The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (20 page)

—
-and extend the message to all people
—

The Bust

WHEREAS La Honda's Wilde Weste lode

Seems to be owed to the gunslinging Younger Brothers; and

WHEREAS They holed up in town

And dad-blamed but they found a neighborly way

To pay for their stay; and

WHEREAS They built a whole modern store, those notorious mothers; But them was the Younger Brothers,

Mere gunslingers; and

WHEREAS Now this Kesey

And his Merry Humdingers down the road—

God-damn Wild West ob-scene

Crazies and dope fiends

And putrescent beatniks

Paint the treetrunks phosphorescent; and

WHEREAS They beat on tin drums with sticks

And roots while a tin man

With a tin tenderloin

Buries his smile in the tin groin

Of a tin bitch ejaculating through a bunion; and

WHEREAS The crazies go cooing, keening, itchy-gooning

Ululating and yahooing

Worse than gunslingers; and

WHEREAS We know what the ninnies are doing—

You ARE HEREBY EMPOWERED ::::::::::::

By now the Pranksters had built up so much momentum they begin to feel immune even to a very obvious danger, namely, the cops.

The citizens of La Honda were becoming more and more exercised about Kesey and the Pranksters, and so were the San Mateo County sheriff and federal narcotics officials. Not knowing what the hell accounted for the crazy life at Kesey's place, they apparently assumed there was some hard drug use going on—heroin, cocaine, morphine. Late in 1964 they put Kesey's place under surveillance. The Pranksters knew about it and used to play games with the cops. The main federal narcotics agent in the area was a San Francisco Chinese, Agent William Wong. The Pranksters made a huge sign and put it up on the house:

WE'RE CLEAN, WILLIE!

It was fun, the cop game. The cops would be out in the woods at night, along the creek, and one of them would step into the creek and get his feet wet and say something. The Pranksters would pick all this up on the remote mikes in the woods, whereupon the voice of Mountain Girl, broadcasting from inside the cabin, would jeer out over an amplifier up in the redwoods: "Hey! Why don't you come in the house and dry off your feet, you cops! Quit playing the cop game and come in and git some nice hot coffee!"

The cops were just playing their eternal cop game. That's all it seemed like to the Pranksters.

About April 21, 1965, the Pranksters got a tip that a warrant had been drawn up and the cops were going to raid. Delightful! The cops were really going to play their game right up to their BB gun eyeballs. The Pranksters put up a great sign at the front gate

No ADMITTANCE. FIVE-DAY COUNTDOWN IN PROGRESS

as if they were embarked upon the damnedest, most awfulest dope orgy brain blowout in the history of the world. In fact, they set about making the premises clean. On the third day of the countdown, April 23, 1965, 10:50 P.M., the raid came. Oh God, there was never a better game played by any cops. Here they were, the absolute perfect cop-game cops, the sheriff, seventeen deputies, Federal Agent Wong, eight police dogs, cars, wagons, guns, posses, ropes, walkie-talkies, bullhorns—Cosmo! the whole freaking raid scene—and right up to the end the Pranksters played it as they saw it: namely, as a high farce, an
opéra bouffe.
The cops claimed they caught Kesey trying to flush a batch of marijuana down the toilet. Kesey claimed he was only in there painting flowers on the toilet bowl. The bathroom was already a madhouse collage of photos, clippings, murals, mandalas, every weird thing in the world, like an indoor version of the bus, and the cops crashed in and Agent Wong grabbed Kesey from behind. Kesey was later booked on a charge of resisting arrest, among other charges, to which he said that he had been in the bathroom and some unidentified male came up and embraced him from behind, and so naturally he slugged him. It was a laugh and a half. Kesey's resistance, he said, upended Wong and hurtled him into the bathtub on top of Page Browning, who was taking a bath. Browning was arrested for resisting arrest, too. It was too much.

Even after the raiders had everybody in there, thirteen people, lined up against the walls, and were searching them for drugs, it was just the most wacked-out cop game anybody had ever seen any cops play. One of the raiders reached into Mike Hagen's pocket, and when he drew his hand out, it held a vial of some clear liquid, whereupon all the Pranksters started shouting: "Hey! Play fair! Play fair! Be fair cops! Play hard but play fair"—and so on. The vial, whatever it was or was supposed to be, was never heard of again. In a tool box outside, the raiders found a hypodermic syringe full of some kind of liquid—which turned out to be Three-in-One Oil for oiling the tape-recorder mechanisms—and Kesey and twelve others, including Babbs, Gretch, Hagen, Walker, Mountain Girl, Page, Cassady, and the Hermit, were booked on many charges, including possession of marijuana and narcotics paraphernalia (the syringe), resisting arrest and impairing the morals of minors (Mountain Girl and the Hermit).

Even then, the whole thing became not much more than the cop-and-jailhouse-and-judge-and-lawyer game, with such high moments as when they all got bailed out and emerged from the jail in San Mateo and the Hermit's mother appeared. Hermit, they discovered from the police blotter, was named Anthony Dean Wells. Nobody had ever asked him what his name was. Anyway, his mother slapped Kesey across the face with a paperback edition of
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
and screamed, "Go back to your cuckoo pad! You should have stayed in the nest instead of flying over it, you big cuckoo!"

Well, the whole thing was too much. When the cops booked them, Babbs gave his occupation as "movie producer," and Mountain Girl said she was a "movie technician." So Babbs solemnly appeared in the local newspapers as the big movie producer caught in the raid along with the big novelist, Kesey. It was something. The San Francisco newspapers took a very lively interest in the case and sent people out to interview Kesey within the Dope Den, and word of the Prankster life style was made public, however obliquely, for the first time.

The publicity couldn't have been better, at least in terms of the hip-intellectual circles where the Pranksters might hope to have some immediate influence. Accusing somebody of possession of marijuana was like saying "I saw him take a drink." Kesey was referred to as a kind of "hipster Christ," "a modern mystic," after the model of Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs. As all could plainly read in the press, Kesey had gone even further. He had stopped writing. He was now working on a vast experimental movie entitled—the newspapers solemnly reported—
Intrepid Traveler
and His Merry Pranksters Leave in Search of a Cool Place.
"Writers," he told a reporter, "are trapped by artificial rules. We are trapped in syntax. We are ruled by an imaginary teacher with a red ball-point pen who will brand us with an A-minus for the slightest infraction of the rules. Even
Cuckoo
seems like an elaborate commercial."

LSD was never mentioned in all this. Kesey came off chiefly as a visionary who had forsaken his riches and his career as a novelist in order to explore new forms of expression. In the California press he graduated from mere literary fame to celebrity.

If the purpose of the raid was to stamp out dopeniks—the cop game couldn't have backfired more completely.

After Kesey and the Pranksters got out on bail, the legal wrangling went on interminably—but they all stayed free. Kesey had a team of aggressive, bright young lawyers working on the case, Zonker's brother-in-law Paul Robertson in San Jose, and Pat Hallinan and Brian Rohan from San Francisco. Hallinan was the son of Vincent Hallinan, the lawyer, a famous champion of the underdog. By and by the charges were dropped against everybody but Kesey and Page Browning, and even they ended up with only one charge lodged against them, possession of marijuana. They trooped down to Redwood City, the San Mateo County Seat, fifteen times during the last eight months of 1965, by Rohan's count. It was interminable, but they all stayed free . ..

Yes! And heads, kids, kooks, intellectual tourists of all sorts, started heading for Kesey's in La Honda.

Even Sandy Lehmann-Haupt returned. About a year had gone by and he was O.K.

again and he flew into San Francisco. Kesey and four or five other Pranksters drove to the San Francisco Airport to meet him. As they drove back to La Honda, Sandy cheerfully gave a brief account of what had happened to him in Big Sur before he split like he did.

"—then I started having dream wars... with somebody," said Sandy. He didn't want to say who.

"Yeah, I know," said Kesey. "With me."

He knew!

And the mysto fogs began to roll in again off the bay ...

NORMAN HARTWEG AND HIS FRIEND EVAN ENGBER DROVE UP

to La Honda from Los Angeles with the idea of doing the Tibetan thing for a few weeks and seeing what it was all about. That was pretty funny, the idea of doing the Tibetan thing at Kesey's. Nevertheless, that was Norman's idea. Norman was a 17-year-old playwright from Ann Arbor, Michigan. He was a thin guy, five feet seven, with a thin face and sharp features and a beard. But his nose tilted up slightly, which gave him a boyish look. He was eking out a living by writing a column for the Los Angeles
Free Press,
a weekly, the L.A. counterpart of the
Village Voice,
and working on avant-garde films, and living in a room underneath the dance floor of a discotheque on the Sunset Strip. He had run into Kesey's friend Susan Brustman and then into Kesey himself, and Kesey had invited him up to La Honda to edit The Movie and ... partake of the life ... Somehow Norman got the idea the people at Kesey's were like, you know, monks, novitiates; a lot of meditating with your legs crossed, chanting, eating rice, feeling vibrations, walking softly over the forest floor and thinking big. Why else would they be out in the woods in the middle of nowhere?

So Norman drove up from L.A. with Evan Engber, who was a theater director, occasionally, and, later, a member of Dr. West's Jug Band, and, as a matter of fact, the husband of Yvette Mimieux the movie actress. They drove up the coastal route, California Route 1, then cut over Route 84 at San Gregorio and on up into the redwood forests; around a bend, and they're at Kesey's. But jesus, somehow it doesn't look very Tibetan. It isn't the hanged man in the tree so much, or the statue of a guy eating it.

Hell, there are no flies on the Tibetans. It is more the odd detail here and there.

Kesey's mailbox, for example, which is red, white, and blue, the Stars and Stripes.

And a big framed sign on top of the house: WE WUZ FRAMED. And the front gate, across the wooden bridge. The gate is made of huge woodcutter's saw blades and has a death mask on it—and a big sign, about 15 feet long, that reads: THE MERRY

PRANKSTERS WELCOME THE HELL'S ANGELS. Music is blasting out of some speakers on top of the house, a Beatles record—
Help, I ne-e-e-ed somebody
—

At that moment, that very moment, Engber gets a stabbing pain in his left shoulder.

"I don't know what it is, Norman," he says, "but it's killing
me. "

They drive on in across the bridge and get out and go into the house looking for Kesey. Brown dogs belly through the flea clouds outside the house, coughing fruit flies. Engber clutches his shoulder. Inside, bright green-and-gold light streams in through the French doors onto the damnedest clutter. There are big pipes hanging down from the rafters in the main room, a whole row of them, like some enormous vertical xylophone. Also dolls, dolls hanging from the rafters, re-assembled dolls, dolls with the heads sticking out of a hip joint, a leg out of the neck joint, arm out of other leg joint, leg out of shoulder joint, and so on, and a Day-Glo navel. Also balloons, also Chianti bottles stuck on the rafters at weird angles somehow, as if they had been in the very process of falling to the floor and suddenly they froze there. And on the floor, on the chairs, on tables, on the couch, toys, and tape recorders, and pieces of tape recorders, and pieces of pieces of tape recorders, and movie equipment, and pieces of pieces of pieces of movie equipment, and tapes and film running all over the place, plaited in among wires and sockets, all of it in great spiral tangles, great celluloid billows, and a big piece of a newspaper headline cut out and stuck up on the wall: HAIL TO ALL EDGES ... In the midst of all this, sitting toward the side, is a gangling girl, looks very Scandinavian, idling over a guitar, which she can't play, and she looks up at Norman and says:

"We've all got hangups.. . and we've got to get rid of them." Yeah ... yeah ... I guess that's right. There ... on the other side here is a little figure with an enormous black beard. The little g-nome looks up at Norman. His eyes narrow and he breaks into a vast inexplicable grin, looking straight at Norman and then Engber, and then he goes scuttling out the door, snuffling and giggling to himself. Yeah .. . yeah ... I guess that's right, too. "I don't know what the hell has happened to me," says Engber, clutching his shoulder, "but it's getting worse."

Norman keeps walking back through the house until he hits a bathroom. Only it is a madhouse of a bathroom. The walls, the ceilings, everything, one vast collage, lurid splashes of red and orange, lurid ads and lurid color photos from out of magazines, pieces of plastic, cloth, paper, streaks of Day-Glo paint, and from the ceiling and down one wall a wild diagonal romp of rhinoceroses, like a thousand tiny rhinoceroses chasing each other through Crazy Lurid Land. Over the top part of the mirror over the sink is a small death mask painted in Day-Glo. The mask hangs from a hinge. Norman lifts it up and underneath the mask is a typewritten message pasted on the mirror: "Now that I've got your attention ..."

Norman and Engber go out back and head up the path that leads into the woods, to look for Kesey. Up past screaming Day-Glo tree trunks and tents here and there and some kind of weird cave down in a gully with Day-Glo objects glowing in the mouth of it and then into deep green glades under the redwoods with the lime light filtering through—and they keep coming upon weird objects. Suddenly, a whole bed, an old-fashioned iron bedstead, a mattress, a cover, but all glowing with mad stripes and swirls of orange, red, green yellow Day-Glo. Then a crazed toy horse in a tree trunk.