they could give a rat’s ass about the subject, since about tenth grade was unfolding before his eyes. See aside for those two thousand facts that he loved to hoard like a king’s ransom and then pop on some unsuspecting doper Markin had sensed that big things were floating in the air for his, their generation to grab onto, and now that they were all out of school they had better hurry up and get west any way they could, by wagon train if necessary. So not only was the summer of 1967 the summer that Josh would latch onto that big tidal wave change he had also sensed coming although he could not articulate it quite that way Markin could but the summer that he met Markin’s corner boys who took him as one of their own. And he them.

Something new was in the air, longer hair, boys and girls, bearded for those males who unlike Josh could muster up enough facial hair to not appear ridiculous, less ownership of girl-boy single and forever ideas, freer sex, protected or not, the break away from the missionary one-position- fits-all, all taboos about sinister dope thrown out the windows, fuck you to the war, the Vietnam War, the central event that fifty years later still defined the life of the generation, except for those who like Markin and Sal  got caught in the draft vice and couldn’t figure a way out, and a general hell let’s turn the world upside down attitude for its own sake but some old-time working-class kindred spirit thing was working among the old friends of Markin and his new friend Josh.

Late August of 1967 was the high water mark of those who came out from North Adamsville and met Josh. They came in a couple of waves, came hitchhiking mostly except Alex Johnson who was working in a band that was heading west on a tour. They all eventually met in what today would seem like pioneer days manner via snail mail, Western Union telegrams and over the land-line telephone. Met in Todo el Mundo just south of Big Sur in a then isolated forest clearing with a few cabins, primitive cabins and a clear view of the pacific Pacific Ocean (just kidding the ocean down on the edge of the western world was wind-swept even on good days, so windy that you had to back yourself to the wind in order to light a cigarette and use about six matches to get a light for a smoke which they all did in those days). Met Josh and Markin there and struck up those life-long connections.            

Josh was thinking how improbable it was that they would all meet in such a desolate isolated spot, such an isolated desolate spot for city boys, born and raised but that was just a matter of Captain Crunch’s whims, or some deal he was running to keep everything afloat, keeping his own counsel on how and why too. The most probable rumor among the passengers, those not too stoned at all times to give a fuck or who just “grooved” on the ride, on the scene and could care less about the finances or the social niceties, was that the Captain was running a high-grade dope operation getting the best dope from south of the border from guys, bad hombres from what Josh could tell when they headed in the bus down to San Diego one time to stay “house-sitting” this huge hacienda mansion place called Rancho San Pedro for a “friend” of the Captain’s, he knew from many trips down there. The most persistent rumor that never faded in the time Josh and Markin were on the bus was that The Living End like he said before was either bought with the proceeds of a dope deal or the Captain got it in trade.

So the Captain, although he ran a loose ship except when it came to Mustang Sally and in that case he was totally frustrated with her antics, was the guy who decided when the bus was leaving for another site. That why the bus had been sitting on Russian Hill the fateful day Josh asked Markin for some dope. It had also been why Markin had first picked up the bus down in Monterrey (and where he meet a short-time fling, Mother Earth, a slender red-head wearing one of the first granny dresses which had caught his eyes down near beat down Cannery Row where he was paying homage to the muse of John Steinbeck, and yes, the monikers, the break from slavery monikers were fast and furious then.) And this was why through a whole ration of crap trying to get West in the first place and then trying to find this place that nobody knew of even longtime denizens of Big Sur the North Adamsville crew met up in the middle of nowhere California.           

Of course as early 1960s corner boys formed by rock and roll and the deep freeze red scare Cold War night they all loved the wine, women and song, and the add-on dope until it came out of their ears. They even bought into Markin’s (and Josh’s) idea of building a commune, getting back to real life and not the nine to five grind of their parents and of what those parents had instilled in them. But as time went by, after what Josh thought was about six months later, after the high tide of the ghost dance they had all performed on peyote buttons under the direction of a neo-shaman, it was clear that like with Butterfly Swirl who had left in the late fall of 1967 that not everybody shared Markin’s dream, not everybody was built for the new world a-borning. Especially when the real world intruded, like hassles from the cops, like not being welcomed in various towns and establishments and like the frictions of living together got too intense. But most of all the whole thing went poof when Markin got his belated draft notice and decided he had no good reason not to be inducted into the Army, a decision he would sorely cometo regret, the old gang started drifting away. Except Josh who would still be on the bus until Markin got back from the service and he meet him in Oakland to see what they would do next.       

They stayed on the bus for a while, although clearly, clearly to Josh, something, something the usually gregarious Markin would not talk about happened in Vietnam, something that had taken the edge off of his free spirit. So they got off the bus, got a place in Oakland, did a lot of political work, mainly defending the Black Panthers and other political prisoners who were increasing under the gun of the American government. One night Markin mentioned that just as he saw in the early 1960s that a new day was dawning, that all things were possible by the end of the decade, the first couple of years of the 1970s, the high tide had been broken, the ebb tide was flowing. Josh held out for a few more years until Markin went over the edge, started doing cocaine, got into bad drug deals, went south on some kind of drug deal never fully explained and wound up with two slugs in his heart in a back alley in Sonora or and was buried in a potter’s field down there.              

Josh thought though after he had gotten back to Olde Saco from his Boston chore that day he saw the blast from the past yellow brick road bus on the Maine highway as he was phoning and e-mailing the old companions about what he had seen that day not everything was for naught. Maybe that bus was a harbinger of things to come. He was ready.