Ken Kesey - Demon Box

As the day drifted toward the festive eve ahead, we drifted out of our little food-filled office to stroll the Christmasy London streets and drink stout in the pubs – work up an appetite for the feast to come. When we ambled back to 3 Savile Row and past the pack of cheeky fans that cluttered the steps with their little autograph books (they all looked like Lulu) and through lobbies #1 and #2 to the hallowed lobby #3, we found that another coterie of Yanks had established a beachhead right in the middle of the lush crimson carpet. What kind of pull they had used to bore this deep into Apple I couldn't imagine, because they were even scruffier than we were. There were half a dozen big bearded dudes with ragged grins, a bunch of naked noisy kids, and one woman – a skinny redhead on the sinewy side of thirty sporting a faded blue dress of hillbilly homespun with matching hicky twang.

"We're the Firedog Family," she informed us. "We come here to see the Beatles all the way from Fort Smith, Arkansas. I had this dream me and John was running side by side through the electric-blue waters of the Caribbean and he looked at me and says 'Come Together.' 'Ticket to Ride' was play in'. We was naked. We was on acid. We ran right out of the water right up into the sky. And my given name is Lucy Diamond. Let's chant again, children."

The pack of kids stopped fussing and settled themselves obeli diently in a circle and began chanting.

"John and Yo-ko Ring-go too-ooo. John and Yo-ko Ring-go too-ooo…"

The woman snaked across the carpet to the rhythm, all knees and elbows and freckles. "We know they is in the building. One of the kids was running in the hall and seen them carrying a big red sack. This chant will bring us together."

Her eyes fluttered shut a moment at the divine prospect, then she stopped dancing and gave us a look faded as her blue dress.

"Y' know, don't you, that the Beatles is the most blessed people on earth? They are. For instance, how many times have you been coming down with the blues and heard a Beatles tune come on the radio and thought to yourself, 'God bless the Beatles.' Huh? That's exactly what I said when I saw Yellow Submarine after my last abortion. 'God bless the Beatles.' And how many folks all over the world have done the same thing more or less, blest the Beatles? So, you see – they're all saints. Blessed saints. I mean who on this miserable earth, in this day and age, who can you name that has been blest more times than the Beatles?"

We couldn't think of a soul. We were hungry and tired and not very interested in playing Name the Saints. When the door was finally opened to us and we left lobby #3 the kids were still chanting "John and Yo-ko Ring-go too-ooo" and the woman was swaying and the bearded dudes were nodding to the beat. We walked up the hall to our assigned room without a word, stomachs grumbling, only to find the food had been completely removed. Nothing left but the smell. It seemed like a hint. Grumpily, Old Bert gathered his bedroll from beneath the empty table.

"Blessing them's all right, but I don't guess you have to get right up in their faces to do it."

"Yeah," Frisco Fran agreed. "Let's cut."

Back down in the main sanctum the night's crowd was gathering – toffs in worsted flannel and sandalwood cologne, birds in bright beads and bouffants by Vidal Sassoon, executive types in tie-dyed Nehru shirts and Day-Glo tennies – and the champagne was flowing. Old Bert decided a little snack might be nice before leaving. His nose told him the grub couldn't be far away. He sniffed up to a parted door where a natty lad in a plaid weskit was positioned as guard.

"Whatsye, myte?" Bert had picked up a nice cockney accent in the afternoon pubs. "That I grabs me a drumstick for the road?"

"Cawn't, I don't think," the boy answered, nervous and vague. "Supposed to save it for after. The invited, rather. You understand – for later."

"We are invited, old sport." Bert produced the card we'd been issued. "And maybe we ain't staying till later. Furthermore" - - he jerked a thick-knuckled thumb over his shoulder, indicating a place in the past – "I ain't ate since the airport."

The boy looked at the thumb with all that carbon and grease still under the thumbnail from reassembling the bikes, and at the leather wristband with its battered studs, and at the big, vein-laced forearm with those terrible tattoos of knives and nooses, and it appeared to me that he was about to see his way clear to advancing Old Bert an early taste of turkey. But just then one of the tie-dyed higher-ups sidled by in long muttonchops and a snide smile. He was eating a macaroon.

"Don't give it to them, Clayburn," this colorful creature advised through a long bony nose as he chewed his cookie. "I don't care how much chanting they do." Then, very foolishly, he added, "They're nothing but leeches and mumpers anyway."

"What was that, myte?" Bert asked with a wide grin, turning slowly from the turkey to what promised to be juicier fare. "What did you sye?"

"I said, 'Leeches and mumpers.' "

Pow! The executive went somersaulting backward all the way to the wall, where he slowly slid down in a pile against the baseboard and lay there, like a rumpled rainbow. The room suddenly polarized, all the Englishmen springing to one side of the carpet to surround their clobbered countryman in an instant display of British pith, all the Yanks to the other.

"Anybody else," Bert asked the group glaring at us from across the room, "thinks we're leeches or mumpers?" – in a challenge so specific that everybody knew it would have to be answered or none of the home team would ever be able to look the statue of Admiral Nelson in his steely eye again. I took off my watch and put it in my pocket. The music stopped. The two factions tightened and gathered, readying for the rumble.

It was into this smoldering scene, right between these two forces about to clash, that John Lennon came, in a red Santa Claus suit and a silly white beard.

"Awright, then," he said, not loud but very clear, and reasonable, and unsmiling, that thin, bespectacled face pale yet intensely bright, polished by more time spent beneath the blast of that high-voltage beam than any face I have ever seen, the thin hands coming out of the white fur cuffs to hold back the two sides of the room, like Moses holding back the waters – "That's enough."

And it was. The rumble didn't erupt. He stopped it, just like that. Old Bert was so impressed that he apologized at once to everyone, even bent down to help the young executive brush the bloody coconut crumbs out of his muttonchops. Everybody laughed. A cork popped. The music resumed. Yoko emerged from behind John, as though cloned from his yuletide image, in matching beard and red Santa suit with a big red sack over her shoulder. She began passing out gifts. Blond Mama Fran decided to take off her mink and stick around awhile after all. Spider began to eye the nervous Lulus. The caterers swept in with trays of sliced meats and pickled crabapples. The party went on.

Oo blah dee.

After New Year's Day, I returned to London with my family. We took a flat in Hampstead and I tubed daily to Apple to work on a spoken-word record that was to be called Paperback Records. It never happened. Fell apart. Administrative shake-ups. I didn't mind. It was a fun time, hanging around the action in the Apple orchard in those days when the bounty was still unblighted.

I saw John Lennon every once in a while after that first night – on the roof watching the sky, in the halls, playing the piano in the studio, at Albert Hall for his over-hyped "Alchemical Wedding" when he crawled into a big bag with Yoko for forty uncomfortable minutes of public humping while the packed and petulant house hooted and whistled and called out things like " 'Ow's the revol oo tion goin' then, John?" – but never again saw anything as bright and clear and courageous as when he stepped between the two sides at the Christmas party.