The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (2 page)
Read The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test Online
Authors: Tom Wolfe
Tags: #United States, #Social Science, #General, #Popular Culture, #History, #20th Century
“âthere's been no creativity,” he is saying, “and I think my value has been to help create the next step. I don't think there will be any movement off the drug scene until there is something else to move toâ”
âall in a plain country accent about somethingâwell, to be frank, I didn't know what in the hell it was all about. Sometimes he spoke cryptically, in aphorisms. I told him I had heard he didn't intend to do any more writing. Why? I said.
“I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph,” he said.
He talked about something called the Acid Test and forms of expression in which there would be no separation between himself and the audience. It would be all one experience, with all the senses opened wide, words, music, lights, sounds, touchâ
lightning
.
lightning
.
“You mean on the order of what Andy Warhol is doing?” I said.
⦠pause. “No offense,” says Kesey, “but New York is about two years behind.”
He said it very patiently, with a kind of country politeness, as if ⦠I don't want to be rude to you fellows from the City, but there's been things going on out here that you would never guess in your wildest million years, old buddy â¦
THE TEN MINUTES WERE UP AND I WAS OUT OF THERE. I HAD gotten nothing, except my first brush with a strange phenomenon, that strange up-country charisma, the Kesey presence. I had nothing to do but kill time and hope Kesey would get out on bail somehow and I could talk to him and get the details on Novelist Fugitive in Mexico. This seemed like a very long shot at this time, because Kesey had two marijuana charges against him and had already jumped the country once.
So I rented a car and started making the rounds in San Francisco. Somehow my strongest memories of San Francisco are of me in a terrific rented sedan roaring up hills or down hills, sliding on and off the cable-car tracks. Slipping and sliding down to North Beach, the fabled North Beach, the old fatherland bohemia of the West Coast, always full of Big Daddy So-and-so and Costee Plusee and long-haired little Wasp and Jewish buds balling spade catsâand now North Beach was dying. North Beach was nothing but tit shows. In the famous Beat Generation HQ, the City Lights bookstore, Shig Murao, the Nipponese panjandrum of the place, sat glowering with his beard hanging down like those strands of furze and fern in an architect's drawing, drooping over the volumes of Kahlil Gibran by the cash register while Professional Budget Finance Dentists here for the convention browsed in search of the beatniks between tit shows. Everything was The Topless on North Beach, strippers with their breasts enlarged with injections of silicone emulsion.
The actionâmeaning the hip cliques that set the original toneâthe action was all over in Haight-Ashbury. Pretty soon all the bellwethers of a successful bohemia would be there, too, the cars going through, bumper to bumper, with everbody rubber-necking, the tour buses going through “and here ⦠Home of the Hippies ⦠there's one there,” and the queers and spade hookers and bookstores and boutiques. Everything was Haight-Ashbury and the acid heads.
But it was not just North Beach that was dying. The whole old-style hip lifeâjazz, coffee houses, civil rights, invite a spade for dinner, Vietnamâit was all suddenly dying, I found out, even among the students at Berkeley, across the bay from San Francisco, which had been the heart of the “student-rebellion” and so forth. It had even gotten to the point that Negroes were no longer in the hip scene, not even as totem figures. It was unbelievable.
Spades
, the very soul figures of Hip, of jazz, of the hip vocabulary itself, man and like and dig and baby and scarf and split and later and so fine, of civil rights and graduating from Reed College and living on North Beach, down Mason, and balling spade catsâall that good elaborate petting and patting and pouring soul all over the spadesâall over, finished, incredibly.
Spades
, the very soul figures of Hip, of jazz, of the hip vocabulary itself, man and like and dig and baby and scarf and split and later and so fine, of civil rights and graduating from Reed College and living on North Beach, down Mason, and balling spade catsâall that good elaborate petting and patting and pouring soul all over the spadesâall over, finished, incredibly.
So I was starting to get the trend of all this heaving and convulsing in the bohemian world of San Francisco. Meantime, miraculously, Kesey's three young lawyers, Pat Hallinan, Brian Rohan, and Paul Robertson, were about to get Kesey out on bail. They assured the judges, in San Mateo and San Francisco, that Mr. Kesey had a very public-spirited project in mind. He had returned from exile for the express purpose of calling a huge meeting of heads and hippies at Winterland Arena in San Francisco in order to tell The Youth to stop taking LSD because it was dangerous and might french fry their brains, etc. It was going to be an “acid graduation” ceremony. They should go “beyond acid.” That was what Kesey had been talking to me about, I guess. At the same time, six of Kesey's close friends in the Palo Alto area
had put their homes up as security for a total of $35,000 bail with the San Mateo County court. I suppose the courts figured they had Kesey either way. If he jumped bail now, it would be such a dirty trick on his friends, costing them their homes, that Kesey would be discredited as a drug apostle or anything else. If he didn't, he would be obliged to give his talk to The Youthâand so much the better. In any case, Kesey was coming out.
had put their homes up as security for a total of $35,000 bail with the San Mateo County court. I suppose the courts figured they had Kesey either way. If he jumped bail now, it would be such a dirty trick on his friends, costing them their homes, that Kesey would be discredited as a drug apostle or anything else. If he didn't, he would be obliged to give his talk to The Youthâand so much the better. In any case, Kesey was coming out.
This script was not very popular in Haight-Ashbury, however. I soon found out that the head life in San Francisco was already such a big thing that Kesey's return and his acid graduation plan were causing the heads' first big political crisis. All eyes were on Kesey and his group, known as the Merry Pranksters. Thousands of kids were moving into San Francisco for a life based on LSD and the psychedelic thing.
Thing
was the major abstract word in Haight-Ashbury. It could mean anything, isms, life styles, habits, leanings, causes, sexual organs;
thing
and
freak
;
freak
referred to styles and obsessions, as in “Stewart Brand is an Indian freak” or “the zodiacâthat's her freak,” or just to heads in costume. It wasn't a negative word. Anyway, just a couple of weeks before, the heads had held their first big “be-in” in Golden Gate Park, at the foot of the hill leading up into Haight-Ashbury, in mock observance of the day LSD became illegal in California. This was a gathering of all the tribes, all the communal groups. All the freaks came and did their thing. A head named Michael Bowen started it, and thousands of them piled in, in high costume, ringing bells, chanting, dancing ecstatically, blowing their minds one way and another and making their favorite satiric gestures to the cops, handing them flowers, burying the bastids in tender fruity petals of love. Oh christ, Tom, the thing was fantastic, a freaking mind-blower, thousands of high-loving heads out there messing up the minds of the cops and everybody else in a fiesta of love and euphoria. Even Kesey, who was still on the run then, had brazened on in and mingled with the crowd for a while, and they were all
one
, even Keseyâand now all of a sudden here he is, in the hands of the FBI and other supercops, the
biggest name in The Life, Kesey, announcing that it is time to “graduate from acid.” And what the hell is this, a copout or what? The
Stop Kesey
movement was beginning even within the hip world.
Thing
was the major abstract word in Haight-Ashbury. It could mean anything, isms, life styles, habits, leanings, causes, sexual organs;
thing
and
freak
;
freak
referred to styles and obsessions, as in “Stewart Brand is an Indian freak” or “the zodiacâthat's her freak,” or just to heads in costume. It wasn't a negative word. Anyway, just a couple of weeks before, the heads had held their first big “be-in” in Golden Gate Park, at the foot of the hill leading up into Haight-Ashbury, in mock observance of the day LSD became illegal in California. This was a gathering of all the tribes, all the communal groups. All the freaks came and did their thing. A head named Michael Bowen started it, and thousands of them piled in, in high costume, ringing bells, chanting, dancing ecstatically, blowing their minds one way and another and making their favorite satiric gestures to the cops, handing them flowers, burying the bastids in tender fruity petals of love. Oh christ, Tom, the thing was fantastic, a freaking mind-blower, thousands of high-loving heads out there messing up the minds of the cops and everybody else in a fiesta of love and euphoria. Even Kesey, who was still on the run then, had brazened on in and mingled with the crowd for a while, and they were all
one
, even Keseyâand now all of a sudden here he is, in the hands of the FBI and other supercops, the
biggest name in The Life, Kesey, announcing that it is time to “graduate from acid.” And what the hell is this, a copout or what? The
Stop Kesey
movement was beginning even within the hip world.
We pull up to the Warehouse in the crazed truck andâwell, for a start, I begin to see that people like Lois and Stewart and Black Maria are the restrained, reflective wing of the Merry Pranksters. The Warehouse is on Harriet Street, between Howard and Folsom. Like most of San Francisco, Harriet Street is a lot of wooden buildings with bay windows all painted white. But Harriet Street is in San Francisco's Skid Row area, and despite all the paint, it looks like about forty winos crawled off in the shadows and died and turned black and bloated and exploded, sending forth a stream of spirochetes that got into every board, every strip, every crack, every splinter, every flecking flake of paint. The Warehouse actually turns out to be the ground-floor garage of an abandoned hotel. Its last commercial use was as a pie factory. We pull up to the garage and there is a panel truck parked just outside, painted in blue, yellow, orange, red Day-Glo, with the word BAM in huge letters on the hood. From out the black hole of the garage comes the sound of a record by Bob Dylan with his raunchy harmonica and Ernest Tubb voice raunching and rheuming in the old jack-legged chantsâ
Inside is a huge chaotic space with what looks at first in the gloom like ten or fifteen American flags walking around. This turns out to be a bunch of men and women, most of them in their twenties, in white coveralls of the sort airport workers wear, only with sections of American flags sewn all over, mostly the stars against fields of blue but some with red stripes running down the legs. Around the side is a lot of theater scaffolding with blankets strewn across like curtains and whole rows of uprooted theater seats piled up against the walls and big cubes of metal debris and ropes and girders.
One of the blanket curtains edges back and a little figure vaults down from a platform about nine feet up. It glows. It is a guy
about five feet tall with some sort of World War I aviator's helmet on ⦠glowing with curves and swirls of green and orange. His boots, too; he seems to be bouncing over on a pair of fluorescent globes. He stops. He has a small, fine, ascetic face with a big mustache and huge eyes. The eyes narrow and he breaks into a grin.
about five feet tall with some sort of World War I aviator's helmet on ⦠glowing with curves and swirls of green and orange. His boots, too; he seems to be bouncing over on a pair of fluorescent globes. He stops. He has a small, fine, ascetic face with a big mustache and huge eyes. The eyes narrow and he breaks into a grin.
“I just had an eight-year-old boy up there,” he says.
Then he goes into a sniffling giggle and bounds, glowing, over into a corner, in among the debris.
Everybody laughs. It is some kind of family joke, I guess. At least I am the only one who scans the scaffolding for the remains.
“That's the Hermit.” Three days later I see he has built a cave in the corner.
A bigger glow in the center of the garage. I make out a school bus ⦠glowing orange, green, magenta, lavender, chlorine blue, every fluorescent pastel imaginable in thousands of designs, both large and small, like a cross between Fernand Léger and Dr. Strange, roaring together and vibrating off each other as if somebody had given Hieronymous Bosch fifty buckets of Day-Glo paint and a 1939 International Harvester school bus and told him to go to it. On the floor by the bus is a 15-foot banner reading ACID TEST GRADUATION, and two or three of the Flag People are working on it. Bob Dylan's voice is raunching and rheuming and people are moving around, and babies are crying. I don't see them but they are somewhere in here, crying. Off to one side is a guy about 40 with a lot of muscles, as you can see because he has no shirt onâjust a pair of khakis and some red leather boots on and his hell of a buildâand he seems to be in a kinetic trance, flipping a small sledge hammer up in the air over and over, always managing to catch the handle on the way down with his arms and legs kicking out the whole time and his shoulders rolling and his head bobbing, all in a jerky beat as if somewhere Joe Cuba is playing “Bang Bang” although in fact even Bob Dylan is no longer on and out of the speaker, wherever it is, comes some sort of tape with a spectral voice saying:
“ ⦠The Nowhere Mine ⦠we've got bubble-gum wrappers ⦔ some sort of weird electronic music behind it, with Oriental intervals, like Juan Carrillo's music: “ ⦠We're going to jerk it out from under the world ⦠working in the Nowhere Mine ⦠this day, every day ⦔
One of the Flag People comes up.
“Hey, Mountain Girl! That's wild!”
Mountain Girl is a tall girl, big and beautiful with dark brown hair falling down to her shoulders except that the lower two-thirds of her falling hair looks like a paint brush dipped in cadmium yellow from where she dyed it blond in Mexico. She pivots and shows the circle of stars on the back of her coveralls.
“We got âem at a uniform store,” she says. “Aren't they great! There's this old guy in there, says, âNow, you ain't gonna cut them flags up for costumes, are you?' And so I told him, âNaw, we're gonna git some horns and have a parade.' But you see this? This is really why we got 'em.”
She points to a button on the coveralls. Everybody leans in to look. A motto is engraved on the bottom in art nouveau curves: “Can't Bust 'Em.”
Can't Bust 'Em!
⦠and about time. After all the times the Pranksters have gotten busted, by the San Mateo County cops, the San Francisco cops, the Mexicale Federale cops, FBI cops, cops cops cops cops â¦
⦠and about time. After all the times the Pranksters have gotten busted, by the San Mateo County cops, the San Francisco cops, the Mexicale Federale cops, FBI cops, cops cops cops cops â¦
And still the babies cry. Mountain Girl turns to Lois Jennings.
“What do Indians do to stop a baby from crying?”
“They hold its nose.”
“Yeah?”
“They learn.”
“I'll try it ⦠it sounds logical ⦔ And Mountain Girl goes over and picks up her baby, a four-month-old girl named Sunshine, out of one of those tube-and-net portable cribs from behind the bus and sits down in one of the theater seats. But instead of the Indian treatment she unbuttons the Can't Bust 'Em coveralls and starts feeding her.
“ ⦠The Nowhere Mine ⦠Nothing felt and screamed and cried ⦔ brang tweeeeeeng “ ⦠and I went back to the Nowhere Mine ⦔
The sledge-hammer juggler rockets awayâ
“Who is that?”
“That's Cassady.”
This strikes me as a marvelous fact. I remember Cassady. Cassady, Neal Cassady, was the hero, “Dean Moriarty,” of Jack Kerouac's
On the Road
, the Denver Kid, a kid who was always racing back and forth across the U.S. by car, chasing, or outrunning, “life,” and here is the same guy, now 40, in the garage, flipping a sledge hammer, rocketing about to his own Joe Cuba andâtalking. Cassady never stops talking. But that is a bad way to put it. Cassady is a monologuist, only he doesn't seem to care whether anyone is listening or not. He just goes off on the monologue, by himself if necessary, although anyone is welcome aboard. He will answer all questions, although not exactly in that order, because we can't stop here, next rest area 40 miles, you understand, spinning off memories, metaphors, literary, Oriental, hip allusions, all punctuated by the unlikely expression, “you understandâ”
On the Road
, the Denver Kid, a kid who was always racing back and forth across the U.S. by car, chasing, or outrunning, “life,” and here is the same guy, now 40, in the garage, flipping a sledge hammer, rocketing about to his own Joe Cuba andâtalking. Cassady never stops talking. But that is a bad way to put it. Cassady is a monologuist, only he doesn't seem to care whether anyone is listening or not. He just goes off on the monologue, by himself if necessary, although anyone is welcome aboard. He will answer all questions, although not exactly in that order, because we can't stop here, next rest area 40 miles, you understand, spinning off memories, metaphors, literary, Oriental, hip allusions, all punctuated by the unlikely expression, “you understandâ”
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