Ken Kesey - Demon Box

It had been too pompous for Deboree to let pass. "What I see is less like poetry and more like ninety pounds Buddy is giving away."

"Then you try him," Buddy had challenged. "I'm curious to see how you do, hotshot, giving away only maybe a third of that."

The moment he took Lars Dolfs hand he had understood Buddy's curiosity. Though he knew the round little form still had the advantage by perhaps two dozen pounds, he could feel immediately that the difference was not one of weight. Nor was it speed; during his last three seasons on the Oregon team Deboree had been able to tell within the first few seconds of the opening round whether his opponent had the jump on him. And this man's reactions were almost slothlike compared to those of a collegiate wrestler. The difference was in a kind of ungodly strength. He remembers thinking, as Dolf snatched him from the floor with a flick of his forearm and hurled him through the air into a crowd of awestruck undergraduates watching from the daybed, bongos mute in their laps, that this would be what it was like to Indian-wrestle a 250-pound ant.

Like his brother, Deboree had risen and returned to battle without any sense of shame or defeat. To take the hand, to be thrown again and again and return again and again, more out of amazement and curiosity than any sense of masculine combativeness.

"It's where you think from, do you begin to see? The eye that seeks the lotus… never sees the lotus. Only the search can it see. The eye that searches for nothing… finds… the garden in full bloom. Desire in the head… makes a hollow in the center… makes a man… ahm!" - - as he threw Deboree into the particle-board wall, with its growing array of dents and craters – "unbalanced."

When Lars Dolf left after that evening, he took three of the undergraduates back to the city with him – two psychology majors and a frat boy who had not yet settled on a field – to enroll them in the Buddhist seminary on Jackson Street, never mind that spring term at Stanford was only two weeks short of over. Deboree himself was so impressed that he was half considering such a transfer until Lars informed him that the sutra classes began at four in the morning six days a week. He decided to stick it out at the writing seminar instead, which only met three times a week, and at three in the afternoon, and over coffee and cookies. But, like his brother and everyone else, he had been awestruck. And Lars Dolf had reigned as the undisputed phenomenon of the peninsula until the next fall, when a Willys jeep with a transmission blown from driving it too far too fierce too fast had brought Houlihan into his yard and his life.

The famous Houlihan. With his bony Irish face dancing continually and simultaneously through a dozen expressions, his sky-blue eyes flirting up from under long lashes, and with his reputation and his unstoppable rap, Houlihan became a sensation around the Stanford bongo circuit before the tortured jeep had hardly stopped steaming. He was a curiosity easily equal to Lars Dolf in charisma and character and, without the heavy-handed oriental dogma, a lot more fun to be around.

There were, in fact, no real similarities between the two men. But comparisons could not be avoided. As fast as Dolf was phlegmatic, as sinewy and animated as Dolf was thick and stolid, poor Houlihan was matched with the Buddhist Bull before he was even aware of an opponent's existence. By mid-fall term, all the talk in the hip Palo Alto coffeehouses was about the latest Houlihan blitz – how he had climbed on stage during Allen Ginsberg's reading in Dinkelspiel Auditorium, without a shirt or shoes, carrying a flashlight in one hand and a flyswatter in the other, to stalk invisible scurriers about the podium: "Maybe so, Ginsy, but I saw the best mice of my generation destroyed by good 'ol American grit – there's one take that you rodent you oop only winged 'em there he goes anyhow – you were saying? Don't let me interrupt"; how he had talked the San Mateo deputy sheriff into giving his stalled sedan a jump start instead of a speeding ticket after being pulled over on Bayshore, and, so persuasive and brain-boggling was Houlihan's rap, got away with the cop's cables in the bargain; how he had seduced the lady psychiatrist who had been sent by a distraught and wealthy Atherton mother to save a daughter deranged by five days' living in the back of the family's station wagon with this maniac, and the mother who had sent her when they all got back to Atherton, and the nurse the family had hired to protect the daughter from further derangement. Usually, eventually, these coffeehouse tales of Houlihan's heroics were followed by conjecture about future feats and finally, inevitably, about the meeting of the two heroes.

"Wonder if Houlihan'll be able to mess with Lars Dolf's mind like that? Should they ever lock horns, I mean…"

Deboree saw the historic encounter. It took place in the driveway of a tall, dark-browed, spectral law student named Felix Rommel, who claimed to be the grandson of the famous German general. No one had given much credence to the claim until a huge crate arrived from Frankfurt containing – Felix had announced – his grandfather's Mercedes. Lars Dolf had been phoned to find out if he would like to see this classic relic from his fatherland. He arrived on a bicycle. There was a champagne party on Felix's wide San Mateo lawn while the car was ceremoniously uncrated and rolled backward into the garage under the lights, gray and gleaming. Lars looked it over carefully, smiling at the double-headed eagle still perched on the radiator cap and some of the Desert Fox's maps and scrawled messages Felix showed him in the glove compartment. "It is a beaut," he told everybody.

The car had been carefully preserved, unscratched except for the right side of the front bumper, which had been bent in shipping and was crimped against the tire. Felix even started the engine with a jump from Deboree's panel. Everybody drank champagne in the yard while the big engine idled in the garage. Felix asked Dolf if he would like to drive it when the bumper got straightened, that there might be a chauffeur's job open as soon as the California bar exams allowed Felix to practice. Felix said he couldn't legally drive it himself for another nine months because of a DUIL, and his wife wouldn't drive it because she was Jewish, "So I need somebody."

Dolf was politely thanking the couple for the offer but was saying he would probably stick with his old Schwinn – "For my German vehicle" – when into the drive came a steaming, lurching '53 Chevy with a noisy rod about to blow under the hood and noisier driver already blowing wild behind the wheel. Houlihan was out the door and into the startled yard before the signal from the ignition had reached the poor motor, shirtless and sweating and jabbering, zooming around to open the other doors for his usual entourage of shell-shocked passengers, introducing each to everybody, digressing between introductions about the day's events, the trip down from the city, the bad rod, the good tires, the lack of gas, and grass, and ass, and of course the need for speed – "Anybody? Anybody? With the well-known leapers? Bennies? Dexies? Uh? Preludins even? Oops? I say something wrong?" – admonishing himself for his manners and his hectic habits, complimenting Felix on his idling heirloom, kicking the tires, clicking his heels and saluting the two-headed hood ornament, starting all over again, introducing his bedraggled crew again only with the names all different… a typical Houlihan entrance that might have gone on uninterrupted until his departure minutes or hours later, if Felix hadn't distracted him with a huge joint that he drew out of his vest pocket as though he'd been saving it for this very occasion. And while Houlihan was holding the first vein-popping lungful of smoke, Felix led him by the elbow to the little cement bench in the shadow of the acacia where Lars Dolf had retreated to sit in full lotus and watch. Without speaking, Dolf had slowly untwined his legs and stood to take Houlihan's hand. Houlihan had resumed his chatter, the words spilling out as irrepressible as the smoke: