SECTION SEVEN
SM
COLUMN FORTY-EIGHT, AUGUST 1, 1999
(Copyright © 1999 Al Aronowitz)
WISDOM'S MAW
[The
following excerpt from Wisdom's Maw is offered here with the author's
permission. Signed, first-edition
copies of Wisdom's Maw are available through Far Gone Books, http://www.fargonebooks.com
; contact Todd Brendan Fahey at: fargone@fargonebooks.com
]
"Wam-Pum? Yeehaaww!!
Jesus traveling Christ, this stuff's good!" the Captain whooped,
tucking the glass vials into his belt-case.
"Keep it coming, Henry. And
God bless Sandoz labs!"
"Al, before you leave we need to go over the new
takers. These Stanford kids are
tremendous. . . it's almost
spooky."
"Any of 'em stand out?" the Captain winked.
"You got one who might interest us, Henry?"
The chemist nodded, staring over his low-cut reading
lenses at a lab folder marked: Perry Lane Classified. "A graduate student named Franklin Moore.
He arrived a few months ago on a creative writing scholarship from Oregon
State."
"Jesus," the Captain moaned. "Not another one of these sensitive, literary
types."
Henry shook his head.
"This kid made the national wrestling team four straight years.
We sent him over to Czechoslovakia, and he tore their heavyweights new
assholes."
The Captain stared at a school photo. Bull-necked, knotty copper curls, and that look in the
eyes, then nodded. "OK, so
you've got him into the IT-290. How's
he held up?"
Henry smiled. "He
could probably pin anyone in the United States, and nevermind the weight."
"But that's all bullshit, Henry. What about his mind"
I want a kid with a goddamn mind like Aldous Huxley," the
Captain shouted. "Get him on
the LSD-25, Henry, we know it's the future.
Don't you know it, Henry? Don't
you know it's the future? You can
eat all that methamwhateverthefuckyouwanttocallit yourself, for all I care, just
get the kid on the L-S-D! Do it
now, Henry. Do it for me.
Turn the whole fucking world on, Henry! Yeaaahooooo!"
The Captain walked out of Langley and stretched his arms
in the early morning sun and let out another shout and offered a young agent,
"Some wampum, son? Make you a
new man, boy!" Squaring his flat-top in the reflection of a blackened
window near the entrance of the CIA's headquarters, Al Hubbard wondered when
Sandoz was going to solve that dilation problem.
"The eyes," he said, to no one particular, "that's
what gives it away. The President
couldn't tell right now if it weren't for the eyes."
At 8:35 a.m., in a leather notebook, he jotted: Franklin
Moore, kid genius wrestler, then jogged up a short stack of stairs at the East
Wing and knocked at the office door of Dr. Sheldon Gottfried.
A platinum-haired man answered the door, wearing a tan
suit and a fixed, professional smile. He
motioned toward a chair, then took a seat behind his own desk, a blonde slab
carved from a fallen bayou jacaranda.
"General," the Doctor said, to a tall, sallow
man sitting at his right, "I'd like you to meet Captain Al Hubbard.
He'll be in charge of the Perry Lane project, reporting to me.
Sit down, Al."
The Captain palmed some sweat from his forehead, eyes
glittering in the staid government den.
"Perry Lane. Tell
us about it, Captain."
"Yeah," Hubbard coughed, "well.
We've got what I call the Beatnik Problem.
These art-literary types and their social consciousness-oriented, well,
you know, have a lot of campuses stirred up.
And we've got to put a lid on it. But
these kids are very keen on martyrdom, a sort of Jesus complex, you might call
it and what we don't need right now is a big showdown."
Gottlieb smiled. "So
what would you have us do about this beatnik problem, Al?"
The Captain pulled out a thick Havana seed-roll, chomped
the end off and put it back in his briefcase.
Lighting up, he rose from the chair.
"We take one of them," he puffed, "and train him and make
him the spokesman of his generation, and then turn him in on his own people as a
sort of Judas Goat, which would be like sticking a screwdriver in that socket
over there, Shelly," the Captain glimmered. "The lights go out.
Total confusion. Then we go
in, sweep away the dregs, and get back to business."
Dr. Gottfried continued to smile.
"It's a long-range solution.
We need to throw a switch in their circuitry," the Captain said,
nodding, still staring at the socket in the wall. "These liberal types are bright.
But their hearts are in the wrong place, you understand.
They'll sell this beautiful country of ours downstream if they ever get
into power."
The General focused grimly on Hubbard, as the spy dragged
slowly on the mahogany tube.
"So," the Captain said, punching at an
imaginary spot in the air, "we keep one of these Beatnik types in his
natural habitat, Perry Lane at Stanford University, where they have set up sort
of a West Coast base and prepare him for a leadership position, like I said
before, and render him weak to the power of suggestion.
Our chemist is working on it right now."
"What kind of suggestion?" Dr. Gottlieb asked.
"We're working on an intersubjectivity drug, sir,
based on a South American vine with purported telepathic properties.
It's a ways off yet. The
best we've got going now is a combination of verbal reinforcement and a hell of
a dose of LSD-25. I wonder how some
of these kids know tomorrow from yesterday with the dosage Sandoz cooks
up," Hubbard chuckled. "This
spokesman will respond to a mentor, a like-minded, liberal-thinking guru type
whose orders will come from us."
"Are we thinking of the same man, Al?"
The Captain sank back in his seat. "He's been a hell of a service to us, Shelly.
He's not in great health, but he's just the sort of elder statesman this
project needs," Hubbard said, reflecting deeply, drawing in as thoughts the
languorous blue vapors of the cigar now resting gently between his fingers.
"Yes. Indeed.
Vitally must have."
"Are you willing to share your supply,
General?" Gottfried wondered, placing his long, tanned fingers on his desk.
William Creasy, Chairman of the Army Chemical Corps,
cocked his head and grinned. "Sounds
so fucking crazy, it might work."
Dr. Gottfried stood up.
"As Director of Project MK-ULTRA, I will immediately request that
special agent Aldous Huxley be assigned to the Perry Lane project."
"Thank you, sir. . . thank you," the Captain jumped to his feet, saluting, and gleamed his whole, shining, glittering, goddamned magnificent self out into the warmth of the sun, with a fresh new pellet under his tongue, say hallelujah.
*
* *
Morning came to Perry Lane with the jaybirds, the smoke
from a nearby stove, and a vigorous rapping on the front door of Cabin #12.
Franklin tried to ignore it, but the sound was insistent.
He pulled on a worn pair of Levis and shuffled bare-chested to the front
of the cabin.
A bearded man stood on the porch with a peculiar, twisted
grin on his face. "Good
morning, oh yes, it is indeed a model morning, and since we are going to be
virtual neighbors, I knew it would only be right to introduce myself. Carlo Marx," the man smiled. An appropriate surname, he admitted, in that his political
convictions had recently evolved from the Zen order of something Franklin
couldn't quite comprehend. "And,
while our backgrounds may be different, I hold not the slightest doubt that we
will solve, not merely remediate, the ills of this venal world. . .together,
Franklin Moore, you and I."
Franklin stared at the bearded man with the gallon jug of
burgundy in his grip. "You're
too crazy to be dangerous," Franklin decided, inviting the man into his
two-room cabin. He stoked the
big-bellied stove to take some of the chill from the air, then grabbed two cups
from the basin, realizing that he was about to get drunk with a sandle-wearing,
Jewish-born, wine-toting bearded freak: the type he'd been warned about
repeatedly in the pages of the Corvallis Daily Herald.
"I read about your arrival in the Town Crier,"
Carlo giggled. "You're a mixed
bag, Franklin Moore. Who would have
ever thought that a common-day jock would end up gobbling strange
pharmaceuticals for the Central Intelligence Agency?"
Franklin lifted his purpled lips from the cup and stared
at Carlo.
"I will write a poem about you some day, my dear.
A great, epic tome. A grand,
ironic thing: Big Brother Requests Your Services.
Oh yes, I feel the flush of a hundred dichotomies.
I must be off. Many
pages to write," Carlo tittered. "Say,
dear, you wouldn't happen to have carried off any benzedrine from the hospital,
now would you? Oh, of course
not," he smiled, eyelids drooping. "I
suppose that's the persistent junky spirit in me."
Franklin followed Carlo to a '54 Rambler loaded down so
heavily with books and blankets and bric-a-brac that its tires resembled last
summer's basketball on a forgotten shelf in the garage.
"That car's not goin' ten feet," he insisted.
Carlo laughed, gazing at the jalopy, comparing it to the
fullness of an idea whose time had come, leaving Franklin wondering, as Carlo
drove off, where he had heard that quote before, or if, indeed, it was an
original, emanating like breath from the mind of a true genius. . .or if the
strange bearded man was, after all, just one of the gaggle of California freaks
he'd read about just last week in the Corvallis Daily Herald.
* * *
Franklin walked through the doors of the Menlo Park
Veterans hospital that afternoon, as he had a dozen times before, each time
wondering which bullet would be spun into the chamber.
"Whatcha got for me today, Doc?" Franklin
wondered, laying himself on a sanitized cot.
"Some of that speedy stuff, maybe?"
Mixing viscous spirits, suffused through gleaming needle.
Slide shaft insert red poke vessel.
Franklin nestled into the bed, taking in the four white
walls and the glistening, metallic instruments arranged on an even shinier tray.
"Good talking to you, too, Doc."
Within seconds, his fingers and toes began to tingle, hands and feet
flushed, running up the arms, legs, chest cavity tightening, reflux peristalsis,
retching up the wine in his gullet.
"Nurse, clean this boy up," the Doctor said,
coolly.
Franklin coughed up another ounce or two of Burgundy and
bile as the nurse waited for him to finish vomiting.
"Whyntcha tell the Doc that if. . . schpptt. . .he wants me back here. . .he should give that
Ditran to some other poor, dumb sonumbitch," Franklin spat and choked as
nurse Lorraine Devlin wiped cold beads of sweat from his forehead.
"Sweet boy," she said, dabbing his face with a
moist cloth.
Franklin's eyes grew huge as he stared down at a nest of
thorns growing, growling out of a blanket down on his waist that he would have
otherwise liked to pull up and over his head to stave off a sudden, venous cold.
He tried to laugh, but the sound came as the cackling of chickens in his
ears.
"Hell, Ditran's only once a month," he said,
feebly. "The rest is usually
good kicks; and I sure can use them 25 smackeroos.
What's your name? I've seen
you here before. . .ahhh, look at me," he said, wiping a crust from the
corners of his mouth as he tried to ignore the army of tumbleweed thistles
marching in divisions toward his head.
"I've been looking," she smiled,
flushed. "I'll see you
Wednesday."
Franklin warmed through the chill of the Ditran, watching
as nurse Devlin ministered to the mostly college-aged volunteers.
Her long, auburn hair, and the way she wore it pulled back in a ponytail,
reminded him of his mom in old pictures. Then,
from the corner of his eye, he watched a stout man in a khaki suit exit the
service elevator outside the Behavioral Research ward.
The man burst through the double doors and the two were joined
intuitively.
"Boy, have I got good news for you," the
Captain roared, taking in the same four breathing, pulsating white walls.
"Stagnant place, terrible scene," Hubbard growled.
"No wonder so many Americans are unbalanced."
The treating physician rounded a corner, pointing
fervidly to a red and white plastic sign. "This
ward is for Authorized Personnel Only. Can't
you read!?"
Captain Hubbard chuckled, lifting away a flap from his
jacket, feeling the coolness of a .357 in its holster.
"I can read a set of orders sending you off to a leper hospital in
the Andes."
"I'm calling security."
The Captain extracted his Colt.
"I'm the only security you need.
I run this project, name's Al Hubbard," he said, watching the doctor
lose color. Pressing forcefully on
the ulnar nerve, he led the physician to the bed of Franklin Moore.
"Looks from here like you've got a chill from whatever the Doc's got
running through your veins, boy." The
Captain motioned nurse Devlin to remove Franklin's I.V., then walked the Doctor
into an empty office. "Ever
try Ditran, Doc?"
"I've. . ."
"Course not," the Captain muttered.
"You'd never jab it into that fine boy's arm if you had.
Terrible stuff, Doc. Evil. Gives a man a powerful dislike for the world around
him." Hubbard unlocked the
leather satchel on his belt and withdrew a vial of Delysid, fresh from Sandoz
Laboratories in Switzerland. "Here.
Put Franklin Moore on 400 micrograms of this and let him see the truth.
And don't let us down, Doc," the Captain grinned.
"Someone of your professional standing might have a hard time
adjusting to the hills of Peru. It
stays awful wet and cold all year. Your
skin just rots off."
Al Hubbard winked at the doctor, and then strolled
through the ward and left as he had entered---a beacon of light, and a wonder.
II.
The Grey Eminence of psychedelic letters walked into the
Vancouver Yacht Club as gracefully as he had thirty-five years before into an
Oxford lecture hall with his vision of a Brave New World. He glided effortlessly, though with a walking stick, bathed
in flannel, toward a window table where Al Hubbard sat waiting.
The Captain knew Aldous Huxley's time was limited on this
earth, but the pain never showed. Hubbard
stood up at his seat and grabbed Huxley fully around the body, holding him at
stunned attention. "We owe it
all to you, you old sonofabitch!" Hubbard bellowed, his eyes completely
swallowed by the pupils---black pools of burning conviction.
Huxley, standing six-foot seven, a mile above the
Captain, began to smile---a wizened, fulltoothy, ear-stretching grin, then a
laugh that caused his frail body to shudder uncontrollably.
"I do believe you are under the influence."
"Well, it's a damn fine place to be!" the
Captain roared, letting Huxley free. "It
truly is."
Fire and ice, the two sat down and gabbed until some
internal and inexplicable sense order became manifest, at which point Huxley
withdrew a small magnifying glass, placing it over the menu, line-by-line,
restoring sight to a pair of retinas damaged by an untreated bout of strep
throat while at Eton.
"How appropriate," Huxley said, and began to
order the quail on a bed of wild rice.
"And the soup, sir?" the waiter asked.
"Why, the mushroom!" Huxley cried,
caving both men into a volley of helpless laughter.
The lunch crowd was beginning to focus on the odd pair,
sensing, perhaps, a muted genius beneath Huxley's stork-like physique, the regal
elegance of a long line of British dignitaries, author of some 84 novels and
plays. But there was also something
strange about the man. Something
distinctly ungrandfatherly: something, no doubt, having to do with his
conversion in 1953 to Psychedelic Drugs.
He was the F. Scott Fitzgerald of the British '20s, a
mind new and brilliant and captivating; they bowed at his feet in the '30s, and
shuddered at his satiric pen, which spared none. . .but by 1935 something had
happened. Nobody was quite sure
what to call it, but it appeared to be madness, or genius, because nothing else
could possibly explain Brave New World.
It was as if God, Himself, had lunched with Huxley and explained to him
the ills of the human condition.
Madness. Genius.
Essence of peyote. . .rhythms of the Cosmos, sending open the Doors of
Perception.
"We owe it all to you," the Captain repeated.
"Nonsense," Huxley frowned. "I knew nothing of LSD-25 until I met you, Captain
Hubbard. I have said it before, and
will, no doubt, again, that you are the membrane through which all must pass to
enter into the Mysteries. You are
the key, good Captain," Huxley maintained.
"The civilized world may occasionally be amused by my talents, but,
when worshipping, pays homage to Al Hubbard."
"Wow," the Captain muttered. "A guy could get a big head hanging around you, Aldous."
Outside the restaurant, across Puget Sound, a cigarette
boat pulled alongside Hubbard's yacht, then cut its engine.
Hubbard stood abruptly. "Looks
like lunch's over."
Major General William Creasy and Dr. Sheldon Gottfried
gripped a narrow ladder and pulled themselves aboard, waiting for the Captain
and his foreign charge to slip out a side door of the restaurant and stroll down
the dock, then onto the deck of the Wisdom.
Al Hubbard saluted General Creasy, who waved him immediately at-ease.
Sheldon Gottfried, tan and fit like an aging tennis pro,
walked over to Huxley and shook his hand. "It's
been a long time, Aldous."
Huxley nodded, reddening in the eyes. "It has, Shelly. But
we will make up for it, and the world will be a better place."
The four sat at a small table on the deck.
Hubbard opened a bottle of Louis-Mouton Courvasier, pouring a long round
into deep snifters to warm their toes from a crisp wind cutting over the Sound.
"General Creasy is Chairman of the Army Chemical Corps, Aldous.
He's our resident populist," Hubbard chuckled.
Creasy snickered, his pale face offset by a pair of black
eyebrows which flickered as he spoke. "Aldous,
I believe in drugs for the masses. To
each, according to their needs, from me, who owns the whole stash."
Dr. Gottfried smiled.
"Bill has a special contract with Sandoz Laboratories. . .for
virtually their total output of lysergic acid diethylamide."
"It's a monopoly," Creasy grinned.
"Actually, a cartel," Gottfried corrected,
"because he's sharing it with the Company."
"And I," Hubbard said, with a glitter in
his eye, "am sharing it with you."
He unlocked the pouch on his waist, extracted a black vial, and dropped a
clean two-hundred micrograms into each of the four cognacs.
"Bon amis," Gottfried pronounced, lifting his
glass, and the Wisdom, under the direction of Captain Hubbard's personal
driver and the power of twin Chevy 317's, raced out of the harbor toward the
estate of Captain Alfred M. Hubbard, indeed a Man for All Eons.
* * *
Forty minutes later, the approaching shore glowed orange,
covered bulbs forming an ascending line from the steps of the dock to Al
Hubbard's estate. The Wisdom
slowed and entered the slip. All
four men were consumed by the LSD, their bodies reverberating some inner magic,
a vibrant aura illuminating everything around them.
"Feel it?" Hubbard wondered. "I keep thinking one day the stuff won't hit me.
That I'll be immune."
"Maybe we should just talk here," Huxley said,
running his hands over his frail thighs. "I'm
afraid I've forgotten how to walk."
Creasy broke up laughing, embarrassing Huxley.
"I thought I pissed my pants once," Creasy admitted, by way of
apology. "Got so fucking high I just forgot what I was doing.
Lucky for me, it was pouring rain and I had a coat on.
Then I got to a bathroom, and saw that I was perfectly dry."
After Captain Hubbard got Huxley aright, the author moved
on his own volition to the lakefront home, feeling a strange softness in his
feet, as if walking on sponge. Hubbard
unlocked the front door and let the men inside.
"Amazing!" Dr. Gottfried marveled.
"I never realized. . ." he said, walking the length of
Hubbard's living room, in which a long teak table sat majestically on bone-white
carpet, surrounded by objets d'art of the first water.
Over the fireplace, a great, curved sword, with etchings of hunts in the
Savannah on the blade, refracted the room's light; a stuffed elephant's head,
three-foot tusks intact, adorned a far mantle.
General Creasy stood inspecting a glass case devoted to
Civil War revolvers. In grainy
celluloid, Harry S. Truman stood on the deck of the Wisdom. On the same wall, unknown photographers had captured Al
Hubbard with Lucky Luciano at the opening of the Tropicana Hotel and Casino in
Las Vegas; with Robert Welch, founder of the John Birch Society, at its national
headquarters in Belmont, Massachusetts; and drinking whiskey with Papa Joe
Kennedy in Hyannis Port.
"You keep weird company, Al," Creasy said,
staring at the photos. "Bob
Welch, I can handle, but the other two give me gas."
The Captain laughed raucously.
"I believe in the diversity of mankind, General.
I have lots of friends: Jews, goys. . .even know some Fellow Travelers
who pitch a mean contract bridge."
Aldous Huxley radiated into the living room and sank down
into an immense leather sofa. "Shall
we?" he smiled. "I will
need to know Franklin Moore. His
character. His morals, his
weaknesses. . .his very essence before I meet with him.
I should not like to be remembered for a failed experiment."
Dr. Gottfried straightened in his chair. "You won't, Aldous.
I've looked over the kid's medical records, his psychiatric profile, his
background, and I think he's perfect. He
just needs some guidance."
"That's what you said about Neal Cassady,"
Creasy muttered, "and look what a fucking head-case he's turned out to
be."
Captain Hubbard disagreed.
"We've gotten some good mileage out of Neal.
He's the model for our whole program.
The Ubermensch, right Aldous?"
General Creasy shook his head suddenly. "I don't know what I'm doing here. I'm not giving away any more of my Delysid to something I
don't understand."
Following an uneasy silence, Aldous Huxley rose from the
couch, like Jesus from the tomb. "General,
the Ubermensch is my dream. It
is a perfect human being, a superman, if you will.
He is an athlete, a field sergeant, an actor, an irresistible mind and
body. . ."
The men sat rapt as Huxley began creating this perfect
man, cell by resplendent cell, one protean layer atop another, until Frederic
Nietzsche's original philosophical invention virtually sprang to life.
The world had seen facets of the Ubermensch---Mozart,
Rousseau, Thomas Jefferson---but he had disappeared in recent times, and Aldous
Huxley wanted him resurrected.
Indeed, to Huxley, creating the Ubermensch was the
only way to a perfect utopia. In
some ways, Huxley was, himself, this hero: the perfect intelligence, the
sharpest wit, the keenest sensibilities. But
he was also nearly blind, walked with a cane, and was dying of cancer.
"Gentlemen, I have little time to spare.
My contribution to this world will be measured not in my literature, but
by the calibre of man that I may cultivate from his baser instincts."
General Creasy stared skeptically at Huxley.
"Why would a guy change for you""
Captain Hubbard shifted in his chair. Dr. Gottfried sat silently.
"I once had a student at Oxford by the name of Eric
Blair," Huxley said, softly. "A
very timid creature, fairly handsome, but somewhat dyslexic.
He came to me for help in the rudiments of the English language.
I told him to realize his vision. Conceive
of it in his mind, live in it, then transfer it onto paper.
As he did, he altered the outlook of the English-speaking world."
"George Orwell," Creasy said, eyes open,
suddenly understanding. "1984,
Animal Farm. . .that was you!"
Huxley closed his eyes.
"When Eric succumbed to tuberculosis much too early, I was
devastated. He had been my prized
model and a dear friend, and he was dead."
William Creasy came alive, a believer. "Now. . .now, what were you saying about Neal Cassady?
What kind of mileage? You've
been keeping me in the dark!"
"MK-ULTRA has always been on a need-to-know basis,
Bill," Gottfried said. "And
you've never needed to know."
"Well, goddamnit, I do now!" he yelled.
"Of course," the Doctor nodded, and took a
heavy breath. "The Company's
Behavioral Research Division has been working on personality modification since
the early '50s, sometimes on its own agents, sometimes with contract employees,
but most of the time with volunteer civilians.
When the poetry movement started getting noisy in San Francisco, we
decided to try out this Ubermensch concept on a couple of its leaders.
A couple proved worthwhile to a degree, a few did not," Gottfried
said.
"Names!" Creasy shouted.
"I want to know who we've got out there as samoles."
Captain Hubbard cut in.
"Yeah, well, we tried with Jack Kerouac. What a waste. Handsomest
man I've ever seen, looked like Clark Gable. . .then he found whiskey.
He's living with his mom on Long Island now, our men couldn't get at him
if we wanted to. She won't even put
a call through from his friends."
"How did you attach him to MK-ULTRA?" Creasy
wondered. "What's the hook""
"It's different every time," Hubbard said.
"We got Kerouac through his buddy Carlo Marx, the fag poet from the
Bronx. He wrote Growl: `I've
seen the great minds of my era destroyed by anguish, grieving, delirious,
hostile, pulling themselves through the vacant city weeds at dusk, looking for a
final thrill'. . ."
"Jesus," Creasy nodded.
"I remember when that thing came out. The bookstores wouldn't carry it. I think he beat a federal obscenity rap."
Hubbard nodded. "That's
him. He was also an accomplice to a
murder back in '52. One of his
friends stabbed a lover to death and weighted him down into the Hudson.
Carlo got rid of the knife. Lucky
for us, the guy bubbled back up," Hubbard chuckled.
"Marx got off as a nut-case and was shipped off to New York Neuro-Psychiatric.
We planted a young agent named Aaron Fischbein in as his roommate, and
cooked up a story that Fischbein's pop owned a little press.
When they got out, they started publishing some of Kerouac and Willy
Burroughs, who's kookier than seven chickens."
Sheldon Gottfried smiled and shook his head.
"What a plan. Where did we go wrong?"
Hubbard pursed his lips.
"It broke my heart, but in '52 America wasn't ready for something
like On the Road. McCarthy
was swinging for the bleachers. We
just kept hoping ol' Joe would drink himself to death, or that someone would put
a bullet into his brain, because there was no way in hell the public would
accept a book about sex with Negroes, and dope and hitchhiking to Mexico when
the Activities Committee was hauling actors into jail for even sounding like
Democrats.
"We kept putting Kerouac off," Hubbard
continued, "getting him $1,000 here and $500 there for some magazine work.
. .I mean, the guy was really good, there was never any doubt. But by the time McCarthy's liver quit, Kerouac was boozing it
pretty bad himself. His looks have
gone to hell. He has no following.
He's just biding his days now until he pickles his innards."
"And what about Neal Cassady?" Creasy wondered.
"Amazing intellect," Huxley smiled,
assimilating the classified information. "I
should like to know him better. He
has an extraordinary capacity of not only listening and digesting every word,
but holding multiple conversations simultaneously.
I had occasion to meet Mr. Cassady at a Hollywood party.
He was listening to Dr. Oscar Janiger talk about LSD therapy in chronic
alcoholics, while Stanley Kubrick was discussing the latest film techniques, and
Mr. Cassady managed to fondle the backs of Candice Bergen's thighs, while
answering both men and puff a marihuana cigarette in the same
instant," Huxley giggled. "I went to bed knowing there is still hope for the human
condition."
"So why's he such a loser?" Creasy grumbled.
"Last time I heard, he was down in San Quentin for running
dope."
Captain Hubbard groaned.
"Some redneck Kern County cops found him with a baggy of joints.
Any one of us could have inhaled them all at once and still driven home. They gave him five-to-life.
We got him out in two and a half, but then he started eating speed.
His brain's wired like a bomb. He'll
aneurism before he hits forty if he doesn't stay off the bennies.
"We tried to get him the same deal we gave
Kerouac," he explained, "but he doesn't want to sit still at a
typewriter for as long as it takes to write his story.
He'd rather be stealing cars."
The LSD was wearing down, and the men were getting tired.
"Don't suppose I could interest any of you gentlemen
in another dose," the Captain shrugged, eyeing his leather satchel, but
noticed no takers.
Bill Creasy was nodding at the ground, still trying to
deal with it all. "So where
are we now? Where's the goddamned Ubermensch
now!?"
The men looked at each other, then at the Captain.
"He's down at Stanford University," Hubbard smiled. "It's a little early to tell, but I have a feeling he's Captain America." ##
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