by Tom Wolfe
AT DAWN—A FREAKING COLD LIGHT ON THE MARSH GRASS AND the beach. A purple shadow all over the ocean like one huge stone-cold bruise. Suddenly the main door bursts open and it’s Owsley.
Owsley is lurching and groping and screaming
“Survival!”
It comes out like a steam whistle forced out of a constricted little opening
“Survival!”
Owsley, the Acid King, in his $600 head outfit, groping through the blue bruise dawn with his eyes like disaster craters, hissing
“Survival!”
The sight of Kesey apparently hits him with a surge of adrenaline, however, because he recovers his voice and starts in on Kesey:
“Kesey!”
The gist of it is that Kesey can’t do this again. This is the end. The Acid Tests are over. Kesey is a maniac and the Tests are maniacal and the roof is falling in. Taking LSD in a monster group like this gets too many forces going, too much amok energy, causing very freaky and destructive things to happen, and so on. It’s his acid and he says this is the end. None of them can figure out precisely what he is saying. Just that he has flipped and Kesey did it.
Little by little, they piece it together. He has had quite a trip for himself on his own LSD, has Owsley. It seems that Owsley took the LSD, a good dose, apparently, and the strobe light and the incredible layers of variable lag began rocking and rippling him and it threw him into a time warp, or parallel time dimension. The heads were always talking about such things. They could cite some serious thinkers, scientists even, such as C. D. Broad and his theory of a second temporal dimension—“events which are separated by a temporal gap in one dimension may be adjoined without any gap in the other, just as two points in the earth’s surface which differ in longitude may be identical in latitude”—or J. W. Dunne’s theory of serialism, or infinite regress—or Maurice Maeterlinck. The heads were always talking about such things and Owsley was primed for it. Then he got high. Then he got caught in the whirlpool, spun out of his gourd by all the special effects of the Pranksters’ variable lag devices—and the legend of the trip he took eventually was told as follows:
Back he went into the eighteenth century, Count Cagliostro! no longer plain Giuseppe Balsamo of Palermo, the Oakland of the Mediterranean, but the good Count, alchemist, seer, magician, master of precognition, forecaster of lotteries, alchemical creator, from out of base elements of … this diamond, greatest and most dazzling in history—here, Cardinal Louis de Rohan—but!—persecuted as a thaumaturge—thrust into this spinning black donjon, the Bastille, seeping with lurid water and carbonated moss and twitching dismembered rats, anatomized in the flashing light of the diamond they wouldn’t believe, a rat shank here, a rat metacarpal there, rat teeth, rat eyes, rat tails leaping and frozen in the air like city lights—that noise—a mob in the streets—either salvation—or—the Bastille begins to disintegrate into absorbent felt cubes—
—and so on. The world began fragmenting on him. It began coming totally to pieces, breaking up into component parts, and he wasn’t even back in the twentieth century yet, he was trapped—where?—Paris in 1786? … The whole world was coming to pieces molecule by molecule now and swimming like grease bubbles in a cup of coffee, disappearing into the intergalactic ooze and gasses all around—including his own body. He lost his skin, his skeleton, his pulmonary veins—sneaking out into the ooze like eels, they are, reeking phosphorus, his neural ganglia—unraveling like hot worms and wiggling down the galactic drain, his whole substance dissolving into gaseous nothingness until finally he was down to one cell. One human cell: his; that was all that was left of the entire known world, and if he lost control of that one cell, there would be nothing left. The world would be, like, over. He has to rebuild himself and the entire world from that one cell with a gigantic act of will—too overwhelming. Where does a man start? With California Route 1 so he can get out of here in his car? or will it turn out to be merely the filthy Rue Ventru with the Bastille mobs waiting? or start with the car? the differential? how do they make the bastards? or the beach? all those freaking grains of sand? the marsh grass? the tourist cabins? got to put every blue door back? or the ocean? or leave it dry? save making all those filthy blind bathosphere black animals down there … or the sky? how far does it go? the Big Dipper? the Ursa Minor? the Delphinium? suppose it is really infinite concentric spheres of crystal making infinite gelatinous submarinal vibrations? the Dead? the Pranksters? Kesey, Kesey’s out for good, Kesey and the bathosphere brutes—but with a superheroic effort he begins. But by the time he gets himself remade, it is too much. It is overwhelming. He makes his car. He makes the parking lot and the beginning of the road out. He’ll make the rest of it as he goes along. Freak it! Split! Leave the rest of the known world to its own devices, out in the gasses. He jumped into the car and gunned off; and smashed it into a tree. A tree he hadn’t even put back yet. But the crash somehow pops the whole world back. There it is; back from the fat-bubbling ooze. The car is smashed, but he has survived. Survived!
SURVIVAL!
and he plunges into the lodge to seek out the maniac Kesey. That sombitch has prolly popped back, too.
chapter XIX
The Trips Festival
OWSLEY’S FREAKOUT! OWSLEY BECAME OBSESSED WITH IT himself. Whenever the subject was the LSD experience—which it was most of the time around Owsley—he would recount his experience at Muir Beach. It seemed to horrify and intrigue him at the same time—such morbid but wonderful details. Everyone listens … can such things be? In any case, it sounded like Owsley thought Kesey was a demon and he was going to cut off their LSD supply.
Richard Alpert was also unhappy with the Acid Tests. Alpert, like Timothy Leary, had sacrificed his academic career as a psychologist for the sake of the psychedelic movement. It was hard enough to keep the straight multitudes from going hysterical over the subject of LSD even in the best of circumstances—let alone when it was used for manic screaming orgies in public places. Among the heads who leaned toward Leary and Alpert, it was hard to even freaking believe that the Pranksters were pulling a freaking prank like this. Any moment they were expecting them to explode into some sort of debacle, some sort of mass freakout, that the press could seize on and bury the psychedelic movement forever. The police watched them closely, but there was very little they could do about it, except for an occasional marijuana bust, since there was no law against LSD at the time. The Pranksters went on to hold Tests in Palo Alto, Portland, Oregon, two in San Francisco, four in and around Los Angeles—and three in Mexico—and no laws broken here, Lieutenant—only every law of God and man—In short, a goddamn outrage, and we’re powerless—
The Acid Tests were one of those outrages, one of those scandals, that create a new style or a new world view. Everyone clucks, fumes, grinds their teeth over the bad taste, the bad morals, the insolence, the vulgarity, the childishness, the lunacy, the cruelty, the irresponsibility, the fraudulence and, in fact, gets worked up into such a state of excitement, such an epitasis, such a slaver, they can’t turn it loose. It becomes a perfect obsession. And now they’ll show you how it should have been done.
The Acid Tests were the epoch of the psychedelic style and practically everything that has gone into it. I don’t mean merely that the Pranksters did it first but, rather, that it all came straight out of the Acid Tests in a direct line leading to the Trips Festival of January 1966. That brought the whole thing full out in the open. “Mixed media” entertainment—this came straight out of the Acid Tests’ combination of light and movie projections, strobes, tapes, rock ‘n’ roll, black light. “Acid rock”—the sound of the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper album and the high-vibrato electronic sounds of the Jefferson Airplane, the Mothers of Invention and many other groups—the mothers of it all were the Grateful Dead at the Acid Tests. The Dead were the audio counterpart of Roy Seburn’s light projections. Owsley was responsible for some of this, indirectly. Owsley had snapped back from his great Freakout and started pouring money
into the Grateful Dead and, thereby, the Tests. Maybe he figured the Tests were the wave of the future, whether he had freaked out or not. Maybe he thought “acid rock” was the sound of the future and he would become a kind of Brian Epstein for the Grateful Dead. I don’t know. In any case, he started buying the Dead equipment such as no rock ‘n’ roll band ever had before, the Beatles included, all manner of tuners, amplifiers, receivers, loudspeakers, microphones, cartridges, tapes, theater horns, booms, lights, turntables, instruments, mixers, muters, servile mesochroics, whatever was on the market. The sound went down so many microphones and hooked through so many mixers and variable lags and blew up in so many amplifiers and roiled around in so many speakers and fed back down so many microphones, it came on like a chemical refinery. There was something wholly new and deliriously weird in the Dead’s sound, and practically everything new in rock ‘n’ roll, rock jazz I have heard it called, came out of it.
Even details like psychedelic poster art, the quasi-art nouveau swirls of lettering, design and vibrating colors, electro-pastels and spectral Day-Glo, came out of the Acid Tests. Later other impresarios and performers would recreate the Prankster styles with a sophistication the Pranksters never dreamed of. Art is not eternal, boys. The posters became works of art in the accepted cultural tradition. Others would even play the Dead’s sound more successfully, commercially, anyway, than the Dead. Others would do the mixed-media thing until it was pure ambrosial candy for the brain with creamy filling every time. To which Kesey would say: “They know where it is, but they don’t know what it is.”
IT WAS ACTUALLY STEWART BRAND WHO THOUGHT UP THE great Trips Festival of January 1966. Brand and a San Francisco artist, Ramon Sender. Brand was 27 and an ex-biologist who had run across the Indian peyote cults in Arizona and New Mexico. Brand founded an organization called America Needs Indians. And then one day he took some LSD, right after an Explorer satellite went up to photograph the earth, and as the old synapses began rapping around inside his skull at 5,000 thoughts per second, he was struck with one of those questions that inflame men’s brains: Why Haven’t We Seen a Photograph of the Whole Earth Yet—and he drove across America from Berkeley, California, to 116th Street, New York City, selling buttons with that legend on them to Leftists, Rightists, Fundamentalists, Theosophists, malcontents, anyone with the health or stealth of paranoia or the put-on in their souls …
He and his friend Sender got the idea of pulling together all the new forms of expression that were kicking around in the hip world at that moment and having a Super Acid Test out in the open. Hire a hall and call in the multitudes. They found an impresario for the thing, Bill Graham, a New Yorker who had a lot of cachet in the hip world of San Francisco as a member of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, which used to get busted for putting on political dumb shows in the park, that kind of thing. The Trips Festival was set for Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights, January 21–23, at the Longshoremen’s Hall in San Francisco. The Trips Festival was billed as a big celebration that was going to simulate an LSD experience, minus the LSD, using light effects and music, mainly. The big night, Saturday night, was going to be called The Acid Test, featuring Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters.
Kesey and the Pranksters were primed for the Festival. Even Mountain Girl was on hand. She had wrestled the thing out in her mind and was back on the bus. The Pranksters had just held an Acid Test at the Fillmore Auditorium, a big ballroom in the middle of one of San Francisco’s big Negro slums, the Fillmore district. It was a wild night. Hundreds of heads and bohos from all over the Bay area turned out, zonked to the eyeballs. Paul Krassner was back in town, and he heard the word that was out on … The Scene. Everybody would be “dropping acid” about 5 or 6 P.M. to get ready for the Acid Test to begin that night at nine o’clock at the Fillmore Auditorium. Krassner arrives and—shit!—he sees:
… a ballroom surrealistically seething with a couple of thousand bodies stoned out of their everlovin’ bruces in crazy costumes and obscene makeup with a raucous rock’n’ roll band and stroboscopic lights and a thunder machine and balloons and heads and streamers and electronic equipment and the back of a guy’s coat proclaiming Please don’t believe in magic to a girl dancing with 4-inch eyelashes so that even the goddamn Pinkerton Guards were contact high.
Kesey asks him to take the microphone and contribute to a running commentary on the scene. “All I know,” he announces into the din, “is that if I were a cop and I came in here, I wouldn’t know where to begin.”
Well, the cops came in, and they didn’t know where to begin. They came in to close the Test down at 2 A.M. in keeping with a local ordinance and the whole thing was at its maddest height. Mountain Girl had hold of a microphone and was shrieking encouragement to the flailing dancers. Babbs was beaming spotlights at heads who were veering around bombed and asking them spectral questions over another microphone—Say there, what’s your trouble—have you l-o-s-t y-o-u-r mi-i-i-i-i-i-i-nd! Page Browning was grinning Zea-lot. The cops started shouting for them to close down but couldn’t make themselves heard and started pulling plugs out, microphone plugs, loudspeaker plugs, strobe plugs, amplifier plugs—but there were so many goddamn plugs, the most monumental snake pit of wires and plugs in history, and as fast as they would pull eight plugs out, Mountain Girl would put ten plugs back in, and finally Mountain Girl had a microphone up on the balcony somewhere and was screaming instructions to the dancers and the cops—louder music, more wine—and they couldn’t find her. Finally they ordered the Pranksters to start clearing the place out, which they did, except for Babbs, who sat down in a chair and wouldn’t budge. We said get busy, said the cops.
“I don’t have to,” said Babbs. “I’m the boss here. They’re working for me.”
Yeah?—and one of the cops grabs Babbs by a luminous vest he has on, succeeding only in separating Babbs from the vest. Babbs grinning maniacally but suddenly looming most large and fierce.
“You’re under arrest!”
“For what?”
“Resistin’.”
“Resistin’ what?”
“You gonna come quietly or do we have to take you?”
“Either way you want it,” says Babbs, grinning in the most frightening manner now, like the next step is eight karate chops to the gizzards and giblets. Suddenly it is a Mexican standoff—with both sides glaring but nobody swinging a punch yet. It is a grand hassle, of course. At the last minute a couple of Kesey’s lawyers arrive on the scene and cool everything down and talk the cops out of it and Babbs out of it and it all rumbles away in the valley as part of the Welthassle.
THE LAWYERS—YES. KESEY’S ORIGINAL MARIJUANA CHARGE, on the big arrest at La Honda, had been ricocheting around in the San Mateo County court system for nine months. Kesey’s lawyers were attacking the warrant that enabled the various constables to make the raid. The case had started with a Grand Jury hearing, which is of course a secret procedure. The County claimed it had all sorts of evidence to the effect that Kesey and the Pranksters had been giving dope to minors. Kesey’s lawyers were trying to get the whole case thrown out on the grounds that the original warrant for the raid was fraudulent. This didn’t work, and Kesey now had the choice of facing trial and a lot of lurid testimony or waiving open trial and letting a judge decide the case on the basis of the transcript of the Grand Jury proceedings. It was finally arranged that Kesey would let the judge do it. He would most likely be getting a light sentence. Even after that he could still appeal the case on the grounds that the warrant had been trumped up. This whole thing with the judge was the equivalent, in a roundabout way, of pleading no contest. On January 17, 1966, four days before the Trips Festival, the judge duly found Kesey guilty and sentenced him to six months on a work farm and three years on probation. This was about what his lawyers expected. It wasn’t so bad. The work farm was right near La Honda, ironically enough, and the prisoners did a lot of their work clearing out a stretch of forest back of Kesey’s place. There was something very funny about
that. Lime-light bowers for the straight multitudes. There was more irony. McMurphy, in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, started his adventures with a six-month stretch on a work farm. Kesey had been a McMurphy on the outside for four years. Now maybe he would be a McMurphy on the inside, for real. Maybe … anyway it was far from the goddamn end of the world. Then an uncool thing happened.
THE NIGHT OF JANUARY 19, TWO NIGHTS BEFORE THE TRIPS Festival, Kesey, Mountain Girl, and some of the Pranksters went over to Stewart Brand’s apartment, in North Beach, San Francisco, to make plans for the Trips Festival. Sometime after midnight Kesey and Mountain Girl went up on the roof on top of the building and spread out an old blue pad that had been in the back of somebody’s station wagon on the gravel up there and stretched out on the pad, grooving on the peaceful debris of North Beach. It’s nice and homey boho quaint, North Beach. Slums with a view. Out there the lights of the bay and the fishing boats and the honky-tonks and more lights climbing up the hills of San Francisco and nearer, all the asphalt squares of the other rooftops, squares and levels and ladders—grooving on the design, which is nice and peaceful and a little arty-looking, but that is North Beach. Mountain Girl all dark brown hair and big brown eyes, coming on ornery and fun-loving—It occurs to Kesey—rather like the eyes of an Irish setter pup just turning from awkward carefree frolic to the task of devotion.
Mountain Girl is being enthusiastic about the Trips Festival. “With that big new speaker,” she says, “we’ll be able to wire that place so you can hear a flea fart!”
Awkward carefree frolic to the task of—Kesey is feeling old. Once a stud so gorged with muscle tone—his face feels lopsided with the strain, of … the eternal hassling, the lawyering, the legally sanctioned lying on all sides, politicking, sucking up, getting lectured at, cranking on the old lopsided diplomatic smile …
