The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (16 page)

A bus? A Beatles record? The Pranksters are here, Now Trippers. Kesey had been invited to Esalen to conduct a seminar entitled "A Trip with Ken Kesey." Nobody had quite counted on the entire fully wired and wailing Prankster ensemble, however. The clientele at Esalen had come a long way in a few weeks and many were beginning to peek over the edge of The Rut. And what they saw ... it could be scary out there in Freedomland. The Pranksters were friendly, but they glowed in the dark. They pranked about like maniacs in the serene Hot Springs. Precious few signed up for a trip with Ken Kesey, even in seminar form. Sandy, meanwhile, was swinging wildly from feelings of paranoia to feelings of godly . . . Power. And the trip was always the bus. One moment it was covered with the Hieronymus Bosch scenes of his most private Hell. The next—he controls the bus. One night he discovers he can unpaint the bus just by staring at it. He has psychokinetic powers. His stare bears the power of life or death. The waves crash below the Esalen cliff—and he stares at the bus and...

unpaints it.
He strips one whole side down to its original sunny school-bus yellow.

The whole Prankster overlay is gone. A trick of the mind? He looks away, out over the Pacific and at the stars—then swings back suddenly toward the bus ::::: IT IS STILL

UNPAINTED :::: STILL VIRGIN SCHOOL-BUS YELLOW.

He has the power—but can it ward off the Monstrous Prank ? The Pranksters take the bus into Monterey to see a movie,
The
Night of the Iguana.
He sits in the back of the bus, so he can watch them. If any of them tries anything, with one stare he can ...

They go into the theater and he lags behind, then sits several rows behind them. To keep an eye out... There is a
Tom and Jerry
cartoon on the screen. The mouse, Jerry, tricks the cat, Tom, and the cat goes off a cliff and
hits,
flattened in an explosion of eyeballs, thousands of eyeballs. Everyone is laughing, but to Sandy it is sickening, incredibly brutal. He jumps up and runs out of the theater and wanders around Monterey for an hour and a half or so. Then he wanders back to the theater, and Hagen is standing outside.

"Where the hell have you been? Kesey is looking all over for you.

Sandy runs back into the theater.
Kesey!
He looks up on the screen—and the mouse, Jerry, tricks the cat, Tom, and the cat goes off a cliff and
hits,
flattened in an explosion of eyeballs, thousands of eyeballs... Sandy flees again. Kesey is now waiting outside. He coaxes Sandy on to the bus and they head back to Esalen.

Back in Esalen, in his cabin, Sandy falls half asleep into ... DREAM WARS! It is his Power vs. Kesey's, like Dr. Strange vs. Aggamon, and one of them will kill the other in the Dream War ... He exerts the utmost psychic energy ... opens his eyes and makes out a machine in the cabin—a heater? It
looks
like a heater but it is Kesey's death instrument, and in that moment the thermostat turns on the machine and a tiny red light comes on—-Kesey's ray gun—has triumphed,
filled
him, and Sandy falls off the bed, dead, lying on the floor, and he leaves his body in astral projection and sails out over the Pacific, out from the Esalen cliff, out for 40 or 50 miles, soaring, and the wind goes in gusts,
huhhhh-hhnnnhh, huhhhhhhhhhnnnh, huhhhhhhhhhnnnh,
and he is the wind, not even a compact spirit flying but a totally diffuse being, dissolved in the upper ethers, and he can see the whole moonlit ocean and Esalen way back there.

Then he comes to, and he is on the floor of the cabin, breathing hard,
huhhhhhhhhnnnh, huhhhh-hhhhhnnh, huhhhhhhhnnnh.

"San-dy! San-dy! San-dy!"—daylight, and they're outside the cabin, calling him, the Pranksters... what Monstrous Prank?—

In fact, Kesey had instructed the Pranksters to give Sandy total Attention to try to bring him around, to put him at the center of everything. Sandy comes out, sees them staring but takes it for glowers and aggression . .. Nevertheless—on to the bus, and they ride out along Big Sur in the sunlight. Kesey and the Pranksters have prepared a long
Sandy
document, twelve pages of text and drawings, very fanciful, like a psychic brief, bringing all of Sandy's fears out front and dispelling them in camaraderie—and it begins to work. Then as they roll along the cliff highway Kesey takes Sandy up on top of the bus for a Now Trip. They sit up there in the sun with the wind streaming by and Kesey is grooving off the designs on the hood of the bus: "Now I see the green snake form going into the red and the edge of it melts into ..." and so forth, and Sandy grooves off Kesey's Now Trip—Kesey!—Total Attention!—and it is like he is coming around at last, he feels
on the bus again.
And then he decides to take Kesey on a Now Trip, sailing along the cliff highway. "Now," says Sandy, "I see the ocean like a sheet of ice slanting in toward the shore . .. Now I see three suns..."—in truth!

the vibration of the bus has thrown him into the DMT reaction. He gets a triple image from the vibration and shaking of the bus, but instead of refocusing on one sun, he keeps seeing three. Kesey looks up at the sky, and says, "Yeah, yeah," grooving with it, which makes Sandy feel very good . . .

But then nighttime. "San-dy! San-dy!" They're trying to coax him out of the cabin again. For—what? Why, the Monstrous Prank, naturally, but... he has Power.

Outside—they have candles, the Pranksters do, and they're beginning a candlelight march down a path in a ravine that cuts down through the cliff, all the way to the water's edge. For—what? Why, the Monst—But then Kesey's wife, Faye, comes up very silent and smiling and loving and gives him a candle and lights it, and Faye is like complete honesty and love, so he starts off, following them down the path, holding candles, while the surf booms up the ravine from below. Why do they want him to join this spooky procession? Why, for the most Monstrous Prank of all—to
kill
him at the water's edge, but
he
has the power—the candle dims in the wind, and then comes back up, burning full—but it is not the wind, it is Sandy—he can make it shrink and dim down just by staring at it, psychokinesis, then draw it back up, all with his mind, he can control the flame utterly, and it can control him, for they are one and the same,
God,
and he trudges down the ravine, becoming more and more powerful—

but a girl named Lola has stopped ahead of him. He draws closer and she has a candle and is tilting it so that the wax drips on her fingers and she is grooving over the wax dripping over her fingers and grinning, and her hand, in wax, turns white and dead, a skeleton, and her grin, lit from beneath by the candle, turns waxy and zombie — THE

DEATH STARTS HERE — and Sandy bolts, charging back up the ravine—

—not knowing that the whole procession had been set up as a ceremony of love, a love trip, for him, to bring him around, a candlelit celebration of Sandy down by the water—

—but he is long gone, running down the cliff highway now, toward Monterey, running until his lungs give out, then walking, then running up to the lights in the houses on the cliffs over the water, Big Sur summer places, and knocking on the door, screaming incoherently about jumping off the cliffs; until the police come. Gotcha!

Which is a joke, because he can annihilate them any moment he chooses, with a psychokinetic ray—

They put him in the back seat, streaking down Route 1 toward Monterey, wheeling around the curves, faster and faster—

"Don't go so fast!" Sandy says.

"What?"

"Don't go so fast!"

"Listen," the cop says. "I'll slow down if you stop staring at the back of my head."

"Ahhhhhh."

"Look out the window or something. Look at the scenery. Stop staring at the back of my head."

So he takes his eyes out of the back of the cop's skull. Two fever hole depressions.

Another moment—

THE MONTEREY POLICE HELD HIM IN THE JAIL IN MONTEREY until his brother Chris could get there from New York. Chris ran into Kesey at the jail. We've got to get him out of here, said Kesey. What do you mean? We've got to get him back where he belongs, with the Pranksters. Chris took Sandy back to New York for treatment. It was a long time before Chris knew what in the hell Kesey had been talking about.

The Unspoken Thing

HOW TO TELL IT! . . . THE CURRENT FANTASY ... I NEVER heard any of the Pranksters use the word religious to describe the mental atmosphere they shared after the bus trip and the strange days in Big Sur. In fact, they avoided putting it into words. And yet—

They got on the bus and headed back to La Honda in the old Big Sur summertime, all frozen sunshine up here, and no one had to say it: they were all deep into some
weird shit
now, as they would just as soon call it by way of taking the curse . . . off the Unspoken Thing. Things were getting very
psychic.
It was like when Sandy drove 191 miles in South Dakota and then he had looked up at the map on the ceiling of the bus and precisely those 191 miles were marked in red ... Sandy : : : : : back in Brain Scan country the White Smocks would never in a million years comprehend where he had actually been ... which was where they all were now, also known as Edge City ...

Back in Kesey's log house in La Honda, all sitting around in the evening in the main room, it's getting cool outside, and Page Browning:
I
think I'll close the window
—and in that very moment another Prankster gets up and closes it for him and smi-i-i-i-les and says nothing . .. The Unspoken Thing—and these things keep happening over and over. They take a trip up into the High Sierras and Cassady pulls the bus off the main road and starts driving up a little mountain road—see where she goes. The road is so old and deserted the pavement is half broken up and they keep climbing and twisting up into nowhere, but the air is nice, and up at the top of the grade the bus begins bucking and gulping and won't pull any more. It just stops. It turns out they're out of gas, which is a nice situation because it's nightfall and they're stranded totally hell west of nowhere with not a gas station within thirty, maybe fifty miles. Nothing to do but stroke themselves out on the bus and go to sleep ... hmmmmmm ... scorpions with boots on red TWA Royal Ambassador slumber slippers on his big Stinger Howard Hughes in a sleeping bag on the floor in a marble penthouse in the desert DAWN

All wake up to a considerable fetching and hauling and grinding up the grade below them and over the crest comes a

CHEVRON

gasoline tanker, a huge monster of a tanker. Which just stops like they all met somewhere before and gives them a tankful of gas and without a word heads
on
into the Sierras toward absolutely

NOTHING

Babbs—
Cosmic control, eh Hassler!

And Kesey—
Where does it go? I don't think man has ever been there. We're under
cosmic control and have been for a long long time, and each time it builds, it's bigger,
and it's stronger. And then you find out... about Cosmo, and you discover that he's
running the show. ..

The Unspoken Thing; Kesey's role and the whole direction the Pranksters were taking—all the Pranksters were conscious of it, but none of them put it into words, as I say. They made a point of not putting it into words. That in itself was one of the unspoken rules.
If you label it
this,
then it can't be
that... Kesey took great pains not to make his role explicit. He wasn't the authority, somebody else was: "Babbs says..."

"Page says..." He wasn't the leader, he was the "non-navigator." He was also the non-teacher. "Do you realize that you're a teacher here?" Kesey says, "Too much, too much," and walks away... Kesey's explicit teachings were all cryptic, metaphorical; parables, aphorisms: "You're either on the bus or off the bus." "Feed the hungry bee,"

"Nothing lasts," "See with your ears and hear with your eyes," "Put your good where it will do the most," "What did the mirror say? It's done with people." To that extent it was like Zen Buddhism, with the inscrutable koans, in which the novice says, "What is the secret of Zen?" and Hui-neng the master says, "What did your face look like before your parents begat you?" To put it into so many words, to define it, was to limit it. If it's
this,
then it can't be
that...
Yet there it was! Everyone had his own thing he was working out, but it all fit into the group thing, which was—"the Unspoken Thing," said Page Browning, and that was as far as anyone wanted to go with words.

For that matter, there was no theology to it, no philosophy, at least not in the sense of an
ism.
There was no goal of an improved moral order in the world or an improved social order, nothing about salvation and certainly nothing about immortality or the life hereafter. Hereafter! That was a laugh. If there was ever a group devoted totally to the here and now it was the Pranksters. I remember puzzling over this. There was something so...
religious
in the air, in the very atmosphere of the Prankster life, and yet one couldn't put one's finger on it. On the face of it there was just a group of people who had shared an unusual psychological state, the LSD experience—

But exactly! The
experience
—that was the word! and it began to fall into place. In fact, none of the great founded religions, Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, Jainism, Judaism, Zoroastrian-ism, Hinduism, none of them began with a philosophical framework or even a main idea. They all began with an overwhelming
new
experience,
what Joachim Wach called "the experience of the holy," and Max Weber,

"possession of the deity," the sense of being a vessel of the divine, of the All-one. I remember I never truly understood what they were talking about when I first read of such things. I just took their weighty German word for it. Jesus, Mani, Zoroaster, Gautama Buddha—at the very outset the leader did not offer his circle of followers a better state hereafter or an improved social order or any reward other than a certain

"psychological state in the here and now," as Weber put it. I suppose what I never really comprehended was that he was talking about an actual mental experience they all went through, an
ecstasy,
in short. In most cases, according to scriptures and legend, it happened in a flash. Mohammed fasting and meditating on a mountainside near Mecca and—
-flash!
—ecstasy, vast revelation and the beginning of Islam.