The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (34 page)

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 balls—
can't stand it
—and 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 hall—the 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 until—
satori
—the 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?—or 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 tower—
and there it is
—it 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?—in 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
—a 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! "—

Babbs 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 it—Babbs 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 gestures—and it comes to pass!—there is a ripple in the crowd
there
and again and there is a ripple in the crowd
here
—also 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 course—a vibration along the crack, the fault,
synchronicity
spoken here, and we are at play, but they
do
it—
start the music!
—and it starts—satori, in the Central Node, as it was written—but I say unto you—and at that very moment, a huge message in red is written on the wall: ANYBODY WHO KNOWS HE IS GOD GO UP ON STAGE

Anybody?
—The 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 unbelieving—unbelieving in what?—up 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...

* * *

THREE NIGHTS THE HUGE WILD CARNIVAL WENT ON. IT WAS A big thing on every level. For one thing, the Trips Festival grossed $12,500 in three days, with almost no overhead, and a new nightclub and dance-hall genre was born. Two weeks later Bill Graham was in business at the Fillmore auditorium with a Trips Festival going every weekend and packing them in. For the acid heads themselves, the Trips Festival was like the first national convention of an underground movement that had existed on a hush-hush cell-by-cell basis. The heads were amazed at how big their own ranks had become—and euphoric over the fact that they could come out in the open, high as baboons, and the sky, and the law, wouldn't fall down on them. The press went along with the notion that this had been an LSD experience without the LSD. Nobody in the hip world of San Francisco had any such delusion, and the Haight-Ashbury era began that weekend.

The Trips Festival changed many things. But as soon as the whirlpool died down, Kesey was right back where he started, so far as the grinning lopsided frowning world of the San Mateo and San Francisco County courts were concerned. The bastids were digging in for prisoner's base. They had already dug him out of the place in La Honda.

Part of the fiat of Judge de Matteis was that Kesey get out of La Honda and sell his place to somebody who had nothing to do with him or his works and stay out of San Mateo County except to see his probation officer or travel through on the Harbor Freeway or over the territorial boundaries of San Mateo County by airplane and remove himself and all his influences from said County. So Kesey and Faye and the kids moved into the Spread, Babbs's place, in Santa Cruz. Winding his way down there on January 23—there was a warrant waiting for his arrest on the grounds of violating probation.

Well, that's their Movie, Tonto, and we all know how that one ends. Three years in the San Mateo donjon, plus the five or eight or twenty they come up with in San Francisco to teach a lesson while the iron and the spittle are hot to all the Trips Festival dope fiends. Kesey called an immediate briefing, and remember that little abjuration a couple months ago about prepare for Mexico... ?

So they gathered at the Spread.

"If society wants me to be an outlaw," said Kesey, "then I'll be an outlaw, and a damned good one. That's something people need. People at all times need outlaws."

The Pranksters comprehended it all at once.

So here is the current fantasy: tonight he is going to split for Mexico. He'll go across the border in the back of Ron Boise's truck. Boise was down at Babbs's at the time, and he had a truck that served as a kind of mobile studio. It had all his welding equipment and acetylene torches and the like and he would work back there on the mud flats out back, shaping old car fenders into the erotic poses of the Kama Sutra.

Finally Roy Seburn's psychedelic car, his miniature bus, had been fed to the torches back there, too, as it was broken down for good. Nothing lasts. Art is not eternal.

They would head for Puerto Vallarta. He would use another Prankster's driver's license as I.D. in case he needed it down there. Meanwhile, as a cover story, one last grand prank. The Suicide Trip.

Kesey would write a suicide note. Then D—, who looked uncommonly like him—

Dee would dress up like him and get in an old panel truck that was around there and drive up the coast, toward Oregon, and pick out a likely cliff and smash the truck into a tree trunk and get out and leave the suicide note on the seat of the truck and throw his sky-blue boots down by the shore so it would look like he had dived in the water and gone out to sea, never to come back to his swamp of troubles. The idea was that Dee would look enough like Kesey, especially in a Prankster costume, so that if anybody did happen to see him driving along the way, they would remember him as someone answering Kesey's description. Let 'em unravel that one. Even if they don't fall for it, at least it might take the heat off. Why should we go to all this trouble—the ninny
might
be lying on the bottom of the ocean, them damn dope fiends ...

"I hope Dee doesn't do a Dee-out," Mountain Girl said. But she was optimistic. The whole thing had a lot of
élan du Prank.

That night Kesey and Mountain Girl got stoned on grass and started composing the great suicide note:

"Last words. A vote for Barry is a vote for fun. I, Ken Kesey, being of (ahem) sound mind and body, do hereby leave the whole scene to Faye, Corporation, cash and the works (and it occurs to me here that nobody is going to buy this prank and now it occurs to me that I like that even better).. ."

Shee-ut, this was fun. Put-on after put-on bubbled up in their brains, and all the bullshit metaphors of destiny, all the bullshit lines a good bullshit poet would come up with upon looking the Grim Creeper in the arsehole:

"Wind, wind send me not this place, though, onward ..."

More! More! Louder music, more wine!

"... Ocean, ocean, ocean, I'll beat you in the end, I'll break you this time. I'll go through with my heels your hungry ribs..."

On and on it went, like a running account of the mad-drive-to-be up the coast, looking for his favorite cliff, to jump off of, presumably, the whole scene bubbling up in his brain and Mountain Girl's on the ratty rug in Babbs's living room. Hell, let's throw in some acid—they'll
believe
the damn ninny dope fiend would take the dread LSD and break his ass for good—and hell, slam the freaking vehicle into a tree, bleed verisimilitude all over the California littoral:

"... I've lost the ocean again. Beautiful. I drive hundreds of miles looking for my particular cliff, get so trapped behind acid I can't find the ocean, end up slamming into a redwood ..."

Beautiful. Ready, Ron? He gets into Boise's truck and they head off south for San Diego, the Mexican border, Tijuana and the land of all competent Outlaws.

The Electric Kool-Aid

Acid Test

WHAT HAPPENED TO THE PRANKSTERS AFTER KESEY'S flight to Mexico was so much like what happened to the League after Leo fled in Hermann Hesse's book
The Journey to the East
—well, it was freaking weird, this particular
synch ...

exactly ... the Pranksters ! and the great bus trip of 1964! their whole movie. No; it went on. Hesse's fantasy coincided with theirs all the way. It went
on
—all the way to this weird divide—

The leader of the League in
The Journey to the East
was named Leo. He was never openly known as the leader: like Kesey, he was the "non-navigator" of the brotherhood. And Leo suddenly left "in the middle of the dangerous gorge of Morbio Inferiore," just when the League was deepest into its Journey to the East, in the critical phase of a trip that was being alternately denounced and wondered at. "From that time, certainty and unity no longer existed in our community, although the great idea still kept us together. How well I remember those first disputes! They were something so new and unheard-of in our hitherto perfectly united League. They were conducted with respect and politeness—at least in the beginning. At first they led neither to fierce conflicts nor personal reproaches or insults—at first we were still an inseparable, united brotherhood throughout the world ..." Things got more and more bitter, and the narrator, "H.," left after the Morbio Inferiore. And the narrator, Hartweg, left after ...

Very weird, the
synch!

With Kesey gone, Babbs became the leader. There was no meeting, no vote, not even a parting word from Kesey. Babbs becomes the leader—the ... group mind knew that at once, without a second thought. They packed up everything at La Honda and took it up to Oregon, to Kesey's parents' home. The Archives they stashed at the Spread and, later, up at Chuck's house in Oregon. This and that they bequeathed to other heads, like the great round table with the Hell's Angels' carvings all over it.