The Further Inquiry

Interior. Dark. Big Green Leaves . . . looking through the leaves at a semi-obscured man in the background. He is wearing the old-fashioned legal robe and wig of a Victorian courtroom bailiff.

CHEST
He turns around, lighting a cigar. The court opposer is a stout-face, healthy man with thick round glasses and an unblinking impishness to his gaze. With his wig cocked and his robe held girded at the middle to save the hem, he looks more a jovial monk than a judge advocate. He finishes lighting his cigar and blows a cloud of smoke across the courtroom.

BAILIFF
Defender Tooey is a woman. She is less middle-aged than Chest, and prettier. Blond locks hang from beneath the tight white curls of her wig. She scoots back from her table and stands, as tall and lean as her adversary is otherwise. She waves tiredly at the cigar smoke.

KEM
Into the area where the Dictaphone table had been is wheeled a huge KEM apparatus with three blank viewing screens.

TOOEY
The defense is ready, Bailiff. . .

The gavel bangs.

BAILIFF
The inquiry is open have a care and govern yourselves accordingly. Opposition, will you present your case?

Chest stands, looking up out of his dossier.

CHEST
Sebern? A Mister Sebern in the court?

BAILIFF
Mr. Sebern?

ROY
Here. Roy Sebern here.

Roy stands and walks up aisle. Beyond him in the background, the screens of the KEM fill, one after the other, with pictures of Roy from bus days, 25 years earlier. Roy stops before the bailiff's podium and turns. His "now" face is flanked by 3 out-of-focus bearded "then" faces. He is a hawkishly-featured man with black hair and eyebrows. His eyes are intense behind black rimmed glasses.

BAILIFF
How would you be called by this court?

ROY
Roy will be fine.

Gavel points to the witness seat and Roy sits. Chest comes forward, putting his cigar in its ashtray.

CHEST
Mr. Roy ah . . . what would you say is your occupation at present?

ROY
I would have to say it is . . . artist.

CHEST
A title not taken lightly by you, I can see.

ROY
I am serious about it if that's what you mean.

CHEST
Precisely what I mean. Now Roy, we would like to inquire about a certain journey by bus that took place across the United States of America in the summer of (rifling through his papers) 1964?

The three screens on the KEM are beginning to spin, forward and back, searching randomly among Roy footage.

ROY
Sixty-four, yes. Way back there.

CHEST
The bus, way back there, must have looked somewhat different than this. (Chest jerks his chin toward the decrepit bus parked behind them.)

ROY
Its earliest, its first look was plain school bus yellow -

A reel rolls on KEM table, producing a shot of yellow bus on a green dewy morn. There is an outdoor sound of kids laughing, birds singing, men hammering and calling to each other in general activity, overlaid throughout with strains of Coltrane's "Greensleeves."

ROY
When I first heard Kesey say we were going to paint it the idea didn't appeal to me at all. Because I thought it looked really fine the way it was . . . I didn't see any reason to obliterate it.

CHEST
Did you try to discourage this obliteration?

ROY
beginning to speak faster, getting irritated without being certain why:
I may have just mentioned in passing . . . but once it was obvious it was going to happen, I just jumped in with everybody else. I'd been paying attention to abstract expressionism, in other words, "having at" whatever you were painting and just kind of flinging paint at the canvas.

ROY
And this bus was a canvas that you could keep "having at" all the way to New York. The longest painting in painting history -

CHEST
New York?

ROY
Where the bus was headed. To the World's Fair . . .

CHEST
That was its goal?

ROY
Partially. Something more than that though, something -

CHEST
Further?

Roy doesn't answer. He is watching himself on the KEM paint on the Further sign.

ROY
I had this very strong feeling that having a name like Further would contribute impetus to keeping it going, - when it might get stuck, or broken down - that the word would have power - like Shazam . . . .

click here to read more from
THE FURTHER INQUIRY

To order
THE FURTHER INQUIRY
or books, tapes and videos and other assorted paraphernalia
by
Ken Kesey, Ken Babbs and others
click here