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Drug addiction - United States
Mine ..." As if now everything is under control and the fine tuning begins.
From out of the recesses of the garage—I didn't even know they were there—here comes a woman and three children. Kesey's wife Faye, their daughter Shannon, who is six, and two boys, Zane, five, and Jed, three. Faye has long, sorrel-brown hair and is one of the prettiest, most beatific-looking women I ever saw. She looks radiant, saintly. Kesey goes over to her and picks up each of the kids, and then Mountain Girl brings over her baby, Sunshine, and he picks up Sunshine a moment. All right—
Then Kesey loosens up and smiles, as if he just thought of something. It is as if he just heard Mountain Girl's question about how was jail. "The only thing I was worried about was this tooth," he says. He pops a dental plate out of the roof of his mouth and pushes a false front tooth out of his mouth with his tongue. "I had the awfulest feeling," he says. "I was going to be in court or talking to reporters or something, and this thing was going to fall down like this and I was going to start gumming my words." He gums the words "start gumming my words," to illustrate.
Three weeks later he was to replace it with a tooth with an orange star and green stripes on it, an enameled dens incisus lateral bearing a Prankster flag. One day at a gas station the manager, a white guy, gets interested in the tooth and calls over his helper, a colored guy, and says, "Hey, Charlie, come over here and show this fellow your tooth." So Charlie grins and bares his upper teeth, revealing a gold tooth with a heart cut out in the gold so that a white enamel heart shows through. Kesey grins back and then bares his tooth—the colored guy stares a moment and doesn't say anything.
He doesn't even smile. He just turns away. A little while later, down the road, Kesey says very seriously, very sorrowfully, "That was wrong of me. I shouldn't have done that." "Done what?" "I outniggered him," says Kesey.
Outniggered him! Kesey has kept these countryisms, like "the awfulest feeling," all through college, graduate school, days of literary celebration...
"How did it happen?" says Freewheeling Frank, meaning the tooth.
"He got in a fight with a Hell's Angel," says Mountain Girl.
"What!—" Freewheeling Frank is truly startled.
"Yeah!" says Mountain Girl. "The bastard hit him with a chain!"
"What!" says Frank. "Where? What was his name!"
Kesey gives Mountain Girl a look.
"Naw," she says.
"What was his name!" Frank says. "What did he look like!"
"Mountain Girl is shucking you," Kesey says. "I was in a wreck."
Mountain Girl looks repentant. Angels' duels are no joke with Frank. Kesey breaks up ... the vibrations. He sits down in one of the old theater seats. He is just talking in a soft, conversational tone, with his head down, just like he is having conversation with Mountain Girl or somebody.
"It's funny," he says. "There are guys in jail who have been in jail so much, that's their whole thing. They're jail freaks. They've picked up the whole jail language—"
—everybody starts gathering around, sitting in the old theater seats or on the floor.
The mysto steam begins rising—
"—only it isn't their language, it's the guards', the cops', the D.A.'s, the judge's. It's all numbers. One of them says, 'What happened to so-and-so?' And the other one says,
'Oh, he's over in 34,' which is a cellblock. 'They got him on a 211'—they have numbers for different things, just like you hear on a police radio—'they got him on a 211, but he can cop to a 213 and get three to five, one and a half with good behavior.'
"The cops like that. It makes them feel better if you play their game. They'll chase some guy and run him down and pull guns on him and they're ready to blow his head off if he moves a muscle, but then as soon as they have him in jail, one of them will come around and ask him how his wife is and he's supposed to say she's O.K., thanks, and ask him about his kids, like now
Carol Wallace, Bill Wallance
Vic Ghidalia and Roger Elwood (editors)