The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (52 page)

People stare at the stage, but there's no sign of music. Is it over? Are you on the bus?

... in the pudding?

Kesey plunges on. The lights go out again. The wrench is total now. It's a whole other .. . thing ... Kesey moves to the other side of the floor and sits down. The spot hits him. The Pranksters start gathering from all over the garage: Mountain Girl, The Hermit, Babbs, Gretch, Doris Delay, Page, The Hassler, Cassady, Black Maria, Zonker, Gut, George Walker, Ram Rod, Stewart Brand, Lois Jennings, all heading toward Kesey. Hassler has a hand mike and he starts saying in the dark:

"Everybody who's with us, everybody who's with us in this thing, move in close. If you're not part of this thing, if you're not with us, then it's time to leave. You can move in close and get into this thing or you can leave, because ... that's what time it is..."

Shitfire! that's it—those who were a little spooked by the turn the night is taking are now totally spooked. People heading for the Sixth Street door, flapping and burbling. The Pranksters, meantime, draw in close to Kesey, stepping by people, over people, then settling down, nestling in a circle around Kesey. Others pulling in, through the darkness, toward the cone of light lighting up Kesey's head and back.

Kesey looks distraught. He looks up into the light. He has a hand mike. He makes a gesture as if to say, Let them through—

"I know these people," he says. "I've been with these people!"

The whole Allegory ... A tableau of the Plains of... The tightest inner circle is packed in around him, then the Prankster outer circle. Then a few of the old Perry Lane crowd. Then various heads who are deep into the pudding, like Goldhill and the Kid with the Boiling Teeth, then rings and rings, the grades of faith . . . plus a few clumps up against the wall, of people with no faith at all, just too stroked out or curious to leave. Finally Cassady stepping over the hunkered-down, lotused, sitting bodies, heading toward the inner circle ... Kesey looks up at him, then he seems to grow dizzy and sink ... His head rolls...

"Goodbye, Neal!" he says. He looks like he might pass out. Cassady pulls closer.

Kesey hunches over the microphone.

"They're saying, 'Look at him—the promising novelist... once surrounded by thousands... and now only these few'... But I can—"

—he drops the thought, however. The whole place is quiet and dark, just one small spotlight on Kesey ...

"Get Faye and the kids." Silence. Then a rustle of Faye coming through the clump of people, leading the little girl, Shannon, and the oldest boy, Zane, and carrying the youngest, Jed. They've all been in the nursery section up by the Sixth Street door. One of them is crying, only it is like a scream. That's all you hear in here, it's eerie ... Faye and the kids and Mountain Girl and Sunshine and all the Pranksters in a tight circle with Kesey. They all hold hands and close their eyes. Silence. Then the scream again ARCHETYPICAL! MIND POWER!

Then a voice from one of the clumps of people by the wall, some girl, with a spondee voice like a Ouija medium:

"The—child—is—cry-ing—Do—some-thing—for—the— child—first—"

Kesey says nothing. His eyes are shut tight. The high keening sound rises from the circle with the kid's scream weaving through it.
Fantastic mind power crackle
—

Goldhill registers the energy

THEY'RE ALMOST

But the girl on the other side doesn't let up: "See—a-bout— the—child—A—Child—

is—cry-ing—That's—all—that's— hap-pening—A—child—is—cry-ing—and—no—

one—is— do-ing—any-thing—a-bout— it—"

ALMOST HAVE IT—PRESQUE vu!

"—Why—is—the—child—cry-ing—Doesn't—an-y-bo-dy— care?—"

FEEL IT! THE VIBRATION LEVEL!

Kesey looks up. The spot hits him in the face. The Pranksters release hands. The music starts up. The Anonymous Artists of runenca play a rock 'n' roll version of Pomp and Circumstance with drum flourishes...

THE ACID TEST GRADUATION

By now the crowd is down to about fifty. The lights come up a little around the stage, but the rest of the garage is dark. Cassady is up on the stage in front of a microphone.

He has on nothing but a pair of khakis hung down on his hips and a mortarboard hat on his head, the kind you graduate in. In one hand he has a whole stack of diplomas.

He's wound up like a motorcycle, kicking and twitching and ticking and jerking at the knees, the elbows, the head ... He's off on a dazzling run of words. The Anonymous Artists of America keep rolling away behind him. Every time the little blond girl on the drums gives the drums a good swat, Cassady stiffens, a spasmodic jerk, as if somebody just kicked him in the small of the back. He's rapping away, he's handing out the diplomas for the Acid Test Graduation. It's coming off after all... now ...

when? what the hell time is it? Five o'clock in the morning or ... who the hell knows...

Kesey is in the dimness sunk into the great easy chair. Some of the...
graduates
are here, Pranksters mainly. They put on black caps and gowns and come bouncing up to the stage and get a diploma from Cassady ... scrolly convoluted things done by Paul Foster and the God Rotor....

Gut the Hell's Angel lets out a whoop and does a little dance as his name is called.

Many of the graduates aren't there. The Who Cares Girl...

"The Who Cares Girl," says Cassady. "Now, the Who Cares Girl couldn't be with us this evening, you understand, had to check in for choir practice in the oat bin two hundred fine voices tuned to a split hair screaming the name of the cowboy known as Ray, you understand, couldn't be with us either—ahem—lost in a Band-Aid factory swabbing the jake seats with A-200 ..."

... and the drums roll and Cassady stiffens and jerks and twitches and the Pranksters hasten forward, Hassler, Babbs, Zonker, The Hermit, Mountain Girl, Gretch, Paul Foster, Black Maria, Page, Walker, Hagen, Doris Delay, Roy Seburn, flying up and back in black robes...
graduate—
into what on the horizon ... as the light of dawn breaks through the crack in the garage door behind the bandstand. Those cold goddamn silver slivers... and the light rises in the garage, a cockroach orange dimness, and there is perfect silence, the world stroked out this way and that as in ... Lucite . ..

And the heat of the day creeps in, and rising out of the funk and the musk and the Rat grease smears—now come the cinches, mites, crab lice, fleas, fruit flies, grubs, weevils, all the microbes and larval ooze—and start writhing and crawling and festering and frying and wriggling and sizzling. The straight world breathes in, coughs, gags, spaghetti trapped in every glottis and flapping in panic ...

Back among the acid heads of San Francisco there were two or three days of post mortems after the collapse of the Prankster Winterland fantasy and the strange night in the garage. A little breast-beating here and there ... Oh, did we give in to Fear and Doubts, which a good head cannot afford, and thereby stop a brave cat from doing his thing... But just as many said, Kesey was out to freak us out or cop out on us, and it was just as well. And then the communal mind, not willing to be anti-freak-out, settled on the cop-out theory of it. Kesey had been just copping out all along, to keep from going to jail. That settled something else, too, the troublesome...
souped-up
thing the Pranksters were always into, this 400-horsepower takeoff game, this American flag-flying game, this Day-Glo game, this yea-saying game, this dread neon game, this...
superhero
game, all wired-up and wound up and amplified in the electropastel chrome game gleam. It wasn't the Buddha, not for a moment. Life is shit, said the Buddha, a duress of bad karmas, and satori is passive, just lying back and grooving and grokking on the Overmind and leave Teddy Roosevelt out of it. Grace is in a/far country, India by name .. . Oh, the art of living in India, brothers... And so what if there is no plumbing and the streets are dirty, they have mastered the art of living . . .

The Pranksters had cleared all their debris out of the garage before the Calliope Company had moved back in, and they had piled it up in the vacant lot next door and then they headed off to Babbs's old place, the spread, in Santa Cruz. The Prankster debris lay there in the lot, a vast weird junkhead of bits and pieces of costumes and masks and pieces of wood with Day-Glo paint all over them and weird signs painted in Day-Glo on swaths of butcher paper and it lay there writhing like a maniac all day, and at night... it glowed ... A blot on the escutcheon of Harriet Street. The neighbors there, industrious Japanese and others, were disadvantaged souls, but they had their pride and they formed a delegation to City Hall to insist on keeping their neighborhood clean. The Mayor's Office saw it as an example of the kind of neighborhood pride that regenerates the City, for if they could instill the good burgher spirit in even so lowly a neighborhood as the Tenderloin ... So the Mayor announced utmost cooperation and it became a regular ceremony, with officials showing up along with the Sanitmen, and the TV crews. And the City pitched in, joining forces with the good neighbors of Harriet Street, in the ceremonial destruction of the weird junk heap—

Christ only knew what insane degenerate wino generations
had combined to nearly take over this poor forgotten street like jungle rot. The Day-Glo paint sputtered and sizzled to the end . ..

The Calliope Company held an Acid Test in the garage, and Cassady, wheeling around San Francisco in his latest car, heard about it somehow and showed up that night. He came in the doorway on the Harriet Street side, now marked 69 Harriet Street, after the humor of the times, and he was jerking and kicking at top speed to the unseen Joe Cuba ... He was sailing on speed, as the thirty or forty heads there could tell by the way his eyes jumped around, going tic tac tok tok tok tak toc tac tok tik tik tik tik tik tac tok tac tok tik tik tik tik tik toc tac toc tac toc tac—either that or he was amazed at this Acid Test through and through. There were no lights except the slowest and most fluid light projections, no noise except the most mellifluous hi-fi playing. ..
what the fock..
. sitar? sitar? sitar? ... The garage was scrubbed and chaste and pure with wall hangings of the most meticulous sort, India-print coverlets, delicate and intricate of pure vegetable macrobiotic dyes. A few crystals in the air picked up rays of light one by one like ... jewels... And all the good heads were stroked out most silently, propped up sitting against the walls or stretched out, each grooving on his own private inward thing, receptacles of the Buddha, the All-one invited guest, and the Buddha could have walked in at any moment and felt right at home, 485 B.C. or right now, the ...

.. . dead-ass little gook ... Cassady can't believe it... He is rapping a mile a minute, but nobody picks him up on it. They just stare at him through great amethyst eyes, full of tolerance and pity as his own eyes sprocket and his shoulders bob and weave...

"Hey ! Don't you want to
do
anything-—get it started, you understand—slide it around—"

They just stare at him, peaceful luminescent violet jewel children, smiling like a bunch of freaking nuns, full of peace and tolerance and pity ... as he turns around shaking his head and his shoulders and kicking and flailing disappearing out onto Harriet Street again.

OH CHRIST ANOTHER LITTLE BUD IN THE HEAVES AND GASSES

of the discovery pangs. Her eyes are opened up like morning-glories, her lips are wet and glistening, she smiles like an entranced nun, her teeth are beginning to sizzle ...

hold on to the thoracic box. She has her face right up in yours, everybody's, and she is saying, ecstatic with the discovery—

"I'm—I'm—I'm—I'm—
getting the picture!
We're—all
here
—right? We're all
here!

We're—
he-e-e-e-e-e-ere!"
and her hand pans around to take in the Fantasia in-the-beginning cosmos... which is, in fact, only a place known as The Barn, in Scotts Valley, ten miles from Santa Cruz. The Barn is Scotts Valley's first psychedelic nightspot, a great barn, truly, once converted into a theater and now into a psychedelic nightspot run by Leon Taboory, Scotts Valley's first, and last, to hear the grousing from the church down the way and the local constables and townfolk and the local paper, but ne'mind all that. To the little girl it's her first glimpse of Heaven itself, zonked as she is on LSD, her first capsule—

"I'm—getting the picture! We're all he-e-e-e-e-ere and we can do anything we want!"

—revealing all this to Doris Delay and Zonker, Doris, like a good old helpful hand, says, "That's right. We're all here and everything's all right and you're fine."

The little bud sinks into a folding chair beside Doris's and gives her a look. "I should be suspicious of you . .."

"The paranoia stage," Doris says to Zonker. I love to tell the story—

"... because I'm stoned."

"I know," says Doris. To tell the old, old story—love and glory now playing in your neighborhood for the first run, in Scotts Valley ...

About eighty of the local heads and hipfolk and jazz buffs, etc., in here listening to a jazz trio called The New Dimensions, Dave Molinari, Andrew Shushkoff, and a stocky little guy playing the bass. The little guy has on a sporty-type hat, wears it while he plays, his signature, you understand, and a pair of Cuban wrap-around sunglasses, although it is dark and appropriately nightclubby, except for some light projections, which makes it... psychedelic ... ah ummmmmm ... and he is kneading and slapping and flummoxing the bass like the creamy days of Siam Stewart.
The
New Dimensions
—now that's very funny, you know. Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters have to smile over that. Kesey and the Pranksters are off to one side of the Barn waiting for their turn to go on, setting up their instruments, the electric guitars and basses, Gretch's Hammond organ, Walker's drums, and the goddamnedest gleaming heap of wires, dials, amplifiers, speakers, headsets, mikes—testing, testing—The New Dimensions. .. Yeah. The trio is like a throwback to the late 1940s and the early 1950s when jazz was, like, the
final form,
funky and so fine. Molinari—