ON THE BUS--OR NOT

The brilliant author Tom Wolfe died May 15, 2018 at age 88.  I have read most of his books.  He was a native of Richmond, Va.  I did not think he was THAT old.  I always regarded him as young and “hip.”  I guess that means I’m pretty old, too!

One of his earliest works is Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, being about the LSD-fueled wild journeys of Ken Kesey and his gang of “Merry Pranksters” in the early 1960’s, back and forth across the US in a psychedelically painted school bus named "Further."  Reading that book moved me to pursue a thorough reading of the published works of Ken Kesey, now dead, whose most well-known book is probably One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, later made into a great movie starring Jack Nicholson and Louise Fletcher.  I have a photo still from that movie autographed by Jack Nicholson.

In the mid-1990's I went to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC to hear Ken Kesey speak in a presentation sponsored by the Resident Associate Program, of which I was then a member.  Kesey was also rather well-known to most as having been an aggressive experimenter with drugs of all kinds, including psychedelic mushrooms and LSD. However, on the night he was at the Smithsonian, he seemed rather straight and sober.

Prior to the start of his talk, I saw Kesey "meandering" in the lobby of the auditorium where he was to speak. I approached him, and I asked him first if he was, in fact, not "Mr. Kesey," to which he replied he was. I then asked if the Smithsonian had been trying to get him to donate his old bus to them for display.

Kesey said that the folks with whom he had been speaking there had wanted to display the bus, but he said to me, "Y'know, that bus is rusting away in my back yard and is almost completely gone now!" I said that was no surprise to me; then he said (which I knew) that they had shot a lot of 16-millimeter film on those bus rides, and they had a tape recorder patched into the bus's electrical system. Unfortunately, the tape recorder would speed up when the bus engine speeded up, then it would slow down again when the engine slowed down. Kesey said they had been unable to "sync" the film to the tape, but the emerging digitized sound technology was holding out some promise.

(Indeed, subsequent to Kesey's death, his son has managed to produce DVD's of those films with the digitized sound track intact.)

Anyway, Kesey said he had proposed to the Smithsonian officials an idea they were not very warm to--to create a long, narrow theatre with two rows of bus seats therein, with those films projected onto a far wall for viewing by visitors who would be seated in those seats and who might, in some small way, be able to share the experience of "being on the bus."

He then looked at me and said, "Y'know, it was not about the ride; it was about the trip!"