Ken Kesey: One flew over cuckoo's nest

The Acutes are grinning now, not so uneasy any more, and glad that something out of the ordinary’s going on. They all razz Harding, ask him if he’s bull goose loony. He lays down his cards.

Harding is a flat, nervous man with a face that sometimes makes you think you seen him in the movies, like it’s a face too pretty to just be a guy on the street. He’s got wide, thin shoulders and he curves them in around his chest when he’s trying to hide inside himself. He’s got hands so long and white and dainty I think they carved each other out of soap, and sometimes they get loose and glide around in front of him free as two white birds until he notices them and traps them between his knees; it bothers him that he’s got pretty hands.

He’s president of the Patient’s Council on account of he has a paper that says he graduated from college. The paper’s framed and sits on his nightstand next to a picture of a woman in a bathing suit who also looks like you’ve seen her in the moving pictures — she’s got very big breasts and she’s holding the top of the bathing suit up over them with her fingers and looking sideways at the camera. You can see Harding sitting on a towel behind her, looking skinny in his bathing suit, like he’s waiting for some big guy to kick sand on him. Harding brags a lot about having such a woman for a wife, says she’s the sexiest woman in the world and she can’t get enough of him nights.

When Billy points him out Harding leans back in his chair and assumes an important look, speaks up at the ceiling without looking at Billy or McMurphy. “Does this… gentleman have an appointment, Mr. Bibbit?”

“Do you have an appointment, Mr. McM-m-murphy? Mr. Harding is a busy man, nobody sees him without an ap-appointment.”

“This busy man Mr. Harding, is he the bull goose loony?” He looks at Billy with one eye, and Billy nods his head up and down real fast; Billy’s tickled with all the attention he’s getting.

“Then you tell Bull Goose Loony Harding that R. P. McMurphy is waiting to see him and that this hospital ain’t big enough for the two of us. I’m accustomed to being top man. I been a bull goose catskinner for every gyppo logging operation in the Northwest and bull goose gambler all the way from Korea, was even bull goose pea weeder on that pea farm at Pendleton — so I figure if I’m bound to be a loony, then I’m bound to be a stompdown dadgum good one. Tell this Harding that he either meets me man to man or he’s a yaller skunk and better be outta town by sunset.”

Harding leans farther back, hooks his thumbs in his lapels. “Bibbit, you tell this young upstart McMurphy that I’ll meet him in the main hall at high noon and we’ll settle this affair once and for all, libidos a-blazin’.” Harding tries to drawl like McMurphy; it sounds funny with his high, breathy voice. “You might also warn him, just to be fair, that I have been bull goose loony on this ward for nigh onto two years, and that I’m crazier than any man alive.”

“Mr. Bibbit, you might warn this Mr. Harding that I’m so crazy I admit to voting for Eisenhower.”

“Bibbit! You tell Mr. McMurphy I’m so crazy I voted for Eisenhower twice!”

“And you tell Mr. Harding right back” — he puts both hands on the table and leans down, his voice getting low — “that I’m so crazy I plan to vote for Eisenhower again this November .”

“I take off my hat,” Harding says, bows his head, and shakes hands with McMurphy. There’s no doubt in my mind that McMurphy’s won, but I’m not sure just what.

All the other Acutes leave what they’ve been doing and ease up close to see what new sort this fellow is. Nobody like him’s ever been on the ward before. They’re asking him where he’s from and what his business is in a way I’ve never seen them do before. He says he’s a dedicated man. He says he was just a wanderer and logging bum before the Army took him and taught him what his natural bent was; just like they taught some men to goldbrick and some men to goof off, he says, they taught him to play poker. Since then he’s settled down and devoted himself to gambling on all levels. Just play poker and stay single and live where and how he wants to, if people would let him, he says, “but you know how society persecutes a dedicated man. Ever since I found my callin’ I done time in so many small-town jails I could write a brochure. They say I’m a habitual hassler. Like I fight some. Sheeut. They didn’t mind so much when I was a dumb logger and got into a hassle; that’s excusable , they say, that’s a hard-workin’ feller blowing off steam, they say. But if you’re a gambler, if they know you to get up a back-room game now and then, all you have to do is spit slantwise and you’re a goddamned criminal. Hooee, it was breaking up the budget drivin’ me to and from the pokey for a while there.”

He shakes his head and puffs out his cheeks.

“But that was just for a period of time. I learned the ropes. To tell the truth, this ‘sault and battery I was doing in Pendleton was the first hitch in close to a year. That’s why I got busted. I was outa practice; this guy was able to get up off the floor and get to the cops before I left town. A very tough individual…”

He laughs again and shakes hands and sits down to arm wrestle every time that black boy gets too near him with the thermometer, till he’s met everybody on the Acute side. And when he finishes shaking hands with the last Acute he comes right on over to the Chronics, like we aren’t no different. You can’t tell if he’s really this friendly or if he’s got some gambler’s reason for trying to get acquainted with guys so far gone a lot of them don’t even know their names.

He’s there pulling Ellis’s hand off the wall and shaking it just like he was a politician running for something and Ellis’s vote was good as anybody’s. “Buddy,” he says to Ellis in a solemn voice, “my name is R. P. McMurphy and I don’t like to see a full-grown man sloshin’ around in his own water. Whyn’t you go get dried up?”

Ellis looks down at the puddle around his feet in pure surprise. “Why, I thank you,” he says and even moves off a few steps toward the latrine before the nails pull his hands back to the wall.

McMurphy comes down the line of Chronics, shakes hands with Colonel Matterson and with Ruckly and with Old Pete. He shakes the hands of Wheelers and Walkers and Vegetables, shakes hands that he has to pick up out of laps like picking up dead birds, mechanical birds, wonders of tiny bones and wires that have run down and fallen. Shakes hands with everybody he comes to except Big George the water freak, who grins and shies back from that unsanitary hand, so McMurphy just salutes him and says to his own right hand as he walks away, “Hand, how do you suppose that old fellow knew all the evil you been into?”

Nobody can make out what he’s driving at, or why he’s making such a fuss with meeting everybody, but it’s better’n mixing jigsaw puzzles. He keeps saying it’s a necessary thing to get around and meet the men he’ll be dealing with, part of a gambler’s job. But he must know he ain’t going to be dealing with no eighty-year-old organic who couldn’t do any more with a playing card than put it in his mouth and gum it awhile. Yet he looks like he’s enjoying himself, like he’s the sort of guy that gets a laugh out of people.

I’m the last one. Still strapped in the chair in the corner. McMurphy stops when he gets to me and hooks his thumbs in his pockets again and leans back to laugh, like he sees something funnier about me than about anybody else. All of a sudden I was scared he was laughing because he knew the way I was sitting there with my knees pulled up and my arms wrapped around them, staring straight ahead as though I couldn’t hear a thing, was all an act.