The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

by Tom Wolfe

  “Wind, wind send me not this place, though, onward …”

  More! More! Louder music, more wine!

  “ … Ocean, ocean, ocean, I’ll beat you in the end, I’ll break you this time. I’ll go through with my heels your hungry ribs …”

  On and on it went, like a running account of the mad-drive-to-be up the coast, looking for his favorite cliff, to jump off of, presumably, the whole scene bubbling up in his brain and Mountain Girl’s on the ratty rug in Babbs’s living room. Hell, let’s throw in some acid—they’ll believe the damn ninny dope fiend would take the dread LSD and break his ass for good—and hell, slam the freaking vehicle into a tree, bleed verisimilitude all over, the California littoral:

  “ … I’ve lost the ocean again. Beautiful. I drive hundreds of miles looking for my particular cliff, get so trapped behind acid I can’t find the ocean, end up slamming into a redwood …”

  Beautiful. Ready, Ron? He gets into Boise’s truck and they head off south for San Diego, the Mexican border, Tijuana and the land of all competent Outlaws.

  chapter XX

  The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

  WHAT HAPPENED TO THE PRANKSTERS AFTER KESEY’S flight to Mexico was so much like what happened to the League after Leo fled in Hermann Hesse’s book The Journey to the East—well, it was freaking weird, this particular synch … exactly … the Pranksters! and the great bus trip of 1964! their whole movie. No; it went on. Hesse’s fantasy coincided with theirs all the way. It went on—all the way to this weird divide—

  The leader of the League in The Journey to the East was named Leo. He was never openly known as the leader: like Kesey, he was the “non-navigator” of the brotherhood. And Leo suddenly left “in the middle of the dangerous gorge of Morbio Inferiore,” just when the League was deepest into its Journey to the East, in the critical phase of a trip that was being alternately denounced and wondered at. “From that time, certainty and unity no longer existed in our community, although the great idea still kept us together. How well I remember those first disputes! They were something so new and unheard-of in our hitherto perfectly united League. They were conducted with respect and politeness—at least in the beginning. At first they led neither to fierce conflicts nor personal reproaches or insults—at first we were still an inseparable, united brotherhood throughout the world …” Things got more and more bitter, and the narrator, “H.,” left after the Morbio Inferiore. And the narrator, Hartweg, left after …

  Very weird, the synch!

  With Kesey gone, Babbs became the leader. There was no meeting, no vote, not even a parting word from Kesey. Babbs becomes the leader—the … group mind knew that at once, without a second thought. They packed up everything at La Honda and took it up to Oregon, to Kesey’s parents’ home. The Archives they stashed at the Spread and, later, up at Chuck’s house in Oregon. This and that they bequeathed to other heads, like the great round table with the Hell’s Angels’ carvings all over it. They gave that to a new psychedelic group, the Anonymous Artists of America, at a place called Rancho Diablo up at Skylonda. Whatever they could use for the Acid Tests they took along.

  Babbs moved the Acid Test scene to Los Angeles and the bus lumbered on down there. They had hardly gotten there before the soft rumblings started—“certainty and unity no longer existed in our community, although the great idea still kept us together. How well I remember those first disputes!” Babbs gives too many orders—Kesey, the non-navigator, merely expressed a will and merely waited for it to move forward in the Group Mind. Babbs runs this like the Army … like the Boy Scouts … Babbs’s put-ons suddenly seemed pure sarcasm. His cryptic comments, his candor, seemed cruel. Some of the Pranksters even took to sympathizing with poor wretches like Pancho Pillow; the universally put-down acid-rapping fool, Pancho.

  Pancho, ever in the throes of self-laceration, was still desperate to be on the bus. The poor bastard spent his last earthly dime and traveled from San Francisco to Los Angeles and caught up with the bus in Lemon Grove one day. Pancho came ambling up with a huge grin of brotherhood and started to climb up the steps and Babbs met him at the door of the bus.

  “I don’t think anybody wants you here,” said Babbs.

  “What do you mean?” says Pancho. “Can’t I come on the bus?”

  “There’s nobody on the bus who wants you on the bus.”

  Pancho’s grin is wiped off, of course, and his eyes start batting around like pinballs, trying to make out who is inside the bus—you all know me, I’m Pancho!

  “Well … I know I get on some people’s nerves,” says Pancho, “but I came all the way here to be with you guys, and I spent all my money getting here—”

  “We don’t care,” says somebody else’s voice, on the bus.

  “Look,” says Pancho, “I’ll shut up, I’ll do whatever you want. I just want to help with the Tests. I’ll do anything—”

  “We don’t care.” Somebody else’s voice, on the bus.

  “—odd jobs, run errands, there must be a thousand things—”

  “We don’t care.”

  Pancho stands there, speechless, his face bursts with red.

  “See,” says Babbs, “it’s like I said. I don’t think there’s anybody who wants you on here.”

  Numb Pancho backs down off the steps and trudges off in Lemon Grove.

  Well, they had a good laugh over that. The freaking Pancho Pillow! A bad-trip freak if there ever was one! A breaker of balls extraordinaire! The human bummer: ::::: but it was a laugh with a metallic aftertaste, this joke on Pancho ::::::

  Babbs had gotten hold of an old mansion in L.A., called the Sans Souci, a great incredible moldering old place with a dome and a stone balustrade, all crumbling and moldering, but with style. When the owner found a bunch of beatniks in there, he freaked, but that was later. Anyway, one day they were all in there and one Prankster said a very unPrankster thing. He spoke up and said:

  “I want to voice this idea: I can’t stand Margie and I don’t want her around.”

  Unfreakingbelievable. He was talking about Marge the Barge. So then all eyes went to Babbs, who was now thrust into the Kesey role of resolving all. Babbs turns to Marge the Barge and says:

  “What do you think about that?”

  Marge says: “I think that’s ridiculous,” and with such quiet flat conviction that nobody else says anything.

  A small moment—but one more moment in the gathering schism, the Babbs loyalists versus the had-enough-of-Babbs. Later they would realize they were in many cases merely blaming Babbs for the mysterious sense of loss in their venture. They were casting about for an explanation, and Babbs was It. What they had lost of course, was the magical cement of Kesey’s charisma. “It seemed that the more certain his loss became, the more indispensable he seemed; without Leo, his handsome face, his good humor and his songs, without his enthusiasm for our great undertaking, the undertaking itself seemed in some mysterious way to lose meaning.”

  IN FACT, BABBS CARRIED THE ACID TESTS INTO LOS ANGELES with an amazing determination. The Pranksters were now out of their home territory, the San Francisco area, but they performed with an efficiency they never knew they had before. It was as if they were all picking up on Babbs’s exhortation of months ago: “We’ve got to learn how to function on acid.” They were soaring out of their gourds themselves, but they were pulling off Acid Tests that seemed like they were orchestrated.

  Babbs was in great form, as I say, and he had also hooked up with a remarkable head named Hugh Romney, a poet, actor, and comedian who had gone the whole route, starting back in the Beat Generation days and was now into the LSD thing and had “discovered the Management,” as he put it, “and when you discover the Management there’s nothing to do but go to work for it.” So Romney and his friend Bonnie Jean were now on the bus, and they all set out to—nothing more, nothing less—turn on Los Angeles to the Management … Yesss … The first Test was at Paul Sawyer’s church in Northridge, just out from Los Angeles in the Sa
n Fernando Valley … Sawyer has never lost his willingness to experiment and is on the bus himself. And if the Sport Shirts could see these … new experimental rites … including music, dance, and sacrifice—the sacrifice?—well … it was not strictly an Acid Test, but a “happening,” which had become a harmless and un-loaded word in Cultural circles, even in Sawyer’s Valley Unitarian-Universalist Church. A marvelous modern building shaped like a huge Bermuda onion, it was, forming one great towering … Dome, with fantastic acoustics like it had been created for the current fantasy itself. So the Pranksters moved in and wired and wound up the place, and hundreds arrived for the “happening,” partaking of Prankster magic and pineapple chili, which was a concoction the Pranksters served, on the vile side in taste, but pineapple chili nonetheless, a wacky thought in itself. And Cassady had a microphone and started rapping, and Romney had a microphone and started rapping, and he was great, and Babbs and Paul Foster, flying with the God Rotor and not stuttering at all … People dancing in the most ecstatic way and getting so far into the thing, the straight multitudes even, that even they took microphones, and suddenly there was no longer any separation between the entertainers and the entertained at all, none of that well-look-at-you-startled-squares condescension of the ordinary happening. Hundreds were swept up in an experience, which built up like a dream typhoon, peace on the smooth liquid centrifugal whirling edge. In short, everybody in The Movie, on the bus, and it was beautiful … They were like … on! the Pranksters—now primed to draw the hundreds, the thousands, the millions into the new experience, and in the days ahead they came rushing in :::::

  ::::: Clair Brush, for one. Yes. She was a girl in her twenties, a pretty redhead, who worked for Art Kunkin, the editor of the hip circuit weekly, the Los Angeles Free Press. Her old friend Doc Stanley had called her up before the Test at Sawyer’s church and said, Clair, there is going to be a happening in a Unitarian church in the Valley that you really ought to pick up on, and so forth … But one of the things Clair did at the Free Press was compile a calendar of events for the hip circuit and this was the big season of “happenings” and she had been through all that a dozen times, and each one was always billed as the wave of the future, and was inevitably a drag. So she didn’t go. Ummmm ::::: However :::::

  ::::: In hearing about it from people who did attend, though, she decided to go to the next one :::::

  ::::: which was set for Watts, on Lincoln’s Birthday, February 12, 1966. Watts! the very Watts where hardly five months before the freaking revolution of the blacks had broken out, the symbol of all that was catastrophic and hopeless in American life, and what is this strange space ship now approaching Watts, the very Youth Opportunities center itself—Youth Opportunities!—for the trip beyond catastrophe :::::

  ::::: “I think what decided me”—Clair is recalling it for me—“was someone’s description of Art Kunkin’s spontaneous participation and enjoyment of the evening in the church. Most of the people there were given to improvisation as required, but Arthur and I share a reserve in crowds.

  “Anyway. The Watts site—it was actually Compton, an incorporated city on the fringe of Watts—was chosen for reasons unknown to me. The best guesses I’ve heard have to do with the politics of taking such a party into the recently stricken neighborhood, as a friendship-thing; also a humorous—ironical?—site for such carryings-on.

  “The building was a warehouse, part of a Youth Opportunities center, but still vacant. They—the Center people—were using or were going to use the building as a workshop for manual trades, possibly automotive? Job-retraining, etc. It was legally leased for 24 or 48 hours by Kesey’s group, with money, and the caretaker of the center was present at all times during the Acid Test.

  “Announcements were made in the usual way, Free Press and KPFK calendar, etc., and around 200 people were in attendance. When I arrived, nothing had started … people were clustered in small groups, sitting on mats and blankets around the walls. The room, the main room, was huge … my conception of feet, in yards and such, is bad, but I’d guess maybe 50 by 25. There was a smaller room to the east and bathroom to the west, and the large room had a corridor running along the south wall which had open windows waist-high without glass … through which the scene inside could be observed.

  “I had driven my car down, giving two people a ride, but I left them immediately … went to join some friends who had some rosé wine and were sitting on a pad on the floor. As I said, none of the effects had started … but shortly there was an announcement (I think by Neal Cassady, but I didn’t know him then) that the evening would begin. Films were projected on the south wall, with a commentary … films of Furthur, the bus, the people in the bus … the commentary was a rather dull travelogue and the film seemed fairly uninspired and confused.

  “Remember now, I’m a novice. I’d never even been ‘high’ on ‘pot’ or any kind of pill or anything … my strongest experience had been with alcohol. I knew a few ‘heads’ but didn’t think much of the whole thing … had tried pot a few times and nothing impressed me, except for the unpleasant taste.

  “This may explain why a lot of people were digging the film, laughing, and also why a lot of people were there … I’m sure that I was one of a minority who had no idea what to expect. The word must have been passed, but didn’t get to me. Also I think a lot of those in attendance had heard of Kesey’s things and were very aware of what was being done. Not old unworldly Clair. Story of my life.

  “The film continued, some slides were shown of flowers and patterns, this and that … then a large trash can, plastic, was carried to the middle of the room, and all were invited to help themselves to the Kool-Aid it contained. There was no big rush to the refreshment stand … people wandered up, it was being served in paper cups, and since Kool-Aid is a staple in the homes of Del Close and Hugh Romney and other friends of mine, I thought it quite a natural thing to serve … had a cup, had another, wandered and talked for a while, had another …”

  … Ironically, for Clair, anyway, it was Romney’s inspiration to serve Electric Kool-Aid, as he called it. They had all … yes … laced it good and heavy with LSD. It was a prank, partly, but mainly it was the natural culmination of the Acid Tests. It was a gesture, it was sheer generosity giving all this acid away, it was truly turning on the world, inviting all in to share the Pranksters’ ecstasy of the All-one … all become divine vessels in unison, and it is all there in Kool-Aid and a paper cup. Cassady immediately drank about a gallon of it. Actually there were two cans. Romney took the microphone and said, “This one over here is for the little folk and this one over here is for the big folk. This one over here is for the kittens and this one over here is for the tigers,” and so forth and so on. As far as he was concerned, he was doing everything but putting a sign on the loaded batch saying LSD. Romney was so thoroughly into the pudding himself it never occurred to him that a few simpler souls might have wandered into this unlikely way station in Watts and simply not know … or think that all his veiled instructions probably referred to gin, like the two crystal bowls of punch at either end of the long white table at a wedding reception … or just not hear, like Clair Brush—

  “Severn Darden was there, and Del Close, of course, and I knew them from the Second City in Chicago. Severn and I were standing under a strobe light (first time I’d seen one, and they are kicky) doing an improvisation … he was a jealous husband, I an unfaithful wife, something simple and funny. He was choking me and throwing me around (gently, of course) and suddenly I began to laugh … and laugh … and the laugh was more primitive, more gut-tearing, than anything I had ever known. It came from somewhere so deep inside that I had never felt it before … and it continued … and it was uncontrollable … and wonderful. Something snapped me back and I realized that there was nothing funny … nothing to laugh about … what had I been laughing at?

  “I looked around and people’s faces were distorted … lights were flashing everywhere … the screen (sheets) at the end of
the room had three or four different films on it at once, and the strobe light was flashing faster than it had been … the band, the Grateful Dead, was playing but I couldn’t hear the music … people were dancing … someone came up to me and I shut my eyes and with a machine he projected images on the back of my eyelids (I really think this happened … I asked and there was such a machine) … and nothing was in perspective, nothing had any touch of normalcy or reality … I was afraid, because I honestly thought that it was all in my mind, and that I had finally flipped out.

  “I sought a person I trusted, stopping and asking people what was happening … mostly they laughed, not believing that I didn’t know. I found a man I knew not very well but with whom I felt simpatico from the first time we met. I asked him what was happening, and if it was all me, and he laughed and held me very close and told me that the Kool-Aid had been ‘spiked’ and that I was just beginning my first LSD experience … and not to be afraid, but to neither accept nor reject … to always keep open, not to struggle or try to make it stop. He held me for a long time and we grew closer than two people can be … our bones merged, our skin was one skin, there was no place where we could separate, where he stopped and I began. This closeness is impossible to describe in any but melodramatic terms … still, I did feel that we had merged and become one in the true sense, that there was nothing that could separate us, and that it had meaning beyond anything that had ever been. (Note, a year and two months later … three months … I later read about ‘imprint’ and that it was possible that we would continue to be meaningful to each other no matter what circumstances … I think this is true … the person in question remains very special in my life, and I in his, though we have no contact and see each other infrequently … we share something that will last. Oh hell! There’s no way to talk about that without sounding goopy.)

  “I wasn’t afraid any more and started to look around. The setting for the above scene had been the smaller room which was illuminated only by black light, which turns people into beautiful color and texture. I saw about ten people sitting directly under the black light, which was back-draped by a white (luminescent lavender, then) sheet, painting on disembodied mannequins with fluorescent paint … and on each other, their clothes, etc. I stood under the light and drops of paint fell on my foot and sandal, and it was exquisite. I returned to this light frequently … it was peaceful and beautiful beyond description. My skin had depth and texture under the light … a velvety purple. I remember wishing it could be that color always. (I still do.)