The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (30 page)
Read The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test Online
Authors: Tom Wolfe
Tags: #United States, #Social Science, #General, #Popular Culture, #History, #20th Century
“âhear a flea fart!”
“Hasn't happened yet,” says Kesey.
“With this many days to set it up? Always before we were in the hall that night and maybe set up before we finished in the morning.”
And so forth and so onâKesey and Mountain Girl lie on their stomachs with their chins in their hands, gazing down four stories to the alley below and occasionally scraping gravel off the rooftop and tossing it down â¦
⦠yes ⦠ummm ⦠at 1:53 A.M. the cops of the 19th Precinct got a call from a woman at 18 Margrave Place saying some drunken tormentors or something were throwing rocks at her window. Shortly after 2 A.M. a police car pulls into the alley. So Kesey and Mountain Girl groove on that. Yup, a police car right down below, police car come here. A red light on a hillside drive about 50 yards away blinks. A red light blinks and a police car tools in the alley. Ah, always the
synch,
friends. The cops are coming in this building. Wonder on earth what for.
Do I learn anything? Or once again lie loaded and disbelieving as two cops climb five stories to drag me to the cooler ⦠.
Oh, the logic of the groove and the synch. Kesey and Mountain Girl see it all at once, now, so clearly. It is so very obvious that it fascinates. They see it all, grok it allâ
Scram, split, run, flee, hide, vanish, disintegrate
â
the
red alert is so very clear, it blinks and blinks, red, nothing, red, nothing, red, nothing, red, nothing, and yet
move?
and
miss it all?
turning so slow in the interferrometric synch? It is like a weird time he was in Olympic wrestling eliminations, in 1960, in the
San Francisco Olympic Club, first round against a hulking stud, and he took a couple of vitamins before the fray, revved up, revved up, not
doped
, oh mom&dad&buddy&sis&dear-but-square-ones, all Olympian athletes are doped, force-fed pill-heads, see them lead them, all gorged with glistening muscle veins and crewcut and led to the training table and by every plate a lineup of capsules like the wineglasses at the gourmet dinner, capsules for iron, capsules for calcium, capsules to make you squeeze your colon and flex your heart, capsules of B
12
mighty as pure amphetamine turn your blood vessels into black snakes, capsules to make you long and brute in the teeth, make you clean & jerk in the arms, mad ape in the neck, sharp in the tusk, panther in the solar plexus lineup of crewcut stud bulls concocted out of chemicals force-fed every day at every plateârevved up, revved up, revved up waiting for the referee to snap his hand up in mid-air to start the match,
snap
⦠and it is so very fascinating ⦠he is like a motor running at top speed with the clutch in ⦠it is intriguing, not intimidating, the way this great stud grabs him above the knee with his huge hand and starts pulling downâKesey is two people, revved up here on the mat and revved up here in the ethers like an astral body, watchingâinteresting! âno man could be as strong as this guy here and execute a takedown by pulling downward on the kneeâno danger, friends, just fascinationâand so the guy won a trophy for the fastest pin of the tourney, while the motor revved in
synch
with a different bummerâ
synch,
friends. The cops are coming in this building. Wonder on earth what for.
Do I learn anything? Or once again lie loaded and disbelieving as two cops climb five stories to drag me to the cooler ⦠.
Oh, the logic of the groove and the synch. Kesey and Mountain Girl see it all at once, now, so clearly. It is so very obvious that it fascinates. They see it all, grok it allâ
Scram, split, run, flee, hide, vanish, disintegrate
â
the
red alert is so very clear, it blinks and blinks, red, nothing, red, nothing, red, nothing, red, nothing, and yet
move?
and
miss it all?
turning so slow in the interferrometric synch? It is like a weird time he was in Olympic wrestling eliminations, in 1960, in the
San Francisco Olympic Club, first round against a hulking stud, and he took a couple of vitamins before the fray, revved up, revved up, not
doped
, oh mom&dad&buddy&sis&dear-but-square-ones, all Olympian athletes are doped, force-fed pill-heads, see them lead them, all gorged with glistening muscle veins and crewcut and led to the training table and by every plate a lineup of capsules like the wineglasses at the gourmet dinner, capsules for iron, capsules for calcium, capsules to make you squeeze your colon and flex your heart, capsules of B
12
mighty as pure amphetamine turn your blood vessels into black snakes, capsules to make you long and brute in the teeth, make you clean & jerk in the arms, mad ape in the neck, sharp in the tusk, panther in the solar plexus lineup of crewcut stud bulls concocted out of chemicals force-fed every day at every plateârevved up, revved up, revved up waiting for the referee to snap his hand up in mid-air to start the match,
snap
⦠and it is so very fascinating ⦠he is like a motor running at top speed with the clutch in ⦠it is intriguing, not intimidating, the way this great stud grabs him above the knee with his huge hand and starts pulling downâKesey is two people, revved up here on the mat and revved up here in the ethers like an astral body, watchingâinteresting! âno man could be as strong as this guy here and execute a takedown by pulling downward on the kneeâno danger, friends, just fascinationâand so the guy won a trophy for the fastest pin of the tourney, while the motor revved in
synch
with a different bummerâ
â
fascinating!
âsoâ
fascinating!
âsoâ
âout the scroffy arty rooftop door come two cops, Officers Fred Pardella and Thomas L. O'Donnell of the 19th Precinct, by designationâ
What happened next became the subject of two trials in San Francisco, later, many fugitive months later, both ending in hung juries, the second one 11 to 1 against Kesey. According to Officers Pardella and O'Donnell, they found the suspects Kesey and the Adams girl and a plastic bag containing a quantity of brownish
vegetation. Whereupon Officer O'Donnell sought to collect the evidence, and Kesey wrestled him for it, throwing the bag onto an adjoining arty rectangle rooftop and very nearly Pardella along with it, whereupon Officer O'Donnell drew his gun and brought both Kesey and the girl into custody. The plastic bag, retrieved, contained 3.54 grams of marijuana.
vegetation. Whereupon Officer O'Donnell sought to collect the evidence, and Kesey wrestled him for it, throwing the bag onto an adjoining arty rectangle rooftop and very nearly Pardella along with it, whereupon Officer O'Donnell drew his gun and brought both Kesey and the girl into custody. The plastic bag, retrieved, contained 3.54 grams of marijuana.
THIS WAS A BEAUTIFUL MESS AND NO TWO WAYS ABOUT IT. A second offense for possession of marijuana carried an automatic five-year sentence with no possibility of parole. At the very least he stood to get the full three-year sentence in San Mateo County now, as one of the judge's conditions had been that he no longer associate with the Pranksters. Mountain Girl was ready to take the whole rap herself. “We were just tying it off,” she told the press. “He wasn't supposed to hang around with any of us wild, giddy people any more. This was the last time we were gonna see him.” Well ⦠she tried. Kesey's probation officer in San Mateo County advised him for godsake stay away from the Trips Festival or he was in for it, but the whole thing was miles beyond in-for-it, out towards old Edge City, in fact.
Kesey left Municipal Court in San Francisco on January 20 with Mountain Girl and Stewart Brand and onto the whole bus full of Pranksters to roll through San Francisco advertising the Trips Festival. They got out at Union Square. Kesey wore a pair of white Levi's with the backsides emblazoned with HOT on the left side and COLD on the right and TIBET in the middle.âand a pair of sky-blue boots. They all played Ron Boisie's Thunder Machine for loon vibrations in Union Square in the fibrillating heart of San Francisco.
If nothing else, Kesey's second arrest was great publicity for the Trips Festival. It was all over San Francisco newspapers. In the hip, intellectual, and even social worlds of San Francisco, the Trips Festival notion was spreading like a fever.
The dread drug
LSD. Acid heads. An LSD experience without the LSD, it was
being billed asâmoreover, people actually believed it. But mainly the idea of a new life style was making itself felt. Do you suppose this is theâ
new wave ⦠?
The dread drug
LSD. Acid heads. An LSD experience without the LSD, it was
being billed asâmoreover, people actually believed it. But mainly the idea of a new life style was making itself felt. Do you suppose this is theâ
new wave ⦠?
And you buy y'r ticket, f'r chrissake
âan absurd thought to Norman Hartwegâ
and we've got a promoter
âall absurd, but the thousands pour into the Longshoremen's Hall for the Trips Festival, thousands even the first night, which was mostly Indian night, a weird thing put on by Brand's America Needs Indians, but now on Saturday evening the huge crush hits for the Acid Test. Norman is absolutely zonked on acidâand look at the freaks running in here. Norman is not the only one. “An LSD experience without LSD”âthat was a laugh. In fact, the heads are pouring in by the hundreds, bombed out of their gourds, hundreds of heads coming out into the absolute open for the first time. It is like the time the Pranksters went to the Beatles concert in full costume, looking so bizarre and so totally
smashed
that no one could believe they were. Nobody would
risk
it in public like this. Well, the kids are just having an LSD experience without LSD, that's all, and this is what it looks like. A hulking crazed whirlpool. That's nice. Lights and movies sweeping around the hall; five movie projectors going and God knows how many light machines, interferrometrics, the intergalactic science-fiction seas all over the walls, loudspeakers studding the hall all the way around like flaming chandeliers, strobes exploding, black lights with Day-Glo objects under them and Day-Glo paint to play with, street lights at every entrance flashing red and yellow, two bands, the Grateful Dead and Big Brother and the Holding Company and a troop of weird girls in leotards leaping around the edges blowing dog whistlesâand the Pranksters. Paul Foster has wrapped black friction tape all around his shoes and up over his ankles and swaddled his legs and hips and torso in it up to his rib cage, where begins a white shirt and then white bandaging all over his face and skull and just a slit for his eyes, over which he wears dark glasses. He also wears a crutch and a sign saying, “You're in the Pepsi Generation and I'm a pimply freak!” Rotor!
Also heads from all over, in serapes and mandala beads and Indian headbands and Indian beads, the great era for all that, and one in a leather jerkin with “Under Ass Wizard Mojo Indian Fighter” stenciled on the back. Mojo! Oh the freaking strobes turning every brain stem into a cauliflower erupting into corrugated ping-pong ballsâ
can't stand it
âand a girl rips off her shirt and dances bare-breasted with her great mihs breaking up into an endless stream of ruby-red erect nipples streaming out of the great milk-and-honey under the strobe lights. The dancing is ecstatic, a nice macaroni of braless breasts jiggling and cupcake bottoms wiggling and multiple arms writhing and leaping about. Thousands of straight intellectuals and culturati and square hippies, North Beach style, gawking and learning. Dr. Francis Rigney, Psychiatrist to the Beat Generation, looking on, and all the Big Daddies left over from the Beat period, Eric “Big Daddy” Nord and Tom “Big Daddy” Donahue, and the press, vibrating under Ron Boise's thunder machine. A great rout in progress, you understand.
âan absurd thought to Norman Hartwegâ
and we've got a promoter
âall absurd, but the thousands pour into the Longshoremen's Hall for the Trips Festival, thousands even the first night, which was mostly Indian night, a weird thing put on by Brand's America Needs Indians, but now on Saturday evening the huge crush hits for the Acid Test. Norman is absolutely zonked on acidâand look at the freaks running in here. Norman is not the only one. “An LSD experience without LSD”âthat was a laugh. In fact, the heads are pouring in by the hundreds, bombed out of their gourds, hundreds of heads coming out into the absolute open for the first time. It is like the time the Pranksters went to the Beatles concert in full costume, looking so bizarre and so totally
smashed
that no one could believe they were. Nobody would
risk
it in public like this. Well, the kids are just having an LSD experience without LSD, that's all, and this is what it looks like. A hulking crazed whirlpool. That's nice. Lights and movies sweeping around the hall; five movie projectors going and God knows how many light machines, interferrometrics, the intergalactic science-fiction seas all over the walls, loudspeakers studding the hall all the way around like flaming chandeliers, strobes exploding, black lights with Day-Glo objects under them and Day-Glo paint to play with, street lights at every entrance flashing red and yellow, two bands, the Grateful Dead and Big Brother and the Holding Company and a troop of weird girls in leotards leaping around the edges blowing dog whistlesâand the Pranksters. Paul Foster has wrapped black friction tape all around his shoes and up over his ankles and swaddled his legs and hips and torso in it up to his rib cage, where begins a white shirt and then white bandaging all over his face and skull and just a slit for his eyes, over which he wears dark glasses. He also wears a crutch and a sign saying, “You're in the Pepsi Generation and I'm a pimply freak!” Rotor!
Also heads from all over, in serapes and mandala beads and Indian headbands and Indian beads, the great era for all that, and one in a leather jerkin with “Under Ass Wizard Mojo Indian Fighter” stenciled on the back. Mojo! Oh the freaking strobes turning every brain stem into a cauliflower erupting into corrugated ping-pong ballsâ
can't stand it
âand a girl rips off her shirt and dances bare-breasted with her great mihs breaking up into an endless stream of ruby-red erect nipples streaming out of the great milk-and-honey under the strobe lights. The dancing is ecstatic, a nice macaroni of braless breasts jiggling and cupcake bottoms wiggling and multiple arms writhing and leaping about. Thousands of straight intellectuals and culturati and square hippies, North Beach style, gawking and learning. Dr. Francis Rigney, Psychiatrist to the Beat Generation, looking on, and all the Big Daddies left over from the Beat period, Eric “Big Daddy” Nord and Tom “Big Daddy” Donahue, and the press, vibrating under Ron Boise's thunder machine. A great rout in progress, you understand.
And in the center of the hallâthe Pranksters' tower of Control. It had come to that, and it was perfect. Babbs had supervised the building of a great scaffolding of pipes and platforms in the center of the hall. It rose and rose, this tower, as the Pranksters added equipment, all the mikes and amplifiers and spots and projectors and all the rest of it, the very architecture of Control, finally. Babbs at the controls, Hagen up there taking movies; the Movie goes on. Kesey, meanwhile, was up on an even higher plateau of control, up on a balcony in a silver space suit complete with a big bubble space helmet. He conceived of it first as a disguise, so he could be there without the various courts being raggy and outraged, but everyone recognized the Space Man immediately, of course, and he perched up above the maelstrom with a projection machine with which you could write messages on acetate and project them in mammoth size on the walls.
Zonker dancing in a spin of pure unadulterated bliss, higher than he had ever been in his life, which for Zonker was getting
up there. Norman, smashed, but with a mission. Norman to circulate among the multitudes with movie camera. Only he has no power pack, so he has to plug the camera in a wall socket and go out with a great long cord. His eye pressed against the sighting lens and gradually the whole whirlpool coming into his one eye, unity,
I,
the vessel, receiving all, Atman and Brahman, letting it all flow in untilâ
satori
âthe perfect state is reached and he realizes he is God. He has traveled miles through this writhing macaroni ecstasy mass and could the camera still possibly be plugged in?âor could that possibly matter?
deus ex machina,
with the world flowing into one eye. Becomes essential that he reach the Central Node, the Tower of Control, the great electric boom of the directional mike picking up the band sticking out from atop the scaffolding towerâ
and there it is
âit is all there in this moment. Starts clambering up the scaffolding with the huge camera still over his shoulder and up to his eye, all funneling in, and the wire and plug snaking behind him, through the multitudes. And who might
these
irate forms be?âin truth, Babbs and Hagen, Babbs gesturing for Norman to get off the platform, he's in the way,
there's no room, get the hell off of here
âa cosmic laugh, since obviously they don't know who he is, viz., God. Norman, the meek, the mild, the retiring, the sideliner, laughs a cosmic laugh at them and keeps on coming. At any moment, he fully realizes, he can make them disappear down ⦠his eye, just two curds in the world flow, Babbs and Hagen.
up there. Norman, smashed, but with a mission. Norman to circulate among the multitudes with movie camera. Only he has no power pack, so he has to plug the camera in a wall socket and go out with a great long cord. His eye pressed against the sighting lens and gradually the whole whirlpool coming into his one eye, unity,
I,
the vessel, receiving all, Atman and Brahman, letting it all flow in untilâ
satori
âthe perfect state is reached and he realizes he is God. He has traveled miles through this writhing macaroni ecstasy mass and could the camera still possibly be plugged in?âor could that possibly matter?
deus ex machina,
with the world flowing into one eye. Becomes essential that he reach the Central Node, the Tower of Control, the great electric boom of the directional mike picking up the band sticking out from atop the scaffolding towerâ
and there it is
âit is all there in this moment. Starts clambering up the scaffolding with the huge camera still over his shoulder and up to his eye, all funneling in, and the wire and plug snaking behind him, through the multitudes. And who might
these
irate forms be?âin truth, Babbs and Hagen, Babbs gesturing for Norman to get off the platform, he's in the way,
there's no room, get the hell off of here
âa cosmic laugh, since obviously they don't know who he is, viz., God. Norman, the meek, the mild, the retiring, the sideliner, laughs a cosmic laugh at them and keeps on coming. At any moment, he fully realizes, he can make them disappear down ⦠his eye, just two curds in the world flow, Babbs and Hagen.
“Norman, if you don't get the hell off of here, I'm going to
throw
you off!ӉBabbs looking huge and untamable in the same stance he gave the San Francisco cops at the Fillmore, and Norman's mind split just slightly along the chiasma, like a San Andreas fault, one part some durable hard-core fear of getting thrown off and breaking his ass, him, Norman, but the other, the Cosmic laugh of God at how useless Babbs's stance is now, vibrating slightly between God and not-God, but then the laugh comes in a wave, just the cosmic fact that he, Norman, now dares do this,
defiance,
the new
I
and there is not one thing, really, they
can do about itâBabbs staring at this grinning, zonked figure with the huge camera clambering up the scaffolding. Babbs just throws his hands up, gives up, Norman ascends.
God!
in the very Tower of Control.
Well, if I'm God, I can control this thing.
Gazing down into the whirlpool. He gesturesâand it comes to pass!âthere is a ripple in the crowd
there
and again and there is a ripple in the crowd
here
âalso so clear what is
going
to happen, he can predict it, a great eruption of ecstatic dancing in
that
clump, under the strobes, it will
break out now
, and it does, of courseâa vibration along the crack, the fault,
synchronicity
spoken here, and we are at play, but they do itâ
start the music!
âand it startsâsatori, in the Central Node, as it was writtenâbut I say unto youâand at that very moment, a huge message in red is written on the wall:
throw
you off!ӉBabbs looking huge and untamable in the same stance he gave the San Francisco cops at the Fillmore, and Norman's mind split just slightly along the chiasma, like a San Andreas fault, one part some durable hard-core fear of getting thrown off and breaking his ass, him, Norman, but the other, the Cosmic laugh of God at how useless Babbs's stance is now, vibrating slightly between God and not-God, but then the laugh comes in a wave, just the cosmic fact that he, Norman, now dares do this,
defiance,
the new
I
and there is not one thing, really, they
can do about itâBabbs staring at this grinning, zonked figure with the huge camera clambering up the scaffolding. Babbs just throws his hands up, gives up, Norman ascends.
God!
in the very Tower of Control.
Well, if I'm God, I can control this thing.
Gazing down into the whirlpool. He gesturesâand it comes to pass!âthere is a ripple in the crowd
there
and again and there is a ripple in the crowd
here
âalso so clear what is
going
to happen, he can predict it, a great eruption of ecstatic dancing in
that
clump, under the strobes, it will
break out now
, and it does, of courseâa vibration along the crack, the fault,
synchronicity
spoken here, and we are at play, but they do itâ
start the music!
âand it startsâsatori, in the Central Node, as it was writtenâbut I say unto youâand at that very moment, a huge message in red is written on the wall:
ANYBODY WHO KNOWS HE IS GOD GO UP ON STAGE
Any
body?âThe chiasmic halves vibrate, the God and the not-God, and then he realizes: Kesey wrote that. Kesey up on the balcony in his space suit wrote that with his projection machine and flashed it on the wall, in that very moment. What to do, Archangel of mine, Norman stares unbelievingâunbelieving in what?âup on stage climbs a spade with a wild head of natural spade hair with a headband wrapped around the hairline so the hair puffs up like a great gray dandelion, a huge shirt swimming under the lights, and it is Gaylord, one of the few spades in the whole thing, gleaming the glistening grin of acid zonk and going into a lovely godly little dance, this Gaylord God ⦠What the hell. Norman gestures toward the crowd, and it does not ripple. Not here and not there. He predicts
that
clump will rise up in ecstatic levitation, and it does not rise up. In fact, it just sinks to the floor like it was spat there, sad moon eyes glomming up in the acid stare. Sayonara, God. And yet ⦠And yet â¦
body?âThe chiasmic halves vibrate, the God and the not-God, and then he realizes: Kesey wrote that. Kesey up on the balcony in his space suit wrote that with his projection machine and flashed it on the wall, in that very moment. What to do, Archangel of mine, Norman stares unbelievingâunbelieving in what?âup on stage climbs a spade with a wild head of natural spade hair with a headband wrapped around the hairline so the hair puffs up like a great gray dandelion, a huge shirt swimming under the lights, and it is Gaylord, one of the few spades in the whole thing, gleaming the glistening grin of acid zonk and going into a lovely godly little dance, this Gaylord God ⦠What the hell. Norman gestures toward the crowd, and it does not ripple. Not here and not there. He predicts
that
clump will rise up in ecstatic levitation, and it does not rise up. In fact, it just sinks to the floor like it was spat there, sad moon eyes glomming up in the acid stare. Sayonara, God. And yet ⦠And yet â¦
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