St. Timothy on the Freeway

KEN KESEY

Ken Kesey, a merry prankster, wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Sometimes a Great Notion, and other classics.

All the way down, of course, sanity going on with politic policy; Craziness, on the other hand, a little shallow and sporadic.

Streets lined both sides with Karate teachers (DEFEND YOURSELF!) fabricate enormous lies concerning the direness of our neighborhood. Manhole covers open up advertising Elysium with no down payment. Rides needed outta town as soon as possible tomorrow morning if possible help with gas and driving. Citizen band radios charge each other with impossible atrocities (LET ME OUTTA HERE DEFENDING MYSELF! all the way down, still humming, humming, give all you got, humming, humming, all you got) where fascists belch at each other beneath the coffee tables, significantly.

You can’t argue with the seven route interchange fulla segregated schoolbuses, and you hitchhiking high the hell outta here. “Why am ah treated so bad?” you cry with your thumbs out; but you can’t argue. “Where am ah goin to? Will ah ever git thar?” But you know you gonna get on whatever schoolbus stops for you.

“Look at the people this town ferchrissakes!” you cry, hesitating.

“Nemmine that, kid; you get on board or aren’t you?”

“Don’t I have a right to know where you taken me?”

“Listen kid, this your color bus or not? Or you wanta hang out the rest of your life on the shoulder and watch others get an education?”

“All right. Anyplace better’n this town; but look at the people, I ask you; why we makin each other so ugly and shifty eyed?”

“I’m leavin, kid.” Vrooom.

“Wait! No! wait . . .”

In the streets behind you hear the Karate teachers charging the open manholes, all narrated by conflicting radio reports. (Saving grace, humming there on the shoulder of the freeway, all the day long all the way down, humming, humming, feeling all right in spite.)

I’d rather be real than right, tonight, with the freeway furur finally dying down . . . a quiet little rain is falling . . . the Karate classes are dark; the manholes closed . . . oowumm . . . oooywouuummmmmm. . . .

You are a great man, Timothy; what else can we say? We will miss you in this land but we’ll lock you in none.