The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (21 page)

Then a telephone—a
telephone
—sitting up on a tree stump, glowing in the greeny deeps with beautiful glowing cords of many colors coming out of it. Then a TV set, only with mad Day-Glo designs painted on the screen. Then into a clearing, a flash of sunlight, and down the slope, here comes Kesey. He looks twice as big as the time Norman saw him in L.A. He has on white Levi's and a white T-shirt. He walks very erect and his huge muscled arms swing loose. The redwoods soar all around.

Norman says, "Hello—"

But Kesey just nods slightly and smiles very faintly as if to say, You said you'd be here and here you are. Kesey looks around and then down the slope toward the tent plateaus and the house and the highway and says:

"We're working on many levels here." -

Engber clutches his shoulder and says:

"I don't know what this thing is, Norman, but it's killing me. I've got to go back to L.A."

"Well, O.K., Evan—"

"I'll come back up when I get over it."

Norman kind of knew he wouldn't, and he didn't, but Norman wanted to stick around.

ALL RIGHT, FILM EDITOR, ARTICLE WRITER, PARTICIPANT-Observer, you're here. On with your ... editing writing observing. But somehow Norman doesn't start cutting film or writing his column. Almost immediately the strange atmosphere of the place starts rolling over him. There is an atmosphere of—

how can one describe it?—we are all
on
to something here, or
into
something, but no one is going to put it into words for you. Put it into words—one trouble right away is that he finds it very hard to get into the conversations here in the house in the woods.

Everyone is very friendly and most of them are outgoing. But they are all talking about—how can one describe it?—about. . .
life,
things that are happening around there, things they are doing—or about
things
of such an abstract and metaphorical nature that he can't fasten them, either. Then he realizes that what it really is is that they are interested in none of the common intellectual currency that makes up the conversations of intellectuals in Hip L.A., the standard topics, books, movies, new political movements—For years he and all his friends have been talking about nothing but intellectual products, ideas, concoctions, brain candy, shadows of life, as a substitute for living; yes. They don't even use the usual intellectual words here—

mostly it is just
thing.

Cassady's
thing
is—christalmighty, Cassady—and it is with Cassady that he gets the first sense of the daily allegory at Kesey's, allegorical living, every action a demonstration of a lesson of life—like Cassady's Gestalt Driving—but that is
your
term ... Whenever there is any driving to be done, Cassady does it. That is Cassady's thing, or his thing on one level. They drive up the mountain, up to Skylonda, atop Cahill Ridge, for something. Coming back, down the mountain, Norman is in the back seat, two or three others are sitting front and back, and Cassady is driving. They start hauling down the mountain, faster and faster, the trees snapping by like in some kind of amusement park ride, only Cassady isn't looking at the road. Or holding onto the wheel. His right hand is flipping the dial on the radio. One rock 'n' roll number blips out here—
I'm nurding ut noonh erlation
—then another one here on the dial—
vronnnh
ba-bee suckpo pon-pon
—all the time Cassady is whamming out the beat on the steering wheel with the heel of his left hand and the whole car seems to be shuddering with it—and his head is turned completely around looking Norman squarely in the eye and grinning as if he is having the most congenial delightful conversation with him, only Cassady is doing all the talking, an incredible oral fibrillation of words, nutty nostalgia—"a '46 Plymouth, you understand, gear shift like a Dairy Queen pulled up side a '47 Chrysler jumpy little marshmallow fellow in there had a kickdown gear was gonna ossify the world, you understand"—all to Norman with the happiest smile in the world—

You crazy fool
—
the truck
—

—at the last possible moment somehow Cassady fishtails the car back onto the inside of the curve and the truck shoots by clean black shot like a great 10-ton highballing tear drop of tar—Cassady still talking, hanging on the steering wheel, pounding and rapping away. Norman terrified; Norman looks at the others to see if—

but they're all sitting there throughout the whole maniacal ride as if nothing out of the ordinary has happened at all.

And maybe that's it—the first onset of Ahor paranoia hits—maybe that's it, maybe he has been sucked into some incredible trap by a bunch of dope-taking crazies who are going to toy with him, for what reason I do not—

Back at the house he decides to get into his role of Journalist Reporter Observer.

At least he will be doing something and be
outside,
sane, detached. He starts asking about this and that, about Cassady, about Babbs, about the ineffable
things,
about why—

Mountain Girl explodes suddenly.

"Why! Why! Why! Why! Why! Why! Why!" she says, throwing up her hands and shaking her head, with such an air of authority and conviction that he is crushed.

Later Kesey comes in and happens to say in the course of something—"Cassady doesn't have to think any more"—then he walks away. It is as if for some reason he is furnishing Norman with part of the puzzle.

Kesey keeps doing this kind of thing. As if by radar, Kesey materializes at the critical moment, in the cabin, out front, in the backhouse, up in the woods. The crisis may be somebody's personal thing or some group thing—suddenly Kesey pops up like Captain Shotover in Shaw's play
Heartbreak House,
delivers a line—usually something cryptic, allegorical, or merely descriptive, never a pronouncement or a judgment. Half the time he quotes the wisdom of some local sage—Page says, Cassady says, Babbs says—
Babbs says, if you don't /(now what the next thing is, all
you have to
—and just as suddenly he's gone.

For example—well, it always seems like there's no dissension around here, no arguments, no conflict, in spite of all these different and in some cases weird personalities ricocheting around and rapping and carrying on. Yet that is only an illusion. It is just that they don't have it out with one another. Instead, they take it to Kesey, all of them forever waiting for Kesey, circling around him.

One kid, known as Pancho Pillow, was a ball-breaker freak. He has to break your balls by coming on obnoxious in any way he could dream up, after which you were supposed to reject him, after which he could feel hurt and blame you for...
all.
That was his movie. One night Pancho is in the house with a book about Oriental rugs, full of beautiful color plates, and he is rapping on and on about the beautiful rugs—

"—like, man, I mean, these cats were turned on
ten centuries
ago, the whole thing, they had mandalas you never
dreamed
of—right?—look here, man, I want to blow your mind for you, just one time—"

—and he sticks the book under some Prankster's nose—here's a beautiful color picture of an Isfahan rug, glowing reds and oranges and golds and starlike vibrating lines all radiating out from a medallion at the center—

"No thanks, Pancho, I already had some."

"Come on, man! I mean, like, I gotta
share
this thing, I gotta
make
you see it, I can't keep this whole thing to myself! Like, you know, I mean, I want to
share
it with you—you dig?—now you look at this one—"

And so on, shoving the goddamn book at everybody, waiting for somebody to tell him to go fuck himself, at which point he can stalk out, fulfilled.

Feed the hungry bee
—but christ, this ball breaker is too much. So now all the Pranksters
endure,
waiting for one thing, waiting for Kesey to turn up. By and by the door opens and it's Kesey.

"Hey man!" Pancho says and rushes up to him. "You gotta look at these things I found! I gotta turn you on to this, man! I mean, I really got to, because it will fucking
blow your mind!"
and he sticks the book in Kesey's face.

Kesey just looks down at the picture of the Isfahan or the Shiraz or the Bakhtiari or whatever it is, as if he is studying it. And then he says, softly, in the Oregon drawl,

"Why should I take your bad trip?"

—without looking up, as if what he is saying has something to do with this diamond medallion here or this border of turtles and palms—

"Bad trip!" Pancho screams. "What do you mean, bad trip!" and he throws the book to the floor, but Kesey is already off into the back of the house. And Pancho knows his whole thing is, in fact, not sharing beauty rugs at all, but simply his bad trip, and
they
all know that's what it's all about, and he
\knows
they know it, and the whole game is over and so long, Pancho Pillow.

AND YET IT BEGAN TO SEEM TO NORMAN THAT EVEN PANCHO was further into the group thing than he was. He felt useless. He never got to edit the movie. Kesey and Babbs would just say do some cutting. But he wanted to see the whole film first, a whole run-through, so he could see where it was going. It was the same with the group. He wanted to run the whole group back through his personal editing machine and see what the whole picture looked like and what the goal was.

All the while it seemed like they were probing him, probing him, probing him for weaknesses. Bradley, of all people, blew up at him one morning, started calling him everything he could think of, apparently trying to stir him up. Norman was reading a Sanskrit textbook at the time, trying to learn the alphabet. He figured he might as well do that, since he wasn't doing anything else. He was also smoking a cigarette. Bradley starts in.

"Every time you read a book or smoke a cigarette," he yells, "you're
hitting me.

Look at Pancho. Pancho's working. Pancho is writing poetry all the time, and every day he brings me a poem—"

—which is ridiculous, Pancho's poems are
so
bad. In fact, it is so ridiculous Bradley breaks into a smile over it. Nevertheless, the point has been made. Which is that Norman is lazy, "personal." Reading is something that just gives pleasure to the reader. It is not for the group. Also smoking—a thing that begets nothing but itself. So he is telling Norman that he is lazy and not contributing.
Which is true. He is right.

But he wants to start a fight over it or something. This amuses Norman and he laughs at Bradley—
Bradley
—and yet even though it is only Bradley, it seems like an indication of how the rest feel. Otherwise Bradley probably never would have said anything. Norman becomes quieter and quieter, like a clam. And it seemed as if they laughed at him—

"Not
at
you—
with
you," Kesey kept telling him, trying to josh him out of all his hangups and inferiorities.

But the only thing that really helped was having Paul Foster turn up.

Foster was a tall, curly-headed guy in his late twenties with a terrible stutter. He was a mathematician and had been working in Palo Alto as a computer programmer, making a lot of money, apparently. Then he started hanging out with some musicians and they turned him on to a few ... mind-expanders, and now Foster's life seemed to alternate between stretches of good straight computer programming, during which he wore a necktie and an iridescent teal-green suit of Zirconpolyesterethylene and was a formidable fellow in the straight world, and stretches of life with ... Speed, the Great God Rotor, during which he wore his Importancy Coat. This was a jacket he had turned into a collage. It had layers and layers of ribbons and slogan buttons and reflectors and Cracker Jack favors all over it, piled up and flapping in the breeze until it looked like a lunatic billowsleeve coat from out of the court of Louis XV. He moved into the tree. Sandy had built a house in the tree, a platform with a tent on it. Paul built one under it; O.K., a duplex tree house. Paul Foster came in with just an enormous amount of stuff, all this stuff. He brought it all in and he set up housekeeping in the tree. He put a window up in the tree, and a gate, and bookshelves. He had strange books. An encyclopedia, only it was an 1893 encyclopedia, and books on the strangest languages, Tagalog, Urdu, and apparently he knew something about all these languages ... and more and more
stuff.
He had a huge sack of googaws that he would carry around, of the weirdest stuff, bits of glittering glass and tin and transistor-radio shells, just the shells, and nails and screws and tops and tubes, and inside his sack of weird junk was a little sack that was a miniature of the big sack and contained
tiny
weird junk ... and you got the idea that somehow, somewhere in there was a
very
tiny little sack that contained
very
tiny weird junk, and that it went on that way into infinity ... He also had a lot of pens, some of them felt-nib pens with colors, and he sat up in the tree house while the old restless Roto-rooter, the good god Speed, scoured puns, puns, puns, puns, puns from out of the walls of his skull and he fashioned signs like one he put at the entrance of the place, where the driveway turned in to the bridge from Route 84, a sign reading: "No Left Turn Unstoned." Then people would come and he'd entertain them up in his tree house, and at night you would see it lit up like some mad thing, gleaming with Dali-Day-Glo swoops, and he would be up there drawing, drawing, drawing, drawing, or working on a huge mad scrapbook he had ...

Norman and Paul Foster had a lot in common. They were both fairly good artists, they both had a certain fund of erudition erudition erudition. Foster, with his terrible stutter, valued privacy in the midst of it all, just as Norman did. Of course, Foster was proving himself a Prankster far faster than Norman was. It was a strange thing about that. There were no rules. There was no official period of probation, and no vote on is he or isn't he one of us, no blackballing, no tap on the shoulders. And yet there was a period of proving yourself, and everyone knew it was going on and no one ever said a word about it. In any case, Norman could talk to Foster, and that made all the difference. He didn't feel so desperately lonely any more. Also he suddenly saw that it wasn't just him—the Pranksters probed everybody, to make them bring their hangups out front to the point where they could act totally out front, live in the moment, spontaneously, and if needling was what it took to bring you that far—