The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (22 page)

Foster is coming on, in the house, with these wild logical conundrums he had, only stuttering something awful:

—Sup-puh-puh-puh-
pose
that that everything you per-per-per-perceive is only a . .

."—some long involved thing, and Mountain Girl breaks in:

—B-b-b-b-b-but, P-P-P-P-P-P-Paul, I don't git the p-p-p-p-p-point about all this per-per-per-per-per-per-ception. I try to git it, b-b-b-b-b-b-b-but all I git is the w-w-w-w-w-w-words. How 'bout goin' over it ag-gih-gih-gih-gih-gih-gih-gih-gih-gih-gih-gih-gih-gih
-gih-gihn!"

Foster can't believe this performance. He stands there frozen with his eyes bugging out, bugging out, bugging out, bugging out bigger and bigger until he explodes:

"Is that supposed to be funny! You've got a worse hangup than stuttering, Mountain Girl ! You've got a fat mouth and you don't know what to use it for! Ugly—

that's your trip, the ugly trip! Well, all I know is—"

"Yuh see!" Mountain Girl says. She is grinning, triumphant practically laughing and clapping her hands, she is so pleased with the results. "When you git mad, you don't stutter!"

Foster freezes again. He stares at her. Then he wheels around and walks out the door without saying another word.

The funny part is, she's right

.

WHAT WAS IT? ... IT WAS LIKE . . . WELL, YES!
GROUP THERAPY,
like a marathon encounter in group therapy, in which everybody is together for days, probing everybody's weaknesses, bringing everything out front. Only this was group therapy not for the middle-aged and fucked-up but for the Young! and Immune!—as if they were not patching up wrecks but tooling up the living for some incredible breakthrough,
beyond
catastrophe. Since time was, the serious concerns of man have always been fights against catastrophe, against sickness, war, poverty, enslavement, always the horsemen of the Apocalypse riding. But what to do in that scary void
beyond catastrophe,
where all, supposedly, will be possible—and Norman happens upon another of those strange, prophetic books on Kesey's shelf, Arthur Clarke's
Childhood's End,
in which . .. the Total Breakthrough generation is born on Earth and as mere infants they show powers of mind far beyond their parents' and they go off into a colony by themselves, not as individuals, however, but as one great colonial being, in the biological sense of the colonial animal, until, at last, the Earth, its mission complete, convulses, starts coming apart, and they, the children: "Something's starting to happen. The stars are becoming dimmer. It's as if a great cloud is coming up, very swiftly, all over over all the sky. But it isn't really a cloud. It seems to have some sort of structure—I can glimpse a hazy network of lines and bands that keep changing their position. It's almost as if the stars are tangled in a ghostly spider's web.

The whole network is beginning to glow, to pulse with light, exactly as if it were alive

. . . There's a great burning column, like a tree of fire, reaching above the western horizon. It's a long way off right around the world. I know where it springs from:
they're
on their way at last, to become part of the Overmind. Their probation is ended: they're leaving the last remnants of matter behind ... The whole landscape is lit up—

it's brighter than day—reds and golds and greens are chasing each other across the sky—oh, it's beyond words, it doesn't seem fair that I'm the only one to see it—I never thought such colors—"

In short, zonked out of their ever-loving gourds, man, and heading out toward...

Edge City, absolutely, and we're truly synched tonight.

—but no water spouts of Académie Française cherubim and water babies here, and no reverent toga-linen-flapping Gautama Buddha Orientals breathing out the spent Roquefort breath of spiritual detachment. Instead, somehow they're going to try it right down the main highway, eight lanes wide, heron-neck arc lamps rising up as far as the eye can see, and they will broadcast on all frequencies, waving American flags, turning up the Day-Glo and the neon of 1960s electro-pastel America, wired up and amplified, 327,000 horsepower, a fantasy bus in a science-fiction movie, welcoming all on board, no matter how unbelievably Truck Stop Low Rent or raunchy—

The Hell's Angels

I DOUBT IF ANY OF THE PRANKSTERS TRULY UNDERSTOOD Mountain Girl, except for Kesey. Most of the time she was so 100 percent out front, coming on loud and clear and candid as a Mack truck, it never occurred to anybody that a whole side of her was hidden. Except for Kesey, as I say. Sometimes Kesey and Mountain Girl would disappear into the backhouse and lie on mattresses and just talk, Kesey rapping on about how he felt about all sorts of things, life, fate, Now—while Mountain Girl—one thought of hers making sorties through the soft word flow coming from Kesey on the mattress there—yes, well, and she told Kesey as frankly as she could about the last four or five years of her life. Kesey didn't understand completely. Namely, she was sometimes lonely as hell.

Lonely?
Why, for chrissake, Mountain Girl came swinging into every situation like on a vine, like Sheena, Queen of the Jungle. She was high in the Prankster hierarchy already. Nobody was closer to Kesey than Mountain Girl, not even Faye, it often seemed. But there it was: Kesey .. . Kesey was essential to Mountain Girl's whole life with the Pranksters. Without him, and Hassler, a weird loneliness could take over ...

Hassler was the only other person she could talk to. Without Hassler— But it can be tense underneath in a commune, beautiful on one level, but you have to be willing to force it a little to keep it that way.

It is really funny. This afternoon the sprinklers are ratcheting away all sprinkly and starchy on the lawns of Poughkeepsie. In August the sun causes such brown spots where the trees don't shade it, you understand. Well, freak that. The solution, Doctor, happens to be named Kesey. This sound now, Doctor, rising above the ratcheting, would probably throw your poor little thready heart into fibrillation. It's like a locomotive coming through the redwood trees around the bends down Route 84 from Skylonda. The Hell's Angels in running formation, to be exact, scores of the monsters, on Harley-Davidson 74s. Miss Carolyn Adams of Poughkeepsie, N.Y., is about to look this primordial menace in the face and bark bullshit commands at the Hell's Angels, which they obey, since the sunspots exploding in their eyes bedazzle the monsters. The energy flows from Kesey, Doctor, and there is not one goddamn thing to git your little heart scared of.

KESEY MET THE HELL'S ANGELS ONE AFTERNOON IN SAN

Francisco through Hunter Thompson, who was writing a book about them. It turned out to be a remarkable book, as a matter of fact, called
Hell's Angels, a Strange and
Terrible Saga.
Anyway, Kesey and Thompson were having a few beers and Thompson said he had to go over to a garage called the Box Shop to see a few of the Angels, and Kesey went along. A Hell's Angel named Frenchy and four or five others were over there working on their motorcycles and they took to Kesey right away.

Kesey was a stud who was just as tough as they were. He had just been busted for marijuana, which certified him as Good People in the Angels' eyes. They told him you can't trust a man who hasn't done time, and Kesey was on the way to doing time, in any case. Kesey said later that the marijuana bust impressed them but they couldn't have cared less that he was a novelist. But they knew about that, too, and here was a big name who was friendly and interested in them, even though he wasn't a queer or a reporter or any of those other creep suck-ups who were coming around that summer.

And a great many were coming around in the summer of 1965. The summer of 1965 had made the Hell's Angels infamous celebrities in California. Their reputation was at its absolutely most notorious all-time highest. A series of incidents—followed by an amazing series of newspaper and magazine articles,
Life
and the
Saturday
Evening Post
among them—had the people of the Far West looking to each weekend in the Angels' life as an invasion by baby-raping Huns. Intellectuals around San Francisco, particularly at Berkeley, at the University of California, were beginning to romanticize about the Angels in terms of "alienation" and "a generation in revolt,"

that kind of thing. People were beginning to get in touch with Thompson to see if he couldn't arrange for them to meet the Angels—not the whole bunch, Hunter, maybe one or two at a time. Well, Kesey didn't need any one or two at a time. He and the boys took a few tokes on a joint, and the Hell's Angels were on the bus.

The next thing the citizens of La Honda knew, there was a huge sign at the Kesey place—15 feet long, three feet high, in red white and blue.

THE MERRY PRANKSTERS

WELCOME THE HELL'S ANGELS

Saturday, August 7, 1965, was a bright clear radiant limelit summer day amid God's handiwork in La Honda, California. The citizens were getting ready for the day by nailing shut their doors. The cops were getting ready by revving up a squad of ten patrol cars with flashing lights and ammunition. The Pranksters were getting ready by getting bombed. They were down there in the greeny gorge, in the cabin and around it, under the redwoods, getting bombed out of their gourds. They had some good heavy surges of God-given adrenaline going for them, too. Nobody ever came right out front and said it, but this happened to be the real-life Hell's Angels coming, about forty of them, on a full-fledged Angels' "run," the sort of outing on which the Angels did their thing, their whole freaking thing,
en
mangy raunchy head-breaking fire-pissing rough-goddamn-housing
masse.
The Pranksters had a lot of company for the occasion. It was practically like an audience, all waiting for the stars to appear. A lot of the old Perry Lane crowd was there, Vic Lovell, Ed McClanahan, and the others.

Allen Ginsberg was there and so was Richard Alpert and a lot of San Francisco and Berkeley intellectuals.
Tachycardia,
you all—but Kesey was calm and even laughing a little, looking strong as an ox in his buckskin shirt, the Mountain Man, and he made it all seem right and inevitable, an inevitable part of the flow and right now in this moment. Hell, if the straight world of San Mateo County, California, had decided to declare them all outlaws over an innocuous thing like marijuana, then they could freaking well go with the flow and show them what the saga called Outlaw was really like. The Angels brought a lot of things into synch. Outlaws, by definition, were people who had moved off of dead center and were out in some kind of Edge City.

The beauty of it was, the Angels had done it like the Pranksters, by choice. They had become outlaws first— to
explore,
muvva—and then got busted for it. The Angels'

trip was the motorcycle and the Pranksters' was LSD, but both were in an incredible entry into an orgasmic moment,
now,
and within forty-eight hours the Angels would be taking acid on board, too. The Pranksters would be taking on . .. Ahor, the ancient horror, the middle-class boy fear of Hell's Angels.
Hell's Angels,
in the dirty flesh, and if they could bring that dark deep-down thing into their orbit—

Kesey ! What in the freaking—tachycardia, you all...

Bob Dylan's voice is raunching and rheuming in the old jack-legged chants in huge volume from out the speakers up in the redwood tops up on the dirt cliff across the highway—
He-e-e-ey Mis-ter Tam-bou-rine Man
—as part of Sandy Lehmann-Haupt's Non-Station KLSD program, the indomitable disco-freak-jockey Lord Byron Styrofoam himself, Sandy, broadcasting over a microphone in a cabin and spinning them for you—Cassady revved up so tight it's like mechanical speed man sprocket—

Mountain Girl ready—
Hey, Kesey!
—Hermit grin— Page ablaze—men, women, children, painted and in costume— ricochet around the limelit dell—

Argggggghhhhh
—about 3 P.M. they started hearing it.

It was like a locomotive about ten miles away. It was the Hell's Angels in "running formation" coming over the mountain on Harley-Davidson 74s. The Angels were up there somewhere weaving down the curves on Route 84, gearing down—

thragggggggggh
—and winding up, and the locomotive sound got louder and louder until you couldn't hear yourself talk any more or Bob Dylan rheumy and—

thraaaaaaaggggghhh
—here they came around the last curve, the Hell's Angels, with the bikes, the beards, the long hair, the sleeveless denim jackets with the death's head insignia and all the rest, looking their most royal rotten, and then one by one they came barreling in over the wooden bridge up to the front of the house, skidding to a stop in explosions of dust, and it was like a movie or something—each one of the outlaws bouncing and gunning across the bridge with his arms spread out in a tough curve to the handlebars and then skidding to a stop, one after another after another.

The Angels, for their part, didn't know what to expect. Nobody had ever invited them anywhere before, at least not as a gang. They weren't on many people's invitation lists. They figured they would see what was there and what it was all about, and they would probably get in a hell of a fight before it was all over, and heads would break, but that was about par for the course anyway. The Angels always came into alien situations black and wary, sniffing out the adversary, but that didn't even register at this place. So many people were already so high, on something, it practically dissolved you on the spot. The Pranksters had what looked like about a million doses of the Angels' favorite drug—beer—and LSD for all who wanted to try it. The beer made the Angels very happy and the LSD made them strangely peaceful and sometimes catatonic, in contrast to the Pranksters and other intellectuals around, who soared on the stuff.

June the Goon gave a Hell's Angel named Freewheeling Frank some LSD, which he thought was some kind of souped-up speed or something—and he had the most wondrous experience of his life. By nightfall he had climbed a redwood and was nestled up against a loudspeaker in a tree grooving off the sounds and vibrations of Bob Dylan singing "The Subterranean Homesick Blues."