by Tom Wolfe
—vibrating poison madness and filling the universe with the teeny agony torn out of them. It dawns on Kesey: it is one being. They have all been transformed into one being.
—Mountain Girl grins and urges them on—its scream does not subside for a moment, during after or between numbers, the Beatles could be miming it for all it matters. But something else … does … matter … and Kesey sees it. One of the Beatles, John, George, Paul, dips his long electric guitar handle in one direction and the whole teeny horde ripples precisely along the line of energy he set off—and then in the other direction, precisely along that line. It causes them to grin, John and Paul and George and Ringo, rippling the poor huge freaked teeny beast this way and that—
Control—it is perfectly obvious—they have brought this whole mass of human beings to the point where they are one, out of their skulls, one psyche, and they have utter control over them—but they don’t know what in the hell to do with it, they haven’t the first idea, and they will lose it. In Kesey the vibration is an awful anticipation of the snap—
Ghhhhhwooooooooowwwww, thousands of teeny bodies hurtling toward the stage and a fence there and a solid line of cops, fighting to hurl the assault back, while the Beatles keep moving their chops and switching their hips around sunk like a dumb show under the universal scream. In that surge, just when you would have thought not another sound in the universe could break through, it starts—thwaaaack—thwaaaack—the sound of the folding chairs on the arena floor collapsing and smashing down on the floor, and the remains are down there amid the pink tentacles, crushed to a pulp, little bits and splinters that used to be folding chairs, debris being passed out from hand to hand traveling over the pink tentacles from one to the other like some hideously diseased lurching monster cockroaches. And then the girls start fainting, like suffocation, and getting tromped on, and they start handing out their bodies, cockroach chair debris and the bodies of little teeny freaks being shuttled out over the pitched sea like squashed lice picked off the beast, screaming and fainting and Ghhhhhwooooowwwwww again up against the cop fence while the Beatles cheese and mince at them in the dumb show, utterly helpless to ripple them or anything else now, with no control left—
CANCER—Kesey has only to look and it is perfectly obvious—all of them, the teeny freaks and the Beatles, are one creature, caught in a state of sheer poison mad cancer. The Beatles are the creature’s head. The teeny freaks are the body. But the head has lost control of the body and the body rebels and goes amok and that is what cancer is. The vibrations of it hit the Pranksters, in a clump, stoned out of their gourds, in sickening waves. Kesey—Babbs—they all feel it at once, and Norman.
—Mountain Girl looks very surprised. She wants to see the rest of it. But Kesey and Babbs have decided they should all leave—before the Monster Snap occurs, the big cancer wrap-up of the whole process.
—Wait a minute, says Mountain Girl.
But the Pranksters get up in a clump and a rustle of plumes and epaulets and Day-Glo, zonked out of their heads on acid, and all sorts of people start getting up—but like, concrete. The more headway they make toward the exits, the more it becomes a claustrophobia of pens, an endless series of pens. They head down long corridors, all concrete, and already hundreds are jammed in the corridors, all looking kind of raggy—because—They get the total vibration from them—everybody has the one same feeling: suppose this thing snaps now and there is panic and everybody makes a rush for it, the exit, but there is no exit, only concrete walls and concrete ceilings weighing down like a thousand tons and ramps—toward nothing—leading down—then up in a great clump of hump—and then down, outside, there is the sky, but it is black, it is nighttime by now and sick ochre floodlights, but they have merely made it to another pen, more Cyclone fences and barbed wire with frantic raggy people—all fleeing—milling around in it like rats, trying to get to the exit, which is a turnstile, an upright turnstile with bars, like an iron maiden, and you have to get inside of it, totally, one person at a time, with a frantic crush on both sides, and even then you have only made it to another pen, a parking lot, with more Cyclone fence and barbed wire and now teeny freaks and cars crushed in here, all trying to get out, seven and eight cars at a whack trying to nose through an opening big enough for one. Cages, cages, cages and no end to it. Even out there, beyond, where cars have escaped and they are in a line with their lights on—trapped by the hills, which are another great pen trapping the whole place in … in … The Pranksters all silent and numb with the apprehension of the Great Cancer Snap to come—
—Except that Mountain Girl says Wait a minute—
—and Zonker, with his huge euphoric Zonker grin on, fraternizing madly with all teeny freaks as they stream out, saying to all who listen: “The Beatles are going to Kesey’s when they leave here … the Beatles are going to Kesey’s …” and the word spreads among the crowd in the most delirious way—
Kesey plunges back in for survivors. See if there are any Pranksters trapped inside. He tells the rest to go to the bus and stay there, and he plunges in. The Pranksters touch the bus and their morale revives a bit. They rev up the amplifiers and the speakers and climb up on top in their crazy costumes and start idling over the drums and the electric guitars. The thousands of little raggy girls keep pouring out into the parking lot, still wound up like a motorcycle and no release and of course they see the bus and these strange Day-Glo people. One group of kids is protesting that the music business is rigged and they’re carrying placards and screaming and they figure the Pranksters support them—the Pranksters grin and wave back—everybody figures the strange Day-Glo people are for whatever they’re for. They start piling around the bus, these little teeny freaks, and start pelting it with jelly beans, the hard kind, the kind they brought to throw at the Beatles. The Pranksters sit on top of the bus with the jelly beans clattering off the side and the flaming little teeny freaks pressed around screaming—So this is what the Beatles feel, this mindless amok energy surging at them for—what?
At last Kesey returns with the last to be rescued, Mary Microgram, looking like a countryside after a long and fierce war, and Kesey says let’s haul ass out of here. Babbs starts the bus up and they pull out, bulling their way slowly out toward freedom.
Cancer! We saw it. It was there. Bad vibrations, say all. Endless cages. They all rock and sway, stoned on acid.
“Hell,” thinks Mountain Girl. “I have to come here with a bunch of old men who never saw a rock ‘n’ roll show before.”
ON THE WAY BACK THEY PUT THE BEATLES TAPE ON AGAIN, from Help! but it was no use. They were all too dispirited. Except for Mountain Girl and Zonker. Mountain Girl said she’d wanted to stay and see the rest of the show. Well—what the hell. Zonker was smiling about the Beatles coming. Well—that was what he had told the whole world anyway. And where the hell else would they go from there? In fact, the current fantasy—the imminent arrival of the Beatles—had hardly crossed anybody’s mind for the last hour, not even Kesey’s. Get the hell out of there, that was the main thing. Where were the Beatles? Who the hell knew. The little vinyl dolls had probably cheesed and minced off into a time warp … . In any case, it wasn’t very hulking likely they were coming to La Honda.
Finally the bus comes grinding around the last curve round the mountain, up to Kesey’s place, and the bus noses across the bridge and the headlights hit the yard—and the sight is gruesome and comical at the same time. It is like a super version of the nightmare of the man who just wants to go home and go to bed. The Pranksters have guests. In fact, they have three or four hundred guests. They are all jammed into the big yard between the main house and the backhouse, with big bitter lollipop eyes. It’s like every head, freak, boho, and weirdo in the West has assembled in one spot, the first freakout, with a couple of hundred teeny freaks thrown in for good measure. Half of them are hunkered down with their big lollipop eyes turned up like somebody spit them up against the house and they slid down to the ground like slugs. Natura
lly they all came for the big beano with the Beatles. The party. Zonker did his work in the highest Prankster tradition. The sign still hangs on the gate:
THE MERRY PRANKSTERS WELCOME THE BEATLES
Kesey is not in the mood for a goddamned thing and heads into the house. The whole head-freak-boho-slug mob stares at him, all these lollipop eyes, as if he is going to produce the Beatles from out of a sleeve. Then they start grumbling, like a bunch of prisoners who haven’t been fed but don’t know whether this is the time for the slave revolt or not. It is a debacle, except that it is so damned comical. The look on their faces.
That, and the appearance of Owsley.
A COCKY LITTLE GUY, SHORT, WITH DARK HAIR, DRESSED LIKE an acid head, the usual boho gear, but with a strange wound-up nasal voice, like a head with the instincts of a roller-skating rink promoter—this little character materializes in front of Kesey from out of the boho-slub multitudes and announces:
“I’m Owsley.”
Kesey doesn’t say Hi, I’m Kesey. He just looks at him, as if to say, all right, you’re Owsley and you’re here—and then what?
Owsley looks stunned—I’m Owsley. In fact, Kesey never heard of him. It was like, if Owsley suddenly found himself in a place where nobody ever heard of him, he didn’t know what to do. He and Kesey are just standing there trading eyeballs until finally Owsley produces a little bag he has and opens it and it is full of capsules of acid. He’s Owsley, the greatest LSD manufacturer in the world, which turns out to be just about right, the Sandoz Chemical Corporation included.
Mountain Girl looks and just smiles. Everything gets funnier and funnier on the Beatles patrol! He’s got his little bag of acid. Mountain Girl figures him for a wiseacre right away. Kesey looks at the bagful of acid. One thing the little wiseacre’s got is acid.
The world’s greatest acid manufacturer, bar none, standing out in the dark in the middle of nowhere amid the boho-slug multitudes under the shadowy redwoods.
By and by they had most of the boho-slubs off the place and sliding up the highway in the dark looking for christ knows what, seeing as how the Beatles never made it. Kesey and Owsley and the Pranksters sat down around a fire out by the big stump. And who the hell shows up but the Mad Chemist. He and Owsley start sniffing and eyeing each other. It’s like the slick sharp young neurological doctor genius from out of the Mayo Clinic face to face with the old blowsy homey country doctor—on the most puzzling and difficult case in the history of medicine. Owsley and the Mad Chemist start arguing over drugs. It’s like a debate. All of the Pranksters, even Kesey, keep out of it and the two of them start hammering away. Let the little wiseacre have it, Mad Chemist, Mountain Girl keeps thinking and most of the Pranksters feel the same way. But Owsley, the little wiseacre, is tearing him up. Owsley is young and sharp and quick and the Mad Chemist—the Mad Chemist is an old man and he has taken too much dope. He’s loose in the head. He tries to argue and his brains all run together like goo. Owsley, the Pranksters figure—well, maybe he never even took acid himself. Or maybe he took it once. It is just something they sense. And the poor old Mad Chemist, he has taken so much dope—caressing his guns and hooking down dope—he is loose in the head, and Owsley just tears him up. The Mad Chemist is getting crushed. The Mad Chemist never came around again but once or twice, it was all so humiliating. So the Pranksters had this little wiseacre Owsley on their hands whether they liked it or not. But he did make righteous acid and he had money. Between the two of them, Owsley and the Pranksters, they were about to put LSD all over the face of the globe.
Little by little, Owsley’s history seeped out. He was 30 years old, although he looked younger, and he had a huge sonorous name: Augustus Owsley Stanley III. His grandfather was a United States Senator from Kentucky. Owsley apparently had had a somewhat hungup time as a boy, going from prep school to prep school and then to a public high school, dropping out of that, but getting into the University of Virginia School of Engineering, apparently because of his flair for sciences, then dropping out of that. He finally wound up enrolling in the University of California, in Berkley, where he hooked up with a hip, good-looking chemistry major named Melissa. They dropped out of the University and Owsley set up his first acid factory at 1647 Virginia Street, Berkeley. He was doing a huge business when he got raided on February 21, 1965. He got off, however, because there was no law against making, taking, or having LSD in California until October 1966. He moved his operation to Los Angeles, 2205 Lafler Road, called himself the Baer Research Group, and paid out $20,000 in $100 bills to the Cycle Chemical Corporation for 500 grams of lysergic acid monohydrate, the basic material in LSD, which he could convert into 1.5 million doses of LSD at from $1 to $2 apiece wholesale. He bought another 300 grams from International Chemical and Nuclear Corporation. His first big shipment arrived March 30, 1965.
He had a flair, this Owsley. By and by he had turned out several million doses of LSD, in capsules and tablets. They had various whimsical emblems on them, to indicate the strength. The most famous, among the heads, were the “Owsley blues”—with a picture of Batman on them, 500 micrograms worth of Superhero inside your skull. The heads rapped over Owsley blues like old juice heads drawling over that famous onetime brand from Owsley’s Virginia home territory, Fairfax County Bourbon, bottled in bond. Owsley makes righteous acid, said the heads. Personally he wasn’t winning any popularity contests with the heads or the cops, either. He is, like, arrogant; he is a wiseacre; but the arrogant little wiseacre makes righteous acid.
In fact, Owsley’s acid was famous internationally. When the acid scene spread to England in late 1966 and 1967, the hippest intelligence one could pass around was that one was in possession of “Owsley acid.” In the acid world, this was bottled-in-bond; certified; guaranteed; and high status. It was in this head world that the … Beatles first took LSD. Now, just to get ahead of the story a bit—after Owsley hooked up with Kesey and the Pranksters, he began a musical group called the Grateful Dead. Through the Dead’s experience with the Pranksters was born the sound known as “acid rock.” And it was that sound that the Beatles picked up on, after they started taking acid, to do a famous series of acid-rock record albums, Revolver, Rubber Soul, and Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts’ Club Band. Early in 1967 the Beatles got a fabulous idea. They got hold of a huge school bus and piled into it with thirty-nine friends and drove and wove across the British countryside, zonked out of their gourds. They were going to … make a movie. Not an ordinary movie, but a totally spontaneous movie, using hand-held cameras, shooting the experience as it happened—off the top of the head!—cavorting, rapping on, soaring in the moment, visionary chaos—a daydream! a black art! a chaos! They finished up with miles and miles of film, a monster, a veritable morass of it, all shaky and out of focus—blissful Zonk!—which they saw as a total breakthrough in terms of expression but also as a commercial display—shown on British TV it was—that might be appreciated even outside the esoteric world of the heads—
THE MOVIE
—called Magical Mystery Tour. And … the great banner rippled on the Prankster gate in the nighttime in ripples and intergalactic billows of great howling owsley electro-mad-chemical synchronicity …
THE MERRY PRANKSTERS
WELCOME THE BEATLES
chapter XVI
The Frozen Jug Band
SYNCHRONICITY SPOKEN HERE!
—and the Pranksters sit around Kesey’s living room at night, grooving on many strange events. Like the day of the great Blackout in New York City, the great power failure that knocked out subways, elevators, lights, air conditioners, TVs, clocks, buildings and the rest of the hulks in the great cancer capital of the East. The Pranksters grooved over the cataclysm and grokked it. Such consternation in the cancer capital! A huge surge of electricity had suddenly rolled through the wires and freaking blown everything. The utility companies didn’t know what had caused this surge, but bygod they had experts working on it and they would figure it out and such a surge would
never occur again.
A surge, Mahavira?—
Meanwhile, there was one story in the newspapers that the Pranksters grooved on most truly. It seems that some kid had been playing hooky from school in New York that day and had gone off to the movies finally and come out of the movie house about 5:15 P.M. and started walking home, feeling guilty already, and he picked up a stick out of the gutter and he started whacking parking meters with it. When he got to the corner, he whacked the big utility pole there and
IN THAT VERY MOMENT
all the lights in New York went out
NOW
and the kid ran home in the dark, crying, confessing all to his mother—I did it, I did it, but I didn’t mean to—
And Kesey and the Pranksters did groove on that. The kid was right, that was the funny part. Or at least as right as the utility companies. For no doubt there was a great surge, friends, and it came through that kid just like it came through everything and every being that existed in that moment. Just as Severn Darden blew out the candles on his birthday cake in that very moment —and they poked through every Con Ed transformer in the system and they never did find the cause:
