Red Wedge is proud to publish this poem and short self-profile from the legendary Ken Babbs, one of the original Merry Pranksters. The poem asks us to consider the great figure of Neal Cassady, a pioneering countercultural figure and the bridge between the “Beat Generation” and the emergent hippie movement in the Bay Area and beyond, “Cowboy Neal at the wheel on a bus to never ever land”….’
Neal Cassady
The Man Who Bridged Time
By Ken Babbs
Ever hear of Neal Cassady?
the Beat Generation legend
Best friends with Jack Kerouac
On the Road was Jack's book
and Cassady was the character
named Dean Moriarity,
the man who bridged time
between the Beats, the Pranksters
and the Psychedelic Revolutionaries
The drug agents weren't impressed
They called him Johnny Potseed
and he did two years
for two joints
and when he got out
he drove to
Kesey's house on
Perry Lane across the street
from the Stanford golf course
talking all the time
and never repeating himself once,
the rear end went out
of his jeep station wagon
and he spent all weekend
repairing it while the
neighborhood croquet game
went on around him
and he enlightened everyone
with mystifying quips
we're fourth dimensional beings
inhabiting a three dimensional body
living in a two dimensional world
black and white, good and evil
with a touch of grey
At the Vietnam Day peace rally
Cassady offered wrigley's chewing gum
to both the provocateur FBI guys
and the enraged protestors
flummoxing them so much
he defused the entire
head on collision.
the FBI guys were
wearing blue push pins
in their lapels and
the CIA guys were
wearing red push pins
in their lapels and
all over the place
you could see guys
pulling push pins
outta their lapels
and throwing them
on the ground
"Walked away
from another one, Chief,"
Cassady said
Cowboy Neal at the wheel
Ken Babbs, resplendent among Pranksters, 1970.
Babbs on Babbs, Pranksters gonna Prank
Like many others I was born at a very young age and although many times have been accused of being illiterate I certainly am not and have the birth certificate to prove it.
Ohio bred and Ohio born and a rapscallion child on long bike rides and campouts and stolen watermelons and hot smarmy days on the sands of Lake Erie beaches skipping flat rocks across the water.
A graduate of Miami University and a member of two NCAA tourney basketball teams.
Graduate school at Stanford where I met Kesey and Wendell Berry and other luminaries in the writing class. Then five years in the Marine Corps as a helicopter pilot ending with a year in Vietnam and then off the chopper and onto the bus for the famous trip chronicled by Tom Wolfe and filmed and taped by the Merry Band of Pranksters. You can get the vids at www.key-z.com.
43 years of Kesey collaborations, doing talks, shows, musical catastrophes, writing books and magazine stories; pumping kids through high school and college, married to a retired high school English teacher; gardening, tending a milk cow and calf, still writing, one book under my belt, another on the way, occasionally performing with words and trombone.
I can be reached at www.skypilotclub.com.
KB sketched by KB