The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (45 page)

Honesty's the best disguise In the cops and robbers game.

See, cop fellas?

Freaked-out head-buff Cercosporellas

Here's my Rat-tar

And my buckskin cowboy suit.

Prankster red boots

From Guadalajara.

My cowboy hat

Shows you where I'm at

In the cops and robbers game.

I ain't Clark Kent.

I ain't Steve Lamb.

Popeye the Sailor I am what I am

In the cops and robbers game.

Came a car

Didn't take him very far

In the cops and robbers game.

At the wheel

In this fuckedup dust-muck hitchhike deal

Was a Mississippi kite

With a smile of ebonite.

Inchy road

Heavy duty, heavy load

In the cops and robbers game.

Shit.

The Cosmos Kid, he

Split

At the coffee-light eggs-lookin-atcha bus depot.

On the bus!

In the cops and robbers game.

Greyhound humid

Most mightily piss-fumid

All the way to Salt Lake City

On the bus

In the cops and robbers game.

Oh

Riding second class

With shock absorbers up my ass

Reminds me

Of the RB. Eyes left behind me

Out front! superhero

Of the cops and robbers game.

Took a flight

To San Francisco late at night.

Cop alert?

For hero in a buckskin shirt?

Cocked to shoot?

At superdude in red dude boots?

Not hardly.

Official mind destroyer,

This prankster suit of flaming Orion paranoia

Hardly visible,

This risible cowboy

Cardiac drummer

Marching to a different bummer

In the cops and robbers game.

From the airport

With creamy Prankster pudding escorts

Neal and Hugh

Day-Glo Marvel Comic crew

Commence the movie:

FREAK THE COPS!

Shuck the narcos

Shuck the Feds

Shuck the San Mateo Sheriff

Shuck the San Francisco Chief

Shuck the Judges in their chambers

We shall not flag or fail

We shall go on to the end

We shall shuck you on the beaches

We shall shuck you on the landing grounds

We shall shuck you in the fields, in the streets, on the hills And in the trees.

Groovy plot

Hot movie

In these trees.

See the very hunted coons

Salt J. Edgar Hoover's wounds!

Yah! the cops and robbers game.

Kesey holes up at his old friend———'s house in Palo Alto. He is in a strange state of mind. He is in the cops' movie now, the Cops and Robbers Game, and eventually they will win, because it is their movie—
Gotcha!
Unless he makes it his movie, which will take the utmost risk and daring. Here I am, boys... In the cops and robbers game you creep and skulk about in a state of tachycardia, and they like to think of you in your reptile misery—so—

Break skulk!

In short, the fantasy is now to become a kind of Day-Glo Pimpernel, popping up here and there, right out in public, then vanishing, reeking legend in the wake. He will be like one of those movie criminals who send florid coded notes to the police about
au
pair
girls he intends to garrote—and then does it—while all the world pants for next week's broken hyoid bone. Only he hasn't been strangling, merely smoking grass. You would never know that, however, from the excitement in San Francisco ...

A strange sort of guest to have in the house— and----------hardly knows what to make of the performance, Kesey veering wildly from paranoia and hyper-security to extraordinary disregard for his own safety, one state giving way to the other in no fixed order. Kesey gets up about noon or 1 P.M., eats, then goes out in the garden out back and sits there in his buckskin shirt playing a Prankster flute. If one plays anything much more bizarre than a transistor radio out back in the garden in Palo Alto, it amounts to freaking insurrection; let alone a big muscular Mountain Man in a buckskin shirt playing a flute. Then at night—a few tokes here, a few tokes there, it adds up, Major, Kesey and a Prankster or two start to rapping, gently Rapping

Cortex tapping

Rat-tat-tatting

Tatter-ratting

Fooling, puling, ululation

Skeel goose screeling glossolalia

Crested screamers! Megascops!

Bust the eardrums! FREAK THE COPS!

until 2 A.M. the house would be reeling with enough Rat-tars, loon cries, tapes and howling grass euphoria to wake up all of sweet dream tunnel Palo Alto for the next fifteen years—but then suddenly at 4 A.M., or 5, after outlasting everyone in the mad howl, Kesey would suddenly decide it was time for maximum security precautions and would disappear into the cellar to a snug nest behind the packing cases, in the cobwebs. Well, at least the bastards won't get him with Gestapo tap on the shoulder—

All right, Kesey ...

That
movie—but then awakening and starting his movie almost at once. Neal, Hugh Romney, Kesey and a small detachment of Hell's Angels head for a three-day

"trips festival" in progress at San Francisco State College, Saturday night, October 1.

The seeds one has sown... The Acid Tests have already caught hold in the college world. San Francisco State has become the acid heads' true
universitas,
sort of the way Ohio State is for football freaks. They are trying the whole thing, the Acid Test, with the utmost faithful eclecticism.

Alpha,

Beta,

Delta Handa Poker.

Movies at the smoker.

Collegiate!

Donkey beads,

Temple bells,

Sandles and

Mandalas

Psychedelic!

The Hell's Angels are riding shotgun for the Fugitive. They like this. They can freak out any approaching cops, in cruiser or battalion. For some suitable weird reason all the lights are left on in the campus buildings. The festival is in the gymnasium—full of scaffolding and people sweeping the ceilings with movies and light projections—Control towers—and the Grateful Dead on the bandstand, all careful homage to the original Acid Tests, and then suddenly KESEY

will be there, broadcasting into the gymnasium from a campus radio station ... a very tight ship, this fantasy, even up to Hell's Angels standing guard outside the studio.

Except that by the time they get all the wiring hooked up, and start rapping, Cassady with a microphone inside the hall—introducing

KEN KEEEEE-ZEEEEEE

it is about 4 A.M. Kesey is hidden in the studio, talking over the hugest Prankster hookup of wires, running long over the college campus to the gymnasium.

Freewheeling Frank, the Hell's Angel, zonked on acid, barges into the studio, and sees Kesey there sitting on a stool with an electric guitar and wires running all around his legs and his neck, branging on the guitar, rapping poetry into the microphone with fluorescent light and ON THE AIR sign filling up the room—
The god of LSD
—
He's so
wired up it scares me
—
This god reminds me of a satellite that flies around in the
skies
—whereupon Frank hugs him and feels an immediate surge of electricity and sits down on the floor and starts playing a harmonica and Kesey raps on for the benefit of the hundreds watching the swirling light shows in the gymnasium: "You who stand sit and crawl around and about the floor about you and above you on the ceiling that madness that's running in color is your brain!"—and then he stalks out of the room—

He's mad because he has not captured my mind
—thinks Frank—
he has so many
million minds that he has captured that not even a smile is left on his face.

But there were no millions or even hundreds left in the gymnasium because it was so late it was down to a group of hard-core heads, many of whom were so high they were used to all sorts of time and geography warps.
Everything
was real, Mani, Madame Blavatsky's Chohan maya, Ken Kesey broadcasting over the p.a. system ...

Kesey finally comes out and walks through the residue, but they are all wacked out and he is hardly visible ... in his Prankster suit of flaming Orion paranoia . . .

Nevertheless! the word is now out among the heads of Haight-Ashbury. Kesey is back, the
Man,
the Castro who won them what they have today in the first place. The seeds we ...

. . .
HAVE SOWN . . .
DOWN IN RAT LAND RED TIDE MANZANILLO, Kesey and the Pranksters had been so cut off they got almost no news from San Francisco. It was all perfect Devil's Island down there. They had only a dim idea of what was going on among the heads in Haight-Ashbury. But now, like, you don't even have to look for it. It hits you in the face. It's a whole carnival... All you have to do is walk up into the Haight-Ashbury—and Kesey chances a run through ... Hell, in Haight-Ashbury a muscular guy in cowboy boots and a cowboy hat—he ... looks
healthy.
The cops are busy trying to figure out these new
longhairs,
these
beatniks
—

these crazies are somehow weirder than the North Beach beatniks ever were. They glow blue like a TV tube. The hippie-dippies.. . their Jesus hair, men with hair falling down to the shoulders and beards to their chests, all lank and thin and limp like...

lungers!
Sergeant, they're lollygagging up against the storefronts on Haight Street up near that Psychedelic Shop like somebody hocked a bunch of T.B. lungers up against windows and they've oozed down to the sidewalks, staring at you with these huge zombie eyes, just staring. And a lot of weird American Indian and Indian from India shit, beaded headbands and donkey beads and temple bells—and the
live
ones, promenading up and down Haight Street in costumes, or half-costumes, like some kind of a doorman's coat with piping and crap but with blue jeans for pants and Mod boots.. .
The cops!
—oh, how it messed up their minds.

The cops knew drunks and junkies by heart, and they knew
about
LSD, but this
thing
that was going on . . . The heads could con the cops blind and it was wild.

Haight-Ashbury had always been a brave little tenement district up the hill from the Panhandle entrance to Golden Gate Park, with whites and Negroes living next door in peace. Rents had been going up in North Beach. A lot of young couples with bohemian enthusiasms had been moving to Haight-Ashbury. Some of the old beats had moved in. They hung around a place called the Blue Unicorn. But the Trips Festival of eight months before was what really kicked the whole thing off. Eight months!—and all of a sudden it was like the Acid Tests had taken root and sprung up into people living the Tests like a whole life style.

The Grateful Dead had moved into a house in Haight-Ashbury, and it wasn't just the old communal living where everybody piled into some place. They lived in Prankster-style, as a group with a name and a mission, which was music and the psychedelic vision ... Yes... A thin, almost caved-in guy with
incredible
freaking light-brown Jesus hair and beard flowing all over him and round wire-rim spectacles, named Chet Helms, had a group called the Family Dog. They also lived in Prankster-style, in a garage at 1090 Page, holding rock 'n' roll dances amid a lot of Indian symbols. They had taken part in the Trips Festival. Helms was a head but a very practical head. He saw it coming, with the Trips Festival, the whole wave. He started an ongoing Trips Festival, every week, selling tickets, at a ballroom, the Avalon, at Van Ness and Sutter. Bill Graham, the impresario for the Trips Festival, was into the thing too and had a Trips Festival scene going in the Fillmore Auditorium, a dancehall at Fillmore and Geary. Graham and Kesey had had a falling out at the Trips Festival itself over things like who was going to handle the gate and it ended in a badass moment when Graham put out his hand to shake and make up and Kesey just looked at it and walked away. But Graham picked up on the Acid Test format exactly. Both the Fillmore and the Avalon did the Pranksters Acid Test with all the mixed media stuff, the rock 'n' roll and movie projections and the weird intergalactic amoeba light shows. The Avalon even had it down to details like the strobes and sections of the floor where you could play with Day-Glo paint under black light. Everything but the .

.. fourth dimension ... Cosmo ... the three o'clock thing ... the experience, the
kairos...

They know
where
it is, but they don't know
what
it is...
Still, the ballrooms were like a big announcement and a front door ... into The Life.

The new communal groups themselves were into the pudding. Like the Diggers, led by a guy named Emmett Grogan, whose hero was Kesey. They went in for pranks.

They had a Frame of Reference, a huge frame nine feet tall that they set up in the street and asked people to walk through ... "so we'll all be in the same frame of reference." Then they started handing out free food to all comers, heads, winos, anybody, at 4 P.M. in the Panhandle part of the park. The food they cadged from wholesalers, and boosted, and so on. It was a goddamn sketch, seeing them ladle out the stew every day out of big milk cans... Up at Fulton and Scott is a great shambling old Gothic house, a freaking decayed giant, known as The Russian Embassy. A new group called the Calliope Company lives in there, led by Bill Tara, an actor. Many colorful characters like Paul Hawken, and Michael Laton, who always wears a Russian astrakhan hat, and Jack the Fluke, who is a laughing grizzly Irishman with a beard like an Airedale and a cab driver's cap and flapping tweeds bought from the Slightly Soiled Shop ... all of them sitting around the great parlor, bare but a glory of old carved wood, fourteen-foot ceilings... Jack the Fluke tells about his girlfriend Sandra, a teenage girl who just pulled in from Bucks County, Pa.:

"I come in"—and he motions with his head up toward his room on the top floor—

"and, dig: she has a joint rolled
this big,
like a
cigar,
man!—and she's goofing off the radio and puffing on this, I mean,
Corona corona
joint and goofing and puffing—it was
beautiful!
It really takes me back."