The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test Read online

  “No wonder you’re so nigger-heavy in California.”

  FORNIA-FORNIA-FORNIA-FORNIA-FORNIA-FORNIA-FORNIA-FORNIA as it picked up inside the bus in variable lag, and that breaks everybody up.

  That was when it was good … grinding on through Alabama, and then suddenly, to Sandy, Kesey is old and haggard and the organizer. Sandy can see him descending the ladder down from the roof of the bus and glowering at him, and he knows—intersubjectivity! —that Kesey is thinking. You’re too detached, Sandy, you’re not out front, you may be sitting right here grinding and roaring through Alabama but you’re … off the bus … And he approaches Sandy, hunched over under the low ceiling of the bus, and to Sandy he looks like an ape with his mighty arms dangling, like The Incredible Hulk, and suddenly Sandy jumps up and crouches into an ape position, dangling his arms and mimicking him—and Kesey breaks into a big grin and throws his arms around Sandy and hugs him—

  He approves! Kesey approves of me! At last I have responded to something, brought it all out front, even if it is resentment, done something, done my thing—and in that very action, just as he taught, it is gone, the resentment … and I am back on the bus again, synched in …

  Always Kesey! And in that surge of euphoria—Kesey approves! —Sandy knew that Kesey was the key to whatever was going right and whatever was going wrong on this trip, and nobody, not one of them who ever took this trip, got in this movie, would ever have even the will to walk up to Kesey and announce irrevocably: I am off the bus. It would be like saying, I am off this … Unspoken Thing we are into …

  PENSACOLA, FLORIDA. 110 DEGREES. A FRIEND OF BABBS HAS A little house near the ocean, and they pull in there, but the ocean doesn’t help at all. The heat makes waves in the air, like over a radiator. Most of the Pranksters are in the house or out in the yard. Some of the girls are outside the bus barbecuing some meat. Sandy is by himself inside the bus, in the shade. The insomnia is killing him. He has got to get some sleep or keep moving. He can’t stand it in here stranded in between with his heart pounding. He goes to the refrigerator and takes out the orange juice. The acid in New Orleans, the 75 micrograms, wasn’t enough. It’s like he hasn’t had a good high the whole trip, nothing … blissful. So he hooks down a big slug of Unauthorized Acid and sits back.

  He would like something nice and peaceful, closed in softly alone on the bus. He puts on a set of earphones. The left earphone is hooked into a microphone inside the house and picks up Kesey’s cousin Dale playing the piano. Dale, for all his country ways, has studied music a long time and plays well and the notes come in like liquid drops of amethyst vibrating endlessly in the … acid … atmosphere and it is very nice. The right earphone is hooked into a microphone picking up the sounds outside the house, mainly the barbecue fires crackling. So Dale concerto and fire crackling in these big padded earphones closed in about his head … only the sounds are somehow sliding out of control. There is no synch. It is as if the two are fighting for his head. The barbecue crackles and bubbles in his head and the amethyst droplets crystallize into broken glass, and then tin, a tin piano. The earphones seem to get bigger and bigger, huge padded shells about to enclose his whole head, his face, his nose—amok sound overpowering him, as if it is all going to end right here inside this padded globe—panic—he leaps up from the seat, bolts a few feet with the earphones still clamped on his skull, then rips them off and jumps out of the bus—Pranksters everywhere in the afternoon sun, in red and white striped shirts. Babbs has the power and is directing the movie and is trying to shoot something—Acid Piper. Sandy looks about. Nobody he can tell _ it to, that he has taken acid by himself and it is turning into a bummer, he can’t bring this out front … He runs into the house, the walls keep jumping up so goddamn close and all the angles are under extreme stress, as if they could break. Jane Burton is sitting alone in the house, feeling bilious. Jane is the only person he can tell.

  “Jane,” he says, “I took some acid … and it’s really weird …” But it is such an effort to talk …

  The heat waves are solidifying in the air like the waves in a child’s marble and the perspectives are all berserk, walls rushing up then sinking way back like a Titian banquet hall. And the heat—Sandy has to do something to pull himself together, so he takes a shower. He undresses and gets in the shower and … flute music, Babbs! flute music comes spraying out of the nozzle and the heat is inside of him, it is like he can look down and see it burning there and he looks down, two bare legs, a torso rising up at him and like he is just noticing them for the first time. They exist apart from, like another human being’s, such odd turns and angles they take amid the flute streams, swells and bony processes, like he has never seen any of this before, this flesh, this stranger. He groks over that—only it isn’t a stranger, it is his … mother … and suddenly he is back in this body, only it is his mother’s body—and then his father’s—he has become his mother and his father. No difference between I and Thou inside this shower of flutes on the Florida littoral. He wrenches the water off, and it stops the flute. He is himself again—hide from the panic—no, gotcha—and he pulls on his clothes and goes back out in the living room. Jane is still sitting there. Talk, christ, to somebody—jane!—but the room goes into the zooms, wild lurches of perspective, a whole side of the room zooming right up in front of his face, then zooming back to where it was—Jane!—Jane in front of his face, a foot away, then way back over there on the sofa, then zooming up again, all of it rocketing back and forth in the hulking heat—“Sandy!”—somebody is in the house looking for him, Hagen? who is it?—seems Babbs wants him in the movie. Red-and-white striped Pranksters burning in the sun. Seems Babbs has an idea for a section of the movie. In this scene Babbs is the Pied Piper, tootling on a flute, and all the red-and-white striped children are running after him in colorful dances. They hand Sandy a Prankster shirt, which he doesn’t want. It is miles too big. It hangs on him in this sick loose way like he is desiccating in the sun. Into the sun—the shirt starts flashing under his face in the sun in explosive beams of sunball red and sunball silver-white as if he is moving through an aura of violent beams. Babbs gives him his cue and he starts a crazy dance out by a clothesline while the camera whirrs away. He can feel the crazy look come over his face and feel his eyeballs turning up and white with just vague flashes of red and silver-white exploding in under his eyelids … and the freaking heat, dancing like a crazy in the sun, and he goes reeling off to one side.

  It becomes very important that nobody know he has taken Unauthorized Acid. He can trust Jane … This is not very out front, but he must remain very cool. Chuck Kesey is marching around the yard blowing a tuba, going boop boop a boop boop very deep and loud, then he comes by Sandy and looks at him and smiles over the mouthpiece and goes bup bup a bup bup, very tender and soft and—intersubjectivity!—he knows and understands —and that is nice because Chuck is one of the nicest people in the world and Sandy can trust him. If only he can remain cool …

  There is a half pound of grass in a tin can by the bus and Sandy gets down on all fours to help and starts digging his playing in the sun, and he somehow kicks over the can and the grass spills all over this silty brown dirt. Everybody is upset and Hagen gets down to try to separate the grass from the dirt, and Sandy gets down on all fours to help and starts digging his fingers into the dirt to try to dig out the grass, only as he starts digging, the dirt gets browner and browner as he digs, and he starts grooving over the brownness of it, so brown, so deep, so rich, until he is digging way past the grass, on down into the ground, and Hagen says,

  “Hey! What the hell’s the matter with you?”

  And Sandy knows he should just come out with it and say, I’m stoned man, and this brown is a groove, and then it would be all out front and over with. But he can’t bring himself to do it, he can’t bring himself all the way out front. Instead, it gets worse.

  Kesey comes over with a football and a spray can of Day-Glo. He wants Sandy to spray it Day-Glo, and then he and
Babbs and some others are going to take it out near the water at dusk and pass the Day-Glo ball around, and Sandy starts spraying it, only it’s all one thing, the ball and Kesey’s arm, and he is spraying Kesey’s arm in the most dedicated, cool way, and Kesey says:

  “Hey! What the hell’s the matter with you—”

  And as soon as he says it, he knows, which is suddenly very bad.

  “I’m … stoned,” says Sandy. “I took some acid, and I … took too much and it’s going very bad.”

  “We wanted to save that acid for the trip back,” Kesey says. “We wanted to have some for the Rockies.”

  “I didn’t take that much”—he’s trying to explain it, but now a Beatles record is playing over the loudspeaker of the bus and it’s raining into his head like needles—“but it’s bad.”

  Kesey looks exasperated, but he tries some condolence. “Look—just stay with it. Listen to the music—”

  “Listen to the music!” Sandy yells. “Christ! Try and stop me!”

  Kesey says very softly: “I know how you feel, Sandy. I’ve been there myself. But you just have to stay with it”—which makes Sandy feel good: he’s with me. But then Kesey says, “But if you think I’m going to be your guide for this trip, you’re sadly mistaken.” And he walks off.

  Sandy starts feeling very paranoid. He walks off, away from the house, and comes upon some sort of greeny glade in the woods. Babbs and Gretchen Fetchin are lying on the ground in the shade, just lazing on it, but Babb’s legs shift and his arms move and Gretch’s legs shift, and Sandy sees … Babbs and Gretch in a pond, swimming languidly. He knows they are on ground, and yet they are in the water—and he says,

  “How is it?”

  “Wet!” says Babbs.

  —and—marvelous—it is very nice—as if Babbs knows exactly what is in his mind—synch—and is going to swing with it. We are all one brain out here and we are all on the bus, after all. And suddenly there in the Florida glade it is like the best of the whole Prankster thing all over again.

  HE CAME BACK TO THE HOUSE AT DARK, INTO THE YARD, AND there were a million stars in the sky, like tiny neon bulbs, and you could see them between the leaves of the trees, and the trees seemed to be covered with a million tiny neon bulbs, and the bus, it broke up into a sculpture of neon bulbs, millions of them massed together to make a bus, like a whole nighttime of neon dust, with every particle a neon bulb, and they all vibrated like a huge friendly neon cicada universe.

  He goes down to the water where the Pranksters all are, a little inlet, and it is dark and placid and he gets in and wades out until the water laps almost even with his mouth, which makes it very secure and warm and calm and nice and he looks at the stars and then at a bridge in the distance. All he can see of the bridge is the lights on it, swooping strands of lights, rising, rising, rising—and just then Chuck Kesey comes gliding toward him through the water, smiling, like a great friendly fish. Chuck knows and it is very nice—and the lights of the bridge keep rising, rising, until they merge with the stars, until there is a bridge leading right up into heaven.

  chapter VIII

  Tootling the Multitudes

  IN GEORGIA THEY PULLED OVER TO THE SIDE OF THE HIGHWAY at a rest area, by a lake. Old Brother John put on a Robin Hood hat and sang a lot of salty songs and got the MDT Award, Most Disgusting Trip. Babbs nailed a baby doll up on a post and painted it Day-Glo and nailed a lot of nails through it and burnt it, and he got an MDT Award, too. Then something happened that made Sandy very happy. He got the idea of spraying his hand in Day-Glo designs and getting in the water and then rushing up out of the water with his hand stretched out toward Hagen’s movie camera so the film would show an enormous Day-Glo hand rushing up in frantic foreshortening. Everybody grooved on that and started doing it, and Sandy felt like he now shared part of the power. Everybody started painting one hand Day-Glo and opening it and sticking one vast vibrating Day-Glo palm out at the straight world floating by comatose …

  Kesey held another briefing, and without anybody having to say anything, they all began to feel that the trip was becoming a … mission, of some sort. Kesey said he wanted them all to do their thing and be Pranksters, but he wanted them to be deadly competent, too. Like with the red rubber balls they were always throwing around when they got out of the bus. The idea of the red rubber balls was that every Prankster should always be ready to catch the ball, even if he wasn’t looking when it came at him. They should always be that alert, always that alive to the moment, always that deep in the whole group thing, and be deadly competent.

  Well, one Prankster who was proving out deadly competent was Cassady. They highballed on up the Eastern seaboard to New York, and highballing was about it. Cassady had never been in better form. By this time everybody who had any reservations about Cassady had forgotten it. Cassady had been a rock on this trip, the totally dependable person. When everybody else was stroked out with fatigue or the various pressures, Cassady could still be counted on to move. It was as if he never slept and didn’t need to. For all his wild driving he always made it through the last clear oiled gap in the maze, like he knew it would be there all the time, which it always was. When the bus broke down, Cassady dove into the ancient innards and fixed it. He changed tires, lugging and heaving and jolting and bolting, with his fantastic muscles popping out striation by striation and his basilic veins gorged with blood and speed.

  Coming up over the Blue Ridge Mountains everybody was stoned on acid, Cassady included, and it was at that moment that he decided to make it all the way down the steepest, awfulest windingest mountain highway in the history of the world without using the brakes. The lurid bus started barreling down the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. Kesey was up on top of the bus to take it all in. He was up there and he could feel the motion of the thing careening around the curves and the road rippling and writhing out in front of him like someone rippling a bullwhip. He felt totally synched with Cassady, however. It was as if, if he were panicked, Cassady would be panicked, panic would rush through the bus like an energy. And yet he never felt panic. It was an abstract thought. He had total faith in Cassady, but it was more than faith. It was as if Cassady, at the wheel, was in a state of satori, as totally into this very moment, Now, as a being can get, and for that moment they all shared it.

  THEY REACHED NEW YORK IN THE MIDDLE OF JULY, AND THEY were like horses in the home stretch. Everybody felt good. They tooled across 42nd Street and up Central Park West with the speakers blaring and even New York had to stop and stare. The Pranksters gave them the Day-Glo glad hands, Kesey and Babbs got up on top of the bus with their red-and-white striped shirts on and tootled the people. This tootling had gotten to be a thing where you got on top of the bus and played people like they were music, the poor comatose world outside. If a guy looked at you fat and pissed off, you played on the flute in dying elephant tones. If a woman looked up nervous and twittering, you played nervous and twittering. It was saying it right to their faces, out front, and they never knew what to do. And New York—what a dirge New York was. The town was full of solemn, spent, irritable people shit-kicking their way down the sidewalks. A shit kicker is a guy with a frown on and his eyes on the ground, sloughing forward with his shoes scuffing the pavement like he’s kicking horseshit out of the way saying oh that this should happen to me. The shit kickers gave them many resentful looks, which was the Pranksters’ gift to the shit kickers. They could look up at the bus and say those are the bastids who are causing it, all the shit. They pulled into the big driveway out front of the Tavern on the Green, a big restaurant in Central Park, and tootled the people there. One way or another they were drawing the whole freaking town into their movie, and Hagen got it all on film.

  One of the old Perry Lane crowd, Chloe Scott, had arranged to get them an apartment of some friends of hers who were away for the summer, up on Madison Avenue at 90th Street. They parked the bus out front and had a time for themselves. Cassady looked up all his old pals from the On the Road d
ays. Two of them were Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg.

  They gave a party up at the apartment at Madison and 90th and Kerouac and Ginsberg were there. A guy also showed up saying, Hi, I’m Terry Southern and this is my wife Carol. He was a pretty funny guy and talked a blue streak most amiably. It was a week before they found out he wasn’t Terry Southern and didn’t even look like him. It was just some guy’s little freaky prank and they were glad they had gone ahead and wailed with it. Kesey and Kerouac didn’t say much to each other. Here was Kerouac and here was Kesey and here was Cassady in between them, once the mercury for Kerouac and the whole Beat Generation and now the mercury for Kesey and the whole—what?—something wilder and weirder out on the road. It was like hail and farewell. Kerouac was the old star. Kesey was the wild new comet from the West heading christ knew where.

  Sometimes a Great Notion came out and the reviews ran from the very best to the very worst. In the daily New York Herald Tribune , Maurice Dolbier said: “In the fiction wilderness, this is a towering redwood.” Granville Hicks said: “In his first novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey demonstrated that he was a forceful, inventive and ambitious writer. All of these qualities are exhibited, in even higher degree, in Sometimes a Great Notion. Here he has told a fascinating story in a fascinating way.” John Barkham of the Saturday Review said: “A novelist of unusual talent and imagination … a huge, turbulent tale …” Time said it was a big novel—but that it was overwritten and had failed. Some of the critics seemed put out with the back-woodsy, arch, yep-bub-golly setting of the novel and the unusual theme of the heroic strikebreaker and the craven union men. Leslie Fiedler wrote an ambivalent review in the Herald Tribune’s Book Week, but in any case it was a long, front-page review by a major critic. Newsweek said the book “rejects the obligations of art and therefore ends up as a windy, detailed mock-epic barrel-chested counterfeit of life.” Orville Prescott in The New York Times called it “A Tiresome Literary Disaster” and said: “His monstrous book is the most insufferably pretentious and the most totally tiresome novel I have had to read in many years.” He referred to Kesey as “a beatnik type” who had been the model for Dean Moriarty in Kerouac’s On the Road, confusing Kesey with Cassady. The Pranksters got a good laugh over that. The old guy was mixed up and … maybe put out by the whole thing of the bus and the big assault upon New York: stop the Huns …