Wolfe's classic: Pranksters’ long, strange trip revisited

In 1964, when Ken Kesey, author and LSD evangelist, and a group of friends calling themselves the Merry Pranksters, set off across the US in a bus daubed in psychedelic colours, they talked of being either on the bus or off the bus. It was a phrase both literal and metaphorical. Not simply, were you there, physically but were you there mystically?Tom Wolfe was not, in any sense, on the bus.