The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test Read online

  But the hell with it. Kesey was already talking about how writing was an old-fashioned and artificial form and pointing out, for all who cared to look … the bus. The local press, including some of the hipper, smaller sheets, gave it a go, but nobody really comprehended what was going on, except that it was a party. It was a party, all right. But in July of 1964 not even the hip world in New York was quite ready for the phenomenon of a bunch of people roaring across the continental U.S.A. in a bus covered with swirling Day-Glo mandalas aiming movie cameras and microphones at every freaking thing in this whole freaking country while Neal Cassady wheeled the bus around the high curves like Super Hud and the U.S. nation streamed across the windshield like one of those goddamned Cinemascope landscape cameras that winds up your optic nerves like the rubber band in a toy airplane and let us now be popping more speed and acid and smoking grass as if it were all just coming out of Cosmo the Prankster god’s own local-option gumball machines—

  Cosmo!

  Furthur.

  chapter IX

  The Crypt Trip

  IF THERE WAS ANYBODY IN THE WORLD WHO WAS GOING TO comprehend what the Pranksters were doing, it was going to be Timothy Leary and his group, the League for Spiritual Discovery, up in Millbrook, New York. Leary and his group had been hounded out of Harvard, out of Mexico, out of here, out of there, and had finally found a home in a big Victorian mansion in Millbrook, on private land, an estate belonging to a wealthy New York family, the Hitchcocks. So the bus headed for Millbrook.

  They headed off expecting the most glorious reception ever. It is probably hard at this late date to understand how glorious they thought it was going to be. The Pranksters thought of themselves and Leary’s group as two extraordinary arcane societies, and the only ones in the world, engaged in the most fantastic experiment in human consciousness ever devised. The thing was totally new. And now the two secret societies bearing this new-world energy surge were going to meet.

  The Pranksters entered the twisty deep green Gothic grounds of Millbrook with flags flying, American flags all over the bus, and the speakers blaring rock ‘n’ roll, on in over the twisty dirt road, through the tangled greeny thickets, past the ponds and glades, like a rolling yahooing circus. When they got in sight of the great gingerbread mansion itself, all towers and turrets and jigsaw shingles, Sandy Lehmann-Haupt started throwing green smoke bombs off the top of the bus, great booms and blooms of green smoke exploding off the sides of the bus like epiphytes as the lurid thing rolled and jounced around the curves. We are here! We are here!

  The Pranksters expected the Learyites to come rolling out of the house like the survivors of the siege of Khartoum. Instead—a couple of figures there on the lawn dart back into the house. The Pranksters stop in front and there is just the big house sitting there sepulchral and Gothic—and them jumping off the bus still yahooing and going like hell. Finally a few souls materialize. Peggy Hitchcock and Richard Alpert and Susan Metzner, the wife of Dr. Ralph Metzner, another leading figure in the Leary group. Alpert looks the bus up and down and shakes his head and says, “Ke-n-n-n Ke-e-e-esey …” as if to say I might have known that you would be the author of this collegiate prank. They are friendly, but it is a mite … cool here, friends. Maynard Ferguson, the jazz trumpet player, and his wife, Flo, are there, and they groove over the bus, but the others … there is a general … vibration … of We have something rather deep and meditative going on here, and you California crazies are a sour note.

  Finally, Peggy Hitchcock invites some of them over to her house, a big modern house, known as The Bungalow, off from the gingerbread manse. Babbs is one of them. Babbs and the Pranksters are not ready for a lazy afternoon in the country, meditative or not. Inside The Bungalow, Babbs came upon a big framed photograph on the wall, looking like a Yale class picture from the year ’03, a lot of young fellers seated, in tiers, in a clump and staring full-face at the camera.

  “There’s Cassady!” says Babbs.

  “There’s Hassler!”

  “There’s Kesey!”

  “There’s Sandy!”

  They found every single man on the bus in the picture, while the Learyites looked on, tolerantly, and Babbs got the idea of “The Pranksters’ Ancestral Mansion.”

  The Learyites were going to take them on a tour of the great gingerbread mansion, but it became Babbs’s tour. He started leading it.

  “Now ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “we are embarked upon the first annual tour of the Pranksters’ Ancestral Mansion. Now over here you may regard”—he points to a big lugubrious oil portrait, or something of the sort, up on the wall—“one of the Pranksters’ great forefathers, sire and scion of the fabulous line, the fabulous lion, Sir Edward the Freak. Sir Edward the Freak, a joke in his own time. I’ve heard if he got aroused, he would freak a whole block of city, Sir Edward the Freak—”

  —and so on, while the Learyites tagged along, looking more and more dour, as if they sensed disaster, Babbs looking more and more animated, rapping off everything, the ancestral staircase, the ancestral paneling, the ancestral fireplace, his rheostat eyes turning up to 300 watts—

  —then down to one of the four “meditation centers,” little sanctums where the Learyites retreated for the serious business of meditation upon inner things—

  “—and now, for this part of our tour, the Crypt Trip—” And the Pranksters started rapping off the Crypt Trip, while Babbs entered into a parody rendition of The Tibetan Book of the Dead. This was one of the Learyites’ most revered texts. “This is where we take our followers to hang them up when they’re high,” says Babbs, “the Crypt Trip.” The clear message was Fuck you, Millbrook, for your freaking frostiness.

  Other Pranksters were out playing under a little waterfall in the woods. Zonker’s girl friend Kathy, whom he had picked up in New York, sat under the waterfall and the water pasted her bikini, or her bra and panties, or whatever it was she had on, pasted it most nicely to her body and Hagen filmed it. She became Sensuous X in the great movie.

  Where was Leary? Everyone was waiting for the great meeting of Leary and Kesey.

  Well, word came down that Leary was upstairs in the mansion engaged in a very serious experiment, a three-day trip, and could not be disturbed.

  Kesey wasn’t angry, but he was very disappointed, even hurt. It was unbelievable—this was Millbrook, one big piece of uptight constipation, after all this.

  The Pranksters made a few more stabs at getting things going around Millbrook, but it seemed like everybody in the place was retreating to some corner or other. Finally they pulled out. Before they left, Kesey asked Alpert if he could get them some more acid. He said he couldn’t, but he could give them some morning-glory seeds. Morning-glory seeds. The idea of morning-glory seeds sloshing around in your belly like a ptomaine bean bag while the bus bounced and shook and swayed and leaned out on the curves was more than a body could bear. So thanks anyway, and sayonara, you all, League for Spiritual Discovery.

  chapter X

  Dream Wars

  ON THE TRIP BACK WEST THEY TOOK THE NORTHERN ROUTE, through Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, South Dakota—

  South Dakota! 191 miles in South Dakota …

  —which made it all cooler, for a start … In fact, the trip back was a psychic Cadillac, a creamy groove machine, and they soon found themselves grooving in a group mind. Now they could leave behind all the mind-blown freaky binds and just keep going Furthur! on the bus. For example, Zonker meant to stay in New York but he went back with them. He couldn’t break off from the group mind takeoff that had begun, the Unspoken Thing, the all-in-one … He brought with him his gorgeous blond telepathic girl friend Kathy, who felt at once the careening, crazydreaming, creamy bobbing rhythm of the bus and became at once recklessly and infectiously and insenescibly and ultra-infra-sexily one of them: most sinuous Prankstress in their ranks. The Pranksters named her Sensuous X, glowing girl friend resolutely going … Furthur … Kesey laid eyes on the Sensuous
horizon—loved it! On the bus. Next, she became Zonker’s sensuous ex—lost her! On the bus. At first Zonker’s mad, feels he’s been had—affront! But then thanks to his feeling for the Prankster experiment, he sees nothing to resent. There can be no hard feelings when one is dealing totally out front on the bus.

  There was very little LSD left, so they were taking mostly speed and grass, soaring through the Northlands, on Speed. For Sandy—at Millbrook a Main Guru had taken Sandy and Jane aside and confided: It would be good if you took the Millbrook trip alone … meaning, probably, without your obstreperous companions, i.e., off the bus, and Sandy had … Dis-Mounted again and returned to Millbrook, with Jane, and the Main Guru turned him on to DMT, a 30-minute trip like LSD but with a fierce roan-mad intensity—fragments! Sandy had a mad sense of the world torn apart into stained-glass shards behind his eyelids. No matter what he did, eyes open, eyes shut, the world erupted into electric splinters and the Main Guru said, “I wish to enter your metaphysical soul.” But to Sandy—paranoia!—he seemed like a randy-painted lulu bent on his rectococcygeal shoals, a randy boy-enjoyer, while the world exploded and there was no antidote for this rocketing, rocketing, rocketing, rocketing … They returned to New York and Jane disembarked from the bus, stayed behind, but Sandy felt impelled to ride it out on the bus with the rest of the Pranksters, heading west, rocketing, rocketing, rocketing, rocketing Furthur … And now in the Midwest it was as if the DMT trip at Millbrook had been the last stage of a rocket and his whole psyche was now committed to speed and motion, and it was necessary to keep soaring through the Northlands. Certain vibrations of the bus would trip his brain somehow and suddenly bring back the sensation of the rocketing DMT trip and it would be necessary to speed up and keep moving . The sweet wheatfields and dairy lands of America would be sailing by beauty rural green and curving, and Sandy is watching the serene beauty of it … and then he happens to look into the big rear-view mirror outside the bus and—the fields are—in flames :::::::: curve and curdle straight up in hideous orange flames ::::: So he whips his head around and looks way back as far as he can see and over over to the horizon and it is nothing but flat and sweet and green again, sailing by serene. Then he looks back into the mirror—and the flames shoot up again, soaring, corn and lespedeza turning brown like burning color film when the projector is too hot and bursting into flames, corn, wheat, lespedeza turning into brown scouring rush, death camass, bloodwort, wild iris, blue flag, grease wood, poison sucklyea, monkshood mandrake, moonseed, fitweed, locoweed, tumble mustard, spurge nettle, coyote tobacco, crab’s eye bursting into flames—a sea of flames—a mirror with a sea of flames, Narcissus, Moon, twins, thesis and anti-thesis, infirmity of life, as if he is forced to endure at any moment the visual revelation of a paleopsychic mystery—and Sandy looks away and forces himself not to look toward the rearview mirror and once again just sun and the green belly of America sailing by …

  … serene. Certain things worked smoothly on every level. They knew how to run the bus better, for one thing, even though Cassady had had to go back ahead of time by car with Hassler, who had to report back to Fort Ord. The Pranksters took turns driving. Getting food, copping urinations, shooting the movie, making tapes—they managed it all like a team. Once a few minor personal hassles were worked out—out front—and the bus crossed the Mississippi, and they were way out West—then it all merged into the Group Mind and became very psychic …

  Intersubjectivity!

  … Sandy himself wheeling the bus through dour Roosian South Dakota with cold shadows sweeping over the green and golden grasslands. No sea of flames now, just a green and gold sea, serene, coming from out of the stream of the Northlands themselves—and sleep means nothing, because there is no time, only Now, a perfect experience in the perfect momentum set perfectly by his foot on the accelerator—for 191 miles he drove, by the speedometer. Then he goes to the back of the bus and there up on the ceiling is a map of the U.S. pasted up there, and—see!—there is a red line on the map, leaping out on, and it is exactly those 191 miles he drove, glowing on the ceiling of the bus. He looks around, starts asking, very excited—and Sensuous X said she made the line—

  “Why!”

  Sensuous doesn’t know. No why to it. She just had the crayon and that was where the line went—

  —but no need to explain. Telepathic Kathy! Just one line, one current, running through the entire bus. Group Mind, and Cosmic Control, on the bus …

  Then the bus heads up into Canada, to Calgary, to catch the Calgary Stampede. The unquenchable Hagen of the Screw Shack prowls the Stampede for ginch ahoof and comes back to the bus with nice little girl with lips as raunchy as a swig of grape soda, tender in age but ne’mind, ready to go, and she is on the bus, christened Anonymous, down to her bra and panties, which she prefers. The call goes out to the Canadian Royal Mounties for the runaway, or stowaway, the little girl from the Stampede, and they stop the bus in the road check—

  —Why, come right on in, officers, take a look around—

  —while Hagen grinds the camera at them—

  —while the Head Mountie rereads the long description, five feet two, dark hair, etc., and checks out Sensuous X and Gretch and Anonymous in the window—

  —Anonymous reads the description over the Mountie’s shoulder, perched up at the window, and laughs merrily at such a funny-sounding girl—she by now having her face all painted up in Prankster designs and half her grape-soda body as well so that she doesn’t look too much like the pretty helpless waif Grandma described to the Mounties, and the Mounties wave them by and peer on down the road for the next.

  Next down to Boise, Idaho, and everywhere Kesey and Babbs up top the bus with flutes, mercilessly tootling the people of America as they crowd around the bus and getting pretty good at it even. Winces here and there as some little cringing shell in the population pinioned in his crispy black shiny shoes knows, no mistake, that it is him they have singled out—they are playing my song, the desperate sound track from my movie—and Kesey and Babbs score again and again, like the legendary Zen archers, for they no longer play their music at people but inside them. They play inside them, oh merciless flow. And many things are clear in the flow. They are above the multitudes, looking down from the Furthur heights of the bus, and the billion eyes of America glisten at them like electric kernels, and yet the Pranksters are grooving with this whole wide-screen America and going with its flow with American flags flying from the bus and taking energy, as in solar heat, from its horsepower and its neon and there is no limit to the American trip. Bango!—that’s it!—the trouble with Leary and his group is that they have turned back. But of course! They have turned back into that old ancient New York intellectual thing, ducked back into the romantic past, copped out of the American trip. New York intellectuals have always looked for … another country, a fatherland of the mind, where it is all better and more philosophic and purer, gadget-free, and simpler and pedigreed: France or England, usually—oh, the art of living, in France, boys. The Learyites have done the same thing, only with them it’s—India—the East—with all the ancient flap-doodle of Gautama Buddha or the Rig-Veda blowing in like mildew, and Leary calls for blue grass growing in the streets of New York, and he decrees that everyone should have such a dwelling place of such pristine antique décor, with everyone hunkered down amid straw rugs and Paisley wall hangings, that the Gautama Buddha himself from 485 B.C. could walk in and feel at home instantly. Above all, keep quiet, for God’s sake, hold it down, whisper, moan, mumble, meditate, and for chrissake, no gadgets—no tapes, video tapes, TV, movies, Hagstrom electric basses, variable lags, American flags, no neon, Buick Electras, mad moonstone-faced Servicenters, and no manic buses, f’r chrissake, soaring, doubledyclutch doubledyclutch, to the Westernmost edge—

  And in Boise they cut through a funeral or wedding or something, so many dressed-up people in the sun gawking at Pranksters gathered at a fountain and all cutting up in the sunspots, and a kid—they have tootled his s
ong, and he likes it, and he runs for the bus and they all pile on and pull out, just ahead of him, and he keeps running for the bus, and Kesey keeps slowing down and then pulling out just out of his reach, six or eight blocks this way, and then they speed up for good, and they can still see him floating away in the background, his legs still running, like a preview—

  —allegory of life!—

  —of the multitudes who very shortly will want to get on the bus … themselves …

  Back at Kesey’s in La Honda,

  Deep into the rusky-dusky neon dusty,

  More synched in than

  They had ever been,