The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

by Tom Wolfe

  “—but you know what? People are beginning to see through the warf of the games. Not just the heads and everybody, but all sorts of people. You take in California. There’s always been this pyramid—”

  Here Hassler outlines a pyramid in the air with his hands and I watch, fascinated, as the plastic toothbrush case shiny shiny slides up one incline of the pyramid—

  “—they’re transcending the bullshit,” says Hassler, only his voice is earnest and clear and sweet like a high-school valedictorian’s, as if he just said may next year’s seniors remember our motto—“transcending the bullshit—”

  —a nice line of light there along the plastic, a straight rigid gleam from the past, from wherever Hassler came from. Now I’m doing it again, ah, that amiable itch, I just extracted a metaphor, a piece of transcendent bullshit, from this freaking toothbrush case—

  “—transcending the bullshit—”

  A TALL GUY COMES INTO THE WAREHOUSE WEARING SOME kind of blue and orange outfit like a mime harlequin’s and with an orange Day-Glo mask painted on his face, so that he looks extraordinarily like The Spirit, if you remember that comic strip. This, I am told, is Ken Babbs, who used to be a helicopter pilot in Vietnam. I get to talking to him and I ask him what it was like in Vietnam and he says to me, very seriously:

  “You really want to know what it was like?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Come over here. I’ll show you.”

  So he leads me back into the garage and he points to a cardboard box lying on the floor, just lying there amid all the general debris and madness.

  “It’s all in there.”

  “It’s all in there?”

  “Right, right, right.”

  I reach in there and lift out a typewritten manuscript, four or five hundred pages. I leaf through. It’s a novel, about Vietnam. I look at Babbs. He gives me a smile of good fellowship with his Day-Glo mask glowing and crinkling up.

  “It’s all in there?” I say. “Then I guess it takes a while to get it.”

  “Yeah, yeah, right! right! right!” says Babbs, breaking into a laugh, as if I just said the funniest thing in the world. “Yeah! Yeah! Hah hah hah hah hah hah hah Right! Right!” with the mask glowing and bouncing around on his face. I lower the novel back into the box, and for days I would notice Babbs’s novel about Vietnam lying out there on the floor, out in the middle of everything, as if waiting for a twister to whip it up and scatter it over San Francisco County, and Babbs would be somewhere around saying to some other bemused soul: “Yeah, yeah, right! right! right!”

  The Merry Pranksters were all rapidly assembling, waiting for Kesey. George Walker arrives. Walker has on no costume. He is just like some very clean-cut blond college kid wearing a T-shirt and corduroy pants, smiling and outgoing, just a good West Coast golden boy except for a few random notes like the Lotus racing car he has outside, painted with orange Day-Glo so that it lights up at dusk, skidding around the corners of the California suburbs in four-wheel drifts. And Paul Foster. Foster, I am told, is some kind of mad genius, a genius at computers, with all sorts of firms with names like Techniflex, Digitron, Solartex, Automaton, trying to hunt him down to lay money on him to do this or that for them … Whether he is a genius or not, I couldn’t say. He certainly looks mad enough. He is hunched over in a corner, in a theater seat, an emaciated figure but with a vast accumulation of clothes. It looks like he has on about eight pairs of clown’s pants, one on top of the other, each one filthier than the next one, all black, sooty, torn, mungey and fungous. His head is practically shaven and he is so thin that all the flesh seems to be gone off his head and when he contracts his jaw muscles it is as if some very clever anatomical diagram has been set in motion with little facial muscles, striations, sheathes, ligaments, tissues, nodules, integuments that nobody ever suspected before bunching up, popping out, springing into definition in a complex chain reaction. And he contracts his jaw muscles all the time, concentrating, with his head down and his eyes burning, concentrating on a drawing he is doing on a pad of paper, an extremely small but crucial drawing by the looks of his concentration …

  Black Maria sits on a folding chair and smiles ineffably but says nothing. One of the Flag People, a thin guy, tells me about Mexicans strung out on huaraches. Doris Delay tells me—

  “They’re off on their own freak,” Hassler continues, “and it may not look like much, but they’re starting to transcend the bullshit. There’s this old trinity, Power, Position, Authority, and why should they worship these old gods and these old forms of authority—”

  “Fuck God … ehhhhh … Fuck God …”

  This is a voice behind a blanket curtain to one side. Somebody is back there rapping off what Hassler just said.

  “Fuck God. Up with the Devil.”

  It is a very sleepy, dreamy voice, however. The curtain pulls back and standing there is a wiry little guy who looks like a pirate. Behind him, back in there behind the curtain, all sorts of wires, instruments, panels, speakers are all piled up, a glistening heap of electronic equipment, and the tape is back there going … “In the Nowhere Mine …” The guy looks like a pirate, as I said, with long black hair combed back Tarzan-style, and a mustache, and a gold ring through his left earlobe. He stares out, sleepily. In fact, he is a Hell’s Angel. His name is Freewheeling Frank. He has on the Hell’s Angels’ “colors,” meaning a jacket with insignia, a jacket with the sleeves cut off and the skull with the helmet on it and the wings and a lot of other arcane symbols.

  “Fuck God,” says Freewheeling Frank. “Fuck all forms of … of …” and the words trail off in a kind of dreamy way, although his lips are still moving and he kind of puts his head down and trudges off into the gloom, toward the bus, with his hands flicking out, first this side, then the other, like Cassady, and he is off on his trip, like Cassady, and, all right, a Hell’s Angel—and the Hassler brushes his teeth after every meal, in the middle of a Shell station tin-can economy—

  Just then Kesey arrives.

  chapter III

  The Electric Suit

  THROUGH THE SHEET OF SUNLIGHT AT THE DOORWAY AND down the incline into the crazy gloom comes a panel truck and in the front seat is Kesey. The Chief; out on bail. I half expect the whole random carnival to well up into a fluorescent yahoo of incalculably insane proportions. In fact, everybody is quiet. It is all cool.

  Kesey gets out of the truck with his eyes down. He’s wearing a sport shirt, an old pair of pants, and some Western boots. He seems to see me for an instant, but there is no hello, not a glimmer of recognition. This annoys me, but then I see that he doesn’t say hello to anybody. Nobody says anything. They don’t all rush up or anything. It’s as if … Kesey is back and what is there to say about it.

  Then Mountain Girl booms out: “How was jail, Kesey!”

  Kesey just shrugs. “Where’s my shirt?” he says.

  Mountain Girl fishes around in the debris over beside a bunch of theater seats and gets the shirt, a brown buckskin shirt with an open neck and red leather lacings. Kesey takes off the shirt he has on. He has huge latissimi dorsi muscles making his upper back fan out like manta-ray wings. Then he puts on the buckskin shirt and turns around.

  Instead of saying anything, however, he cocks his head to one side and walks across the garage to the mass of wires, speakers, and microphones over there and makes some minute adjustment. “ … The Nowhere Mine …” As if now everything is under control and the fine tuning begins.

  From out of the recesses of the garage—I didn’t even know they were there—here comes a woman and three children. Kesey’s wife Faye, their daughter Shannon, who is six, and two boys, Zane, five, and Jed, three. Faye has long, sorrel-brown hair and is one of the prettiest, most beatific-looking women I ever saw. She looks radiant, saintly. Kesey goes over to her and picks up each of the kids, and then Mountain Girl brings over her baby, Sunshine, and he picks up Sunshine a moment. All right—

  Then Kesey loosens up and smiles, as if he just th
ought of something. It is as if he just heard Mountain Girl’s question about how was jail. “The only thing I was worried about was this tooth,” he says. He pops a dental plate out of the roof of his mouth and pushes a false front tooth out of his mouth with his tongue. “I had the awfulest feeling,” he says. “I was going to be in court or talking to reporters or something, and this thing was going to fall down like this and I was going to start gumming my words.” He gums the words “start gumming my words,” to illustrate.

  Three weeks later he was to replace it with a tooth with an orange star and green stripes on it, an enameled dens incisus lateral bearing a Prankster flag. One day at a gas station the manager, a white guy, gets interested in the tooth and calls over his helper, a colored guy, and says, “Hey, Charlie, come over here and show this fellow your tooth.” So Charlie grins and bares his upper teeth, revealing a gold tooth with a heart cut out in the gold so that a white enamel heart shows through. Kesey grins back and then bares his tooth—the colored guy stares a moment and doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t even smile. He just turns away. A little while later, down the road, Kesey says very seriously, very sorrowfully, “That was wrong of me. I shouldn’t have done that.” “Done what?” “I outniggered him,” says Kesey.

  Outniggered him! Kesey. has kept these countryisms, like “the awfulest feeling,” all through college, graduate school, days of literary celebration …

  “How did it happen?” says Freewheeling Frank, meaning the tooth.

  “He got in a fight with a Hell’s Angel,” says Mountain Girl.

  “What!—” Freewheeling Frank is truly startled.

  “Yeah!” says Mountain Girl. “The bastard hit him with a chain!”

  “What!” says Frank. “Where? What was his name!”

  Kesey gives Mountain Girl a look.

  “Naw,” she says.

  “What was his name!” Frank says. “What did he look like!”

  “Mountain Girl is shucking you,” Kesey says. “I was in a wreck.”

  Mountain Girl looks repentant. Angels’ duels are no joke with Frank. Kesey breaks up … the vibrations. He sits down in one of the old theater seats. He is just talking in a soft, conversational tone, with his head down, just like he is having conversation with Mountain Girl or somebody.

  “It’s funny,” he says. “There are guys in jail who have been in jail so much, that’s their whole thing. They’re jail freaks. They’ve picked up the whole jail language—”

  —everybody starts gathering around, sitting in the old theater seats or on the floor. The mysto steam begins rising—

  “—only it isn’t their language, it’s the guards’, the cops’, the D.A.’s, the judge’s. It’s all numbers. One of them says, ‘What happened to so-and-so?’ And the other one says, ‘Oh, he’s over in 34,’ which is a cellblock. ‘They got him on a 211’—they have numbers for different things, just like you hear on a police radio—’ they got him on a 211, but he can cop to a 213 and get three to five, one and a half with good behavior.’

  “The cops like that. It makes them feel better if you play their game. They’ll chase some guy and run him down and pull guns on him and they’re ready to blow his head off if he moves a muscle, but then as soon as they have him in jail, one of them will come around and ask him how his wife is and he’s supposed to say she’s O.K., thanks, and ask him about his kids, like now that we’ve played the cops-and-robbers part of the game, you can go ahead and like me. And a lot of them in there go along with that, because that’s all they know.

  “When you’re running, you’re playing their game, too. I was up in Haight-Ashbury and I heard something hit the sidewalk behind me and it was a kid had fallen out the window. A lot of people rushed up and a woman was there crying and trying to pick him up, and I knew what I should do is go up and tell her not to move him but I didn’t. I was afraid I was going to be recognized. And then up the street I saw a cop writing out parking tickets and I was going to go up and tell him to call an ambulance. But I didn’t. I just kept going. And that night I was listening to the news on television and they told about a child who fell out of a window and died in the hospital.”

  And that’s what the cops-and-robbers game does to you. Only it is me thinking it. Figuring out parables, I look around at the faces and they are all watching Kesey and, I have not the slightest doubt, thinking: and that’s what the cops-and-robbers game does to you. Despite the skepticism I brought here, I am suddenly experiencing their feeling. I am sure of it. I feel like I am in on something the outside world, the world I came from, could not possibly comprehend, and it is a metaphor, the whole scene, ancient and vast, vaster than …

  TWO GUYS COME IN OUT OF THE DAYLIGHT ON HARRIET Street, heads by the looks of them, and walk up to Kesey. One of them is young with a sweatshirt on and Indian beads with an amulet hanging from the beads—a routine acid-head look, in other words. The other one, the older one, is curiously neat, however. He has long black hair, but neat, and a slightly twirly mustache, like a cavalier, but neat, and a wildly flowered shirt, but neat and well-tailored and expensive, and a black leather jacket, only not a motorcycle jacket but tailored more like a coat, and a pair of English boots that must have set him back $25 or $30. At first he looks like something out of Late North Beach, the boho with the thousand-dollar wardrobe. But he has a completely sincere look. He has a thin face with sharp features and a couple of eyes burning with truth oil. He says his name is Gary Goldhill and he wants to interview Kesey for the Haight-Ashbury newspaper The Oracle, and when could he do that—but right away it is obvious that he has something to get off his chest that can’t wait.

  “The thing is, Ken”—he has an English accent, but it is a middle-class accent, a pleasant sort of Midlands accent—“the thing is, Ken, a lot of people are very concerned about what you’ve said, or what the newspapers say you’ve said, about graduating from acid. A lot of people look up to you, Ken, you’re one of the heroes of the psychedelic movement”—he has a kind of Midlands England way of breaking up long words into syllables, psy-che-delic move-ment—“and they want to know what you mean. A very beautiful thing is happening in Haight-Ashbury, Ken. A lot of people are opening the doors in their minds for the first time, but people like you have to help them. There are only two directions we can go, Ken. We can isolate ourselves in a monastery or we can organize a religion, along the lines of the League for Spiritual Discovery”—the League for Spi-ri-tu-al Dis-cov-ery—“and have acid and grass legalized as sacraments, so everyone won’t have to spend every day in fear waiting for the knock on the door.”

  “It can be worse to take it as a sacrament,” Kesey says.

  “You’ve been away for almost a year, Ken,” Goldhill says. “You may not know what’s been happening in Haight-Ashbury. It’s growing, Ken, and thousands of people have found something very beautiful, and they’re very open and loving, but the fear and the paranoia, Ken, the waiting for the knock on the door—it’s causing some terrible things, Ken. It’s re-spon-si-ble for a lot of bad trips. People are having bad trips, Ken, because they take acid and suddenly they feel that any moment there may be a knock on the door. We’ve got to band together. You’ve got to help us, Ken, and not work against us.”

  Kesey looks up, away from Goldhill, out across the gloom of the garage. Then he speaks in a soft, far-off voice, with his eyes in the distance:

  “If you don’t realize that I’ve been helping you with every fiber in my body … if you don’t realize that everything I’ve done, everything I’ve gone through …”

  —it is rising and rising—

  “I know, Ken, but the repression—”

  “We’re in a period now like St. Paul and the early Christians,” Kesey says. “St. Paul said, if they shit on you in one city, move on to another city, and if they shit on you in that city, move on to another city—”

  “I know, Ken, but you’re telling people to stop taking acid, and they’re not going to stop. They’ve opened up doors i
n their minds they never knew existed, and a very beautiful thing, and then they read in the papers that somebody they’ve looked up to is suddenly telling them to stop.”

  “There’s a lot of things I can’t tell the newspapers,” says Kesey. His eyes are still focused long-range, away from Goldhill. “One night in Mexico, in Manzanillo, I took some acid and I threw the I Ching. And the I Ching—the great thing about the I Ching is, it never sends you Valentines, it slaps you in the face when you need it—and it said we had reached the end of something, we weren’t going anywhere any longer, it was time for a new direction—and I went outside and there was an electrical storm, and there was lightning everywhere and I pointed to the sky and lightning flashed and all of a sudden I had a second skin, of lightning, electricity, like a suit of electricity, and I knew it was in us to be superheroes and that we could become superheroes or nothing.” He lowers his eyes. “I couldn’t tell this to the newspapers. How could I? I wouldn’t be put back in jail, I’d be put in Pescadero.”

  —rising—rising—

  “But most people aren’t ready for that, Ken,” Goldhill says. “They’re just beginning to open the doors in their minds—”

  “But once you’ve been through that door, you can’t just keep going through it over and over again—”

  “—and somebody’s got to help them through that door—”

  “Don’t say stop plunging into the forest,” Kesey says. “Don’t say stop being a pioneer and come back here and help these people through the door. If Leary wants to do that, that’s good, it’s a good thing and somebody should do it. But somebody has to be the pioneer and leave the marks for others to follow.” Kesey looks up again, way out into the gloom. “You’ve got to have some faith in what you’re trying to do. It’s easy to have faith as long as it goes along with what you already know. But you’ve got to have faith in us all the way. Somebody like Gleason—Gleason was with us this far.” Kesey spread his thumb and forefinger about two inches apart. “He was with us as long as our fantasy coincided with his. But as soon as we went on further, he didn’t understand it, so he was going against us. He had … no faith.”