The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test Read online

  … on Perry Lane. Nighttime, the night he and Faye and the kids came back to Perry Lane from Oregon, and they pull up to the old cottage and there is a funny figure in the front yard, smiling and rolling his shoulders this way and that and jerking his hands out to this side and the other side as if there’s a different drummer somewhere, different drummer, you understand, corked out of his gourd, in fact … and, well, Hi, Ken, yes, uh, well, you weren’t around, exactly, you understand, doubledy-clutch, doubledy-clutch, and they told me you wouldn’t mind, generosity knoweth no—ahem—yes, I had a ’47 Pontiac myself once, held the road like a prehistoric bird, you understand … and, yes, Neal Cassady had turned up in the old cottage, like he had just run out of the pages of On the Road, and … what’s next, Chief? Ah … many Day-Glo freaking curlicues—

  All sorts of people began gathering around Perry Lane. Quite an … underground sensation it was, in Hip California. Kesey, Cassady, Larry McMurtry; two young writers, Ed McClanahan and Bob Stone; Chloe Scott the dancer, Roy Seburn the artist, Carl Lehmann-Haupt, Vic Lovell … and Richard Alpert himself … all sorts of people were in and out of there all the time, because they had heard about it, like the local beats—that term was still used—a bunch of kids from a pad called the Chateau, a wild-haired kid named Jerry Garcia and the Cadaverous Cowboy, Page Browning. Everybody was attracted by the strange high times they had heard about … the Lane’s fabled Venison Chili, a Kesey dish made of venison stew laced with LSD, which you could consume and then go sprawl on the mattress in the fork of the great oak in the middle of the Lane at night and play pinball with the light show in the sky … Perry Lane.

  And many puzzled souls looking in … At first they were captivated. The Lane was too good to be true. It was Walden Pond, only without any Thoreau misanthropes around. Instead, a community of intelligent, very open, out-front people—out front was a term everybody was using—out-front people who cared deeply for one another, and shared … in incredible ways, even, and were embarked on some kind of … well, adventure in living. Christ, you could see them trying to put their finger on it and … then … gradually figuring out there was something here they weren’t in on … Like the girl that afternoon in somebody’s cottage when Alpert came by. This was a year after he started working with Timothy Leary. She had met Alpert a couple of years before and he had been 100 percent the serious young clinical psychologist—legions of rats and cats in cages with their brain-stems, corpora callosa and optic chiasmas sliced, spliced, diced, iced in the name of the Scientific Method. Now Alpert was sitting on the floor in Perry Lane in the old boho Lotus hunkerdown and exegeting very seriously about a baby crawling blindly about the room. Blindly? What do you mean, blindly? That baby is a very sentient creature … That baby sees the world with a completeness that you and I will never know again. His doors of perception have not yet been closed. He still experiences the moment he lives in. The inevitable bullshit hasn’t constipated his cerebral cortex yet. He still sees the world as it really is, while we sit here, left with only a dim historical version of it manufactured for us by words and official bullshit, and so forth and so on, and Alpert soars in Ouspenskyian loop-the-loops for baby while, as far as this girl can make out, baby just bobbles, dribbles, lists and rocks across the floor … But she was learning … that the world is sheerly divided into those who have had the experience and those who have not—those who have been through that door and—

  It was a strange feeling for all these good souls to suddenly realize that right here on woody thatchy little Perry Lane, amid the honeysuckle and dragonflies and boughs and leaves and a thousand little places where the sun peeped through, while straight plodding souls from out of the Stanford eucalyptus tunnel plodded by straight down the fairways on the golf course across the way—this amazing experiment in consciousness was going on, out on a frontier neither they nor anybody else ever heard of before.

  PALO ALTO, CALIF., JULY 21, 1963—AND THEN ONE DAY THE end of an era, as the papers like to put it. A developer bought most of Perry Lane and was going to tear down the cottages and put up modern houses and the bulldozers were coming.

  The papers turned up to write about the last night on Perry Lane, noble old Perry Lane, and had the old cliché at the ready, End of an Era, expecting to find some deep-thinking latter-day Thorstein Veblen intellectuals on hand with sonorous bitter statements about this machine civilization devouring its own past.

  Instead, there were some kind of nuts out here. They were up in a tree lying on a mattress, all high as coons, and they kept offering everybody, all the reporters and photographers, some kind of venison chili, but there was something about the whole setup—

  and when it came time for the sentimental bitter statement, well, instead, this big guy Kesey dragged a piano out of his house and they all set about axing the hell out of it and burning it up, calling it “the oldest living thing on Perry Lane,” only they were giggling and yahooing about it,

  high as coons, in some weird way, all of them, hard-grabbing off the stars, and it was hard as hell to make the End of an Era story come out right in the papers, with nothing but this kind of freaking Olsen & Johnson material to work with,

  but they managed to go back with the story they came with, End of an Era, the cliché intact, if they could only blot out the cries in their ears of Ve-ni-son Chi-li—

  —and none of them would have understood it, anyway, even if someone had told them what was happening. Kesey had already bought a new place in La Honda, California. He had already proposed to a dozen people on the Lane that they come with him, move the whole scene, the whole raggedy-manic Era, off to …

  Versailles, his Low Rent Versailles, over the mountain and through the woods, in La Honda, Calif. Where—where—in the lime :::::: light :::::: and the neon dust—

  “ … a considerable new message … the blissful counterstroke …”

  chapter V

  The Rusky-Dusky Neon Dust

  A very Christmas card,

  Kesey’s new place near La Honda.

  A log house, a mountain creek, a little wooden bridge

  Fifteen miles from Palo Alto beyond

  Cahill Ridge where Route 84

  Cuts through a redwood forest gorge—

  A redwood forest for a yard!

  A very Christmas card.

  And—

  Strategic privacy.

  Not a neighbor for a mile.

  La Honda lived it Western style.

  One work-a-daddy hive,

  A housing tract,

  But it was back behind the redwoods.

  The work-a-daddy faces could

  Not be seen from scenic old Route 84,

  Just a couple Wilde Weste roadside places, Baw’s General

  Store,

  The Hilltom Motel, in the Wilde Weste Touriste mode.

  With brown wood signs sawed jagged at the ends,

  But sawed neat, you know,

  As if to suggest:

  Wilde Weste Roughing It, motoring friends,

  But Sanitized jake seats

  Ammonia pucks in every urinal

  We aim to keep your Wilde West Sani-pure—

  Who won the West?

  Antisepsis did, I guess.

  La Honda’s Wilde Weste lode

  Seems to be owed to the gunslinging Younger Brothers.

  They holed up in town

  And dad-blame but they found a neighborly way

  To pay for their stay.

  They built a whole wooden store, these notorious mothers.

  But them was the Younger Brothers,

  Mere gunslingers.

  Now this Kesey

  And his Merry Humdingers down the road—

  —in the ::::: lime ::::: light :::::

  Early in 1964, just a small group on hand as yet. In the afternoon—Faye, the eternal beatific pioneer wife, in the house, at the stove, at the sewing machine, at the washing machine, with the children, Shannon and Zane, gathered around her skirts.
Out in a wooden shack near the creek Kesey has his desk and typewriter where he has just finished the revisions on Sometimes a Great Notion, now almost 300,000 words long. Kesey’s friend from Oregon, George Walker, is here, a blond All-American-looking guy in his twenties, well-built, son of a wealthy housing developer. Walker has what is known as a sunny disposition and is always saying Too much! in the most enthusiastic way. And Sandy Lehmann-Haupt. Sandy is the younger brother of Carl Lehmann-Haupt, whom Kesey had known on Perry Lane. Sandy is a handsome kid, 22 years old, tall, lean—high—strung. Sandy had met Kesey three months before, November 14, 1963, through Carl, when Kesey had come to New York for the opening of the stage version of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Kirk Douglas played McMurphy. Sandy had dropped out of N.Y.U. and was working as a sound engineer. He was a genius with tapes, soundtracks, audio systems and so forth, but he was going through a bad time. It got to the point where one day he tried to enter himself in a psychiatric ward, only to be talked out of it by Carl, who took him off to see the opening of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. And there was Randle McMurphy … Kesey … and Carl asked Kesey to take Sandy out west with him, to La Honda, to get him out of the whole New York morass. And if there was any place for curing the New York thing, this was it, out back of Kesey’s in the lime :::::: light :::::: bower :::::: up the path out back of the house, up the hill into the redwood forest, Sandy suddenly came upon a fabulous bower, like a great domed enclosure, like what people mean when they talk about a “cathedral in the pines,” only the redwoods were even more majestic. The way the sun came down through the redwood leaves—trunks and leaves seemed to stretch up for hundreds of feet above your head. It was always sunny and cool at the same time, like a perfect fall day all year around. The sun came down through miles of leaves and got broken up like a pointillist painting, deep green and dapple shadows but brilliant light in a soaring deep green super-bower, a perpetual lime-green light, green-and-gold afternoon, stillness, perpendicular peace, wood-scented, with the cars going by on Route 84 just adding pneumatic sound effects, sheee-ooooooooo, like a gentle wind. All peace here; very reassuring!

  A FEW TIMES SANDY AND KESEY AND WALKER WOULD WALK UP into the forest with axes and cut some wood for the house—but that wasn’t really the name of it at Kesey’s. Sandy could see that Kesey wasn’t primarily an outdoorsman. He wasn’t that crazy about unspoilt Nature. It was more like he had a vision of the forest as a fantastic stage setting … in which every day would be a happening, an art form …

  He had hi-fi speakers up on the roof of the house, and suddenly out here in God’s great green mountain ozone erupts a manic spade blowing on a plastic saxophone, namely, an Ornette Coleman record. It’s a slightly weird path here that the three loggers take: nutty mobiles hanging from the low branches and a lot of wild paintings nailed up on the tree trunks. Then a huge tree with a hollow base, and inside it, glinting in the greeny dark, here is a tin horse with the tin bent so that the grotesque little animal is keeled over, kneeling, in bad shape.

  The terrain Kesey was most interested in, in fact, was inside the house. The house was made of logs, but it was more like a lodge than a cabin. The main room had big French doors, for a picture-window effect, and exposed beams and a big stone fireplace at one end. Kesey had all sorts of recording apparatus around, tape recorders, motion-picture cameras and projectors, and Sandy helped add still more, some fairly sophisticated relay systems and the like. Often the Perry Lane people would drive over—although no one had moved to La Honda so far. Ed McClanahan, Bob Stone, Vic Lovell, Chloe Scott, Jane Burton, Roy Seburn. Occasionally Kesey’s brother Chuck and his cousin Dale would come down from Oregon. They both resembled Kesey but were smaller. Chuck was a bright quiet man. Casual and down-home. Dale was powerfully built and more completely down-home than either. Kesey was trying to develop various forms of spontaneous expression. They would do something like … all lie on the floor and start rapping back and forth and Kesey puts a tape-recorder microphone up each sleeve and passes his hands through the air and over their heads, like a sorcerer making signs, and their voices cut in and out as the microphones sail over. Sometimes the results were pretty—

  —well, freaking gibberish to normal human ears, most likely. Or, to the receptive standard intellectual who has heard about the 1913 Armory Show and Erik Satie and Edgard Varèse and John Cage it might sound … sort of avant-garde, you know. But in fact, like everything else here, it grows out of … the experience, with LSD. The whole other world that LSD opened your mind to existed only in the moment itself—Now—and any attempt to plan, compose, orchestrate, write a script, only locked you out of the moment, back in the world of conditioning and training where the brain was a reducing valve …

  So they would try still wilder improvisations … like the Human Tapes, huge rolls of butcher paper stretched out on the floor. They would take wax pencils, different colors, and scrawl out symbols for each other to improvise on: Sandy the pink drum strokes there, and he would make a sound like chee-oonh-chunh, chee-oonh-chunh, and so forth, and Kesey the guitar arrows there, broinga broinga brang brang, and Jane Burton the bursts of scat vocals there, and Bob Stone the Voice Over stories to the background of the Human Jazz—all of it recorded on the tape recorder—and then all soaring on—what?—acid, peyote, morning-glory seeds, which were very hell to choke down, billions of bilious seeds mulching out into sodden dandelions in your belly, bloated—but soaring!—or IT-290, or dexedrine, benzedrine, methedrine—Speed!—or speed and grass—sometimes you could take a combination of speed and grass and prop that … LSD door open in the mind without going through the whole uncontrollable tumult of the LSD … And Sandy takes LSD and the lime :::::: light :::::: and the magical bower turns into … neon dust … pointillist particles for sure, now. Golden particles, brilliant forest-green particles, each one picking up the light, and all shimmering and flowing like an electronic mosaic, pure California neon dust. There is no way to describe how beautiful this discovery is, to actually see the atmosphere you have lived in for years for the first time and to feel that it is inside of you, too, flowing up from the heart, the torso, into the brain, an electric fountain … And … IT-290!—he and George Walker are up in the big tree in front of the house, straddling a limb, and he experiences … intersubjectivity—he knows precisely what Walker is thinking. It isn’t necessary to say what the design is, just the part each will do.

  “You paint the cobwebs,” Sandy says, “and I’ll paint the leaves behind them.”

  “Too much!” says George, because, of course, he knows—all of us sliding in and out of these combinations of mutual consciousness, intersubjectivity, going out to the backhouse, near the creek, with tape recorders and starting to rap—a form of free association conversation, like a jazz conversation, or even a monologue, with everyone, or whoever, catching hold of words, symbols, ideas, sounds, and winging them back and forth and beyond … the walls of conventional logic … One of us finds a bunch of wooden chessmen. They are carved figures, some kind of ancient men, every piece an old carved man, only somebody left them outside and they got wet and now they’re warped, which sprung them open into their real selves. This one’s genitals are hanging out despite he has robes on and carries a spear—

  —Have you seen my daughter? Claims I embarrass her. Claims the whole world knows I have cunt on the brain. At my age—

  —Yes, sir, we have the report. Your daughter’s a horny little bitch, but I am the King and I have no choice but to cut your balls off—

  —King, I’ll throw you for them—

  —Your balls?

  —Right! With those gold hubcaps you lug about there—

  —Right! In fact, incredible. Each one of us has a chess figure in his hand and becomes that character and they are rapping off the personalities they see in these figures, and they start thinking the same things at once. I, too, saw these funny little curves under this figure’s hand here, no larger than the head of a tiny tack, as … golden hubca
ps … I was about to say it—

  It is the strangest feeling of my life—intersubjectivity, as if our consciousnesses have opened up and flowed together and now one has only to look at a flicker of the other’s mouth or eye or at the chessman he holds in his hand, wobbling—

  —You wouldn’t believe a girl with electric eel tits, would you, King?

  —The ones that ionized King Arthur’s sword under swamp water?

  —The very ones. Dugs with a thousand tiny suction caps, a horny, duggy little girl, I’m afraid, 120 household volts of jail bait if I ever saw one—

  —and how, in the wildest operations of chance, could a term like 120 household volts of jail bait arise in all our minds at once—

  But the swamps, too—it is no longer all Garden of Eden and glorious discovery for the old Perry Lane crowd. In fact, there’s a little grumbling here in the magic dell. Kesey is starting to organize our trips. He hands out the drugs personally, one for you, and one for you … and just when you’re starting to lie back and groove on your thing, he comes in—Hup!—Hup!—Everybody up! and organizes a tramp through the woods …

  After it’s all over, some of them ask Kesey for some acid and IT-290 to take back to Palo Alto. No-o-o-o-o-o, says Kesey, and he cocks his head as if he wants to say this thing just right, because it’s a delicate matter.—I think you should come here and take it …

  Later, on the way back, someone says: We used to be equals. Now it’s Kesey’s trip. We go to his place. We take his acid. We do what he wants.

  But what does he want? Gradually, vaguely, it dawns that Kesey’s fantasy has moved on again, beyond even theirs, old Perry Lane. In any case, nobody has the stomach for Kesey’s master plan, that they should all move out onto his place, in tents and so forth, transplanting the Perry Lane thing to La Honda. They began to eye Kesey’s place as a kind of hill-country Versailles, with Kesey as the Sun King, looking bigger all the time, with that great jaw in profile against the redwoods and the mountaintops. It never develops into an open breach, however, or even disenchantment. They just get uneasy. They get the feeling that Kesey was heading out on further, toward a fantasy they didn’t know if they wanted to explore.