The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

by Tom Wolfe

  “—hear a flea fart!”

  “Hasn’t happened yet,” says Kesey.

  “With this many days to set it up? Always before we were in the hall that night and maybe set up before we finished in the morning.”

  And so forth and so on—Kesey and Mountain Girl lie on their stomachs with their chins in their hands, gazing down four stories to the alley below and occasionally scraping gravel off the rooftop and tossing it down …

  … yes … ummm … at 1:53 A.M. the cops of the 19th Precinct got a call from a woman at 18 Margrave Place saying some drunken tormentors or something were throwing rocks at her window. Shortly after 2 A.M. a police car pulls into the alley. So Kesey and Mountain Girl groove on that. Yup, a police car right down below, police car come here. A red light on a hillside drive about 50 yards away blinks. A red light blinks and a police car tools in the alley. Ah, always the synch, friends. The cops are coming in this building. Wonder on earth what for. Do I learn anything? Or once again lie loaded and disbelieving as two cops climb five stories to drag me to the cooler … . Oh, the logic of the groove and the synch. Kesey and Mountain Girl see it all at once, now, so clearly. It is so very obvious that it fascinates. They see it all, grok it all—Scram, split, run, flee, hide, vanish, disintegrate—the red alert is so very clear, it blinks and blinks, red, nothing, red, nothing, red, nothing, red, nothing, and yet move? and miss it all? turning so slow in the interferrometric synch? It is like a weird time he was in Olympic wrestling eliminations, in 1960, in the San Francisco Olympic Club, first round against a hulking stud, and he took a couple of vitamins before the fray, revved up, revved up, not doped, oh mom&dad&buddy&sis&dear-but-square-ones, all Olympian athletes are doped, force-fed pill-heads, see them lead them, all gorged with glistening muscle veins and crewcut and led to the training table and by every plate a lineup of capsules like the wineglasses at the gourmet dinner, capsules for iron, capsules for calcium, capsules to make you squeeze your colon and flex your heart, capsules of B12 mighty as pure amphetamine turn your blood vessels into black snakes, capsules to make you long and brute in the teeth, make you clean & jerk in the arms, mad ape in the neck, sharp in the tusk, panther in the solar plexus lineup of crewcut stud bulls concocted out of chemicals force-fed every day at every plate—revved up, revved up, revved up waiting for the referee to snap his hand up in mid-air to start the match, snap … and it is so very fascinating … he is like a motor running at top speed with the clutch in … it is intriguing, not intimidating, the way this great stud grabs him above the knee with his huge hand and starts pulling down—Kesey is two people, revved up here on the mat and revved up here in the ethers like an astral body, watching—interesting! —no man could be as strong as this guy here and execute a takedown by pulling downward on the knee—no danger, friends, just fascination—and so the guy won a trophy for the fastest pin of the tourney, while the motor revved in synch with a different bummer—

  —fascinating!—so—

  —out the scroffy arty rooftop door come two cops, Officers Fred Pardella and Thomas L. O’Donnell of the 19th Precinct, by designation—

  What happened next became the subject of two trials in San Francisco, later, many fugitive months later, both ending in hung juries, the second one 11 to 1 against Kesey. According to Officers Pardella and O’Donnell, they found the suspects Kesey and the Adams girl and a plastic bag containing a quantity of brownish vegetation. Whereupon Officer O’Donnell sought to collect the evidence, and Kesey wrestled him for it, throwing the bag onto an adjoining arty rectangle rooftop and very nearly Pardella along with it, whereupon Officer O’Donnell drew his gun and brought both Kesey and the girl into custody. The plastic bag, retrieved, contained 3.54 grams of marijuana.

  THIS WAS A BEAUTIFUL MESS AND NO TWO WAYS ABOUT IT. A second offense for possession of marijuana carried an automatic five-year sentence with no possibility of parole. At the very least he stood to get the full three-year sentence in San Mateo County now, as one of the judge’s conditions had been that he no longer associate with the Pranksters. Mountain Girl was ready to take the whole rap herself. “We were just tying it off,” she told the press. “He wasn’t supposed to hang around with any of us wild, giddy people any more. This was the last time we were gonna see him.” Well … she tried. Kesey’s probation officer in San Mateo County advised him for godsake stay away from the Trips Festival or he was in for it, but the whole thing was miles beyond in-for-it, out towards old Edge City, in fact.

  Kesey left Municipal Court in San Francisco on January 20 with Mountain Girl and Stewart Brand and onto the whole bus full of Pranksters to roll through San Francisco advertising the Trips Festival. They got out at Union Square. Kesey wore a pair of white Levi’s with the backsides emblazoned with HOT on the left side and COLD on the right and TIBET in the middle.—and a pair of sky-blue boots. They all played Ron Boisie’s Thunder Machine for loon vibrations in Union Square in the fibrillating heart of San Francisco.

  If nothing else, Kesey’s second arrest was great publicity for the Trips Festival. It was all over San Francisco newspapers. In the hip, intellectual, and even social worlds of San Francisco, the Trips Festival notion was spreading like a fever. The dread drug LSD. Acid heads. An LSD experience without the LSD, it was being billed as—moreover, people actually believed it. But mainly the idea of a new life style was making itself felt. Do you suppose this is the—new wave … ?

  And you buy y’r ticket, f’r chrissake—an absurd thought to Norman Hartweg—and we’ve got a promoter—all absurd, but the thousands pour into the Longshoremen’s Hall for the Trips Festival, thousands even the first night, which was mostly Indian night, a weird thing put on by Brand’s America Needs Indians, but now on Saturday evening the huge crush hits for the Acid Test. Norman is absolutely zonked on acid—and look at the freaks running in here. Norman is not the only one. “An LSD experience without LSD”—that was a laugh. In fact, the heads are pouring in by the hundreds, bombed out of their gourds, hundreds of heads coming out into the absolute open for the first time. It is like the time the Pranksters went to the Beatles concert in full costume, looking so bizarre and so totally smashed that no one could believe they were. Nobody would risk it in public like this. Well, the kids are just having an LSD experience without LSD, that’s all, and this is what it looks like. A hulking crazed whirlpool. That’s nice. Lights and movies sweeping around the hall; five movie projectors going and God knows how many light machines, interferrometrics, the intergalactic science-fiction seas all over the walls, loudspeakers studding the hall all the way around like flaming chandeliers, strobes exploding, black lights with Day-Glo objects under them and Day-Glo paint to play with, street lights at every entrance flashing red and yellow, two bands, the Grateful Dead and Big Brother and the Holding Company and a troop of weird girls in leotards leaping around the edges blowing dog whistles—and the Pranksters. Paul Foster has wrapped black friction tape all around his shoes and up over his ankles and swaddled his legs and hips and torso in it up to his rib cage, where begins a white shirt and then white bandaging all over his face and skull and just a slit for his eyes, over which he wears dark glasses. 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 la
st 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: