The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

by Tom Wolfe

  Face! The doctor comes back in and, marvelous, poor tight cone ass, doc, Kesey can now see into him. For the first time he notices that the doctor’s lower left lip is trembling, but he more than sees the tremor, he understands it, he can—almost seen!—see each muscle fiber decussate, pulling the poor jelly of his lip to the left and the fibers one by one leading back into infrared caverns of the body, through transistor-radio innards of nerve tangles, each one on Red Alert, the poor ninny’s inner hooks desperately trying to make the little writhing bastards keep still in there, I am Doctor, this is a human specimen before me—the poor ninny has his own desert movie going on inside, only each horsehair A-rab is a threat—if only his lip, his face, would stay level, level like the honey bubble of the Official Plaster Man assured him it would—

  Miraculous! He could truly see into people for the first time—

  And yes, that little capsule sliding blissly down the gullet was LSD.

  VERY SOON IT WAS ALREADY TIME TO PUSH ON BEYOND ANOTHER fantasy, the fantasy of the Menlo Park clinicians. The clinicians’ fantasy was that the volunteers were laboratory animals that had to be dealt with objectively, quantitatively. It was well known that people who volunteered for drug experiments tended to be unstable anyway. So the doctors would come in in white smocks, with the clipboards, taking blood pressures and heart rates and urine specimens and having them try to solve simple problems in logic and mathematics, such as adding up columns of figures, and having them judge time and distances, although they did have them talk into tape recorders, too. But the doctors were so out of it. They never took LSD themselves and they had absolutely no comprehension, and it couldn’t be put into words anyway.

  Sometimes you wanted to paint it huge—Lovell is under LSD in the clinic and he starts drawing a huge Buddha on the wall. It somehow encompasses the whole—White Smock comes in and doesn’t even look at it, he just starts asking the old questions on the clipboard, so Lovell suddenly butts in:

  “What do you think of my Buddha?”

  White Smock looks at it a moment and says, “It looks very feminine. Now let’s see how rapidly you can add up this column of figures here …”

  Very feminine. Deliver us from the clichés that have locked up even these so-called experimenters’ brains like the accordion fences in the fur-store window—and Kesey was having the same problem with his boys. One of them was a young guy with a lie-down crewcut and the straightest face, the straightest, blandest, most lineless awfulest Plaster Man honey bubble levelest face ever made, and he would come in and open his eyes wide once as if to make sure this muscular hulk on the bed were still rational and then get this smug tone in his voice which poured out into the room like absorbent cotton choked in chalk dust from beaten erasers Springfield High School.

  “Now when I say ‘Go,’ you tell me when you think a minute is up by saying, ‘Now.’ Have you got that?”

  Yeah, he had that. Kesey was soaring on LSD and his sense of time was wasted, and thousands of thoughts per second were rapping around between synapses, fractions of a second, so what the hell is a minute—but then one thought stuck in there, held … ma-li-cious, de-li-cious. He remembered that his pulse had been running 75 beats a minute every time they took it, so when Dr. Fog says ‘Go,’ Kesey slyly slides his slithering finger onto his pulse and counts up to 75 and says:

  “Now!”

  Dr. Smog looks at his stop watch. “Amazing!” he says, and walks out of the room.

  You said it, bub, but like a lot of other people, you don’t even know.

  LSD; HOW CAN—NOW THAT THOSE BIG FAT LETTERS ARE BABBLING out on coated stock from every newsstand … But this was late 1959, early 1960, a full two years before Mom & Dad & Buddy & Sis heard of the dread letters and clucked because Drs. Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert were french-frying the brains of Harvard boys with it. It was even before Dr. Humphry Osmond had invented the term “psychodelic,” which was later amended to “psychedelic” to get rid of the nuthouse connotation of “psycho” … LSD! It was quite a little secret to have stumbled onto, a hulking supersecret, in fact—the triumph of the guinea pigs! In a short time he and Lovell had tried the whole range of the drugs, LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, peyote, IT 290 the superamphetamine, Ditran the bummer, morning-glory seeds. They were onto a discovery that the Menlo Park clinicians themselves never—mighty fine irony here: the White Smocks were supposedly using them. Instead the White Smocks had handed them the very key itself. And you don’t even know, bub … with these drugs your perception is altered enough that you find yourself looking out of completely strange eyeholes. All of us have a great deal of our minds locked shut. We’re shut off from our own world. Aand these drugs seem to be the key to open these locked doors. How many?—maybe two dozen people in the world were on to this incredible secret! One was Aldous Huxley, who had taken mescaline and written about it in The Doors of Perception. He compared the brain to a “reducing valve.” In ordinary perception, the senses send an overwhelming flood of information to the brain, which the brain then filters down to a trickle it can manage for the purpose of survival in a highly competitive world. Man has become so rational, so utilitarian, that the trickle becomes most pale and thin. It is efficient, for mere survival, but it screens out the most wondrous part of man’s potential experience without his even knowing it. We’re shut off from our own world. Primitive man once experienced the rich and sparkling flood of the senses fully. Children experience it for a few months—until “normal” training, conditioning, close the doors on this other world, usually for good. Somehow, Huxley had said, the drugs opened these ancient doors. And through them modern man may at last go, and rediscover his divine birthright—

  But these are words, man! And you couldn’t put it into words. The White Smocks liked to put it into words, like hallucination and dissociative phenomena. They could understand the visual skyrockets. Give them a good case of an ashtray turning into a Venus flytrap or eyelid movies of crystal cathedrals, and they could groove on that, Kluver, op cit., p. 43n. That was swell. But don’t you see?—the visual stuff was just the décor with LSD. In fact, you might go through the whole experience without any true hallucination. The whole thing was … the experience … this certain indescribable feeling … Indescribable, because words can only jog the memory, and if there is no memory of … The experience of the barrier between the subjective and the objective, the personal and the impersonal, the I and the not-I disappearing … that feeling! … Or can you remember when you were a child watching someone put a pencil to a sheet of paper for the first time, to draw a picture … and the line begins to grow—into a nose! and it is not just a pattern of graphite line on a sheet of paper but the very miracle of creation itself and your own dreams flowed into that magical … growing … line, and it was not a picture but a miracle … an experience … and now that you’re soaring on LSD that feeling is coming on again—only now the creation is of the entire universe—

  MEANWHILE, OVER ON PERRY LANE, THIS WASN’T PRECISELY the old Searching Hick they all knew and loved. Suddenly Kesey—well, he was soft-spoken, all right, but he came on with a lot of vital energy. Gradually the whole Perry Lane thing was gravitating around Kesey. Volunteer Kesey gave himself over to science over at the Menlo Park Vets hospital—and somehow drugs were getting up and walking out of there and over to Perry Lane, LSD, mescaline, IT-290, mostly. Being hip on Perry Lane now had an element nobody had ever dreamed about before, wild-flying, mind-blowing drugs. Some of the old Perry Lane luminaries’ cool was tested and they were found wanting. Robin White and Gwen Davis were against the new drug thing. That was all right, because Kesey had had about enough of them, and the power was with Kesey. Perry Lane took on a kind of double personality, which is to say, Kesey’s. Half the time it would be just like some kind of college fraternity row, with everybody out on a nice autumn Saturday afternoon on the grass in the dapple shadows of the trees and honeysuckle tendrils playing touch football or basketball. An hour later, however, Kese
y and his circle would be hooking down something that in the entire world only they and a few avant-garde neuropharmacological researchers even knew about, drugs of the future, of the neuropharmacologists’ centrifuge utopia, the coming age of …

  Well shee-ut. An’ I don’t reckon we give much of a damn any more about the art of living in France, either, boys, every frog ought to have a little paunch, like Henry Miller said, and go to bed every night in pajamas with collars and piping on them—just take a letter for me and mail it down to old Morris at Morris Orchids, Laredo, Texas, boys, tell him about enough peyote cactus to mulch all the mouldering widows’ graves in poor placid Palo Alto. Yes. They found out they could send off to a place called Morris Orchids in Laredo and get peyote, and one of the new games of Perry Lane—goodbye Robin, goodbye Gwen—got to be seeing who was going down to the Railway Express at the railroad station and pick up the shipment, since possession of peyote, although not of LSD, was already illegal in California. There would be these huge goddamned boxes of the stuff, 1,000 buds and roots $70; buds only—slightly higher. If they caught you, you were caught, because there was no excuse possible. There was no other earthly reason to have these goddamned fetid plants except to get high as a coon. And they would all set about cutting them into strips and putting them out to dry, it took days, and then grinding them up into powder and packing them in gelatin capsules or boiling it down to a gum and putting it in the capsules or just making a horrible goddamned broth that was so foul, so unbelievably vile, you had to chill it numb to try to kill the taste and fast for a day so you wouldn’t have anything on your stomach, just to keep eight ounces of it down. But then—soar. Perry Lane, Perry Lane.

  HE HADN’T EVEN MEANT TO WRITE THIS BOOK. HE HAD BEEN working on another one, called Zoo about North Beach. Lovell had suggested why didn’t he get a job as night attendant on the psychiatric ward at Menlo Park. He could make some money, and since there wasn’t much doing on the ward at night, he could work on Zoo. But Kesey got absorbed in the life on the psychiatric ward. The whole system—if they set out to invent the perfect Anti-cure for what ailed the men on this ward, they couldn’t have done it better. Keep them cowed and docile. Play on the weakness that drove them nuts in the first place. Stupefy the bastards with tranquilizers and if they still get out of line haul them up to the “shock shop” and punish them. Beautiful—

  Sometimes he would go to work high on acid. He could see into their faces. Sometimes he wrote, and sometimes he drew pictures of the patients, and as the lines of the ball-point greasy creased into the paper the lines of their faces, he could—the interiors of these men came into the lines, the ball-point crevasses, it was the most incredible feeling, the anguish and the pain came right out front and flowed in the crevasses in their faces, and in the ball-point crevasses, the same—one!—crevasses now, black starling nostrils, black starling eyes, blind black starling geek cry on every face: “Me! Me! Me! Me! I am—Me!”—he could see clear into them. And—how could you tell anybody about this? they’ll say you’re a nut yourself—but afterwards, not high on anything, he could still see into people.

  The novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, was about a roustabout named Randle McMurphy. He is a big healthy animal, but he decides to fake insanity in order to get out of a short jail stretch he is serving on a work farm and into what he figures will be the soft life of a state mental hospital. He comes onto the ward with his tight reddish-blond curls tumbling out from under his cap, cracking jokes and trying to get some action going among these deadasses in the loony bin. They can’t resist the guy. They suddenly want to do things. The tyrant who runs the place, Big Nurse, hates him for weakening … Control, and the System. By and by, many of the men resent him for forcing them to struggle to act like men again. Finally, Big Nurse is driven to play her trump card and finish off McMurphy by having him lobotomized. But this crucifixion inspires an Indian patient, a schizoid called Chief Broom, to rise up and break out of the hospital and go sane: namely, run like hell for open country.

  Chief Broom. The very one. From the point of view of craft, Chief Broom was his great inspiration. If he had told the story through McMurphy’s eyes, he would have had to end up with the big bruiser delivering a lot of homilies about his down-home theory of mental therapy. Instead, he told the story through the Indian. This way he could present a schizophrenic state the way the schizophrenic himself, Chief Broom, feels it and at the same time report the McMurphy Method more subtly.

  Morris Orchids! He wrote several passages of the book under peyote and LSD. He even had someone give him a shock treatment, clandestinely, so he could write a passage in which Chief Broom comes back from “the shock shop.” Eating Laredo buds—he would write like mad under the drugs. After he came out of it, he could see that a lot of it was junk. But certain passages—like Chief Broom in his schizophrenic fogs—it was true vision, a little of what you could see if you opened the doors of perception, friends …

  RIGHT AFTER HE FINISHED ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST, Kesey sublet his cottage on Perry Lane and he and Faye went back up to Oregon. This was in June, 1961. He spent the summer working in his brother Chuck’s creamery in Springfield to accumulate some money. Then he and Faye moved into a little house in Florence, Oregon, about 50 miles west of Springfield, near the ocean, in logging country. Kesey started gathering material for his second novel, Sometimes a Great Notion, which was about a logging family. He took to riding early in the morning and at night in the “crummies.” These were pickup trucks that served as buses taking the loggers to and from the camps. At night he would hang around the bars where the loggers went. He was Low Rent enough himself to talk to them. After about four months of that, they headed back to Perry Lane, where he was going to do the writing.

  ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST WAS PUBLISHED IN FEBRUARY, 1962, and it made his literary reputation immediately:

  “A smashing achievement”—Mark Schorer

  “A great new American novelist”—Jack Kerouac

  “Powerful poetic realism”—Life

  “An amazing first novel”—Boston Traveler

  “This is a first novel of special worth”—New York Herald Tribune

  “His storytelling is so effective, his style so impetuous, his grasp of characters so certain, that the reader is swept along … His is a large, robust talent, and he has written a large, robust book”—Saturday Review

  AND ON THE LANE—ALL THIS WAS A CONFIRMATION OF everything they and Kesey had been doing. For one thing there was the old Drug Paranoia—the fear that this wild uncharted drug thing they were into would gradually … rot your brain. Well, here was the answer. Chief Broom!

  And McMurphy … but of course. The current fantasy … he was a McMurphy figure who was trying to get them to move off their own snug-harbor dead center, out of the plump little game of being ersatz daring and ersatz alive, the middle-class intellectual’s game, and move out to … Edge City … where it was scary, but people were whole people. And if drugs were what unlocked the doors and enabled you to do this thing and realize all this that was in you, then so let it be …

  Not even on Perry Lane did people really seem to catch the thrust of the new book he was working on, Sometimes a Great Notion. It was about the head of a logging clan, Hank Stamper, who defies a labor union and thereby the whole community he lives in by continuing his logging operation through a strike. It was an unusual book. It was a novel in which the strikers are the villains and the strikebreaker is the hero. The style was experimental and sometimes difficult. And the main source of “mythic” reference was not Sophocles or even Sir James Frazer but … yes, Captain Marvel. The union leaders, the strikers, and the townspeople were the tarantulas, all joyfully taking their vow: “We shall wreak vengeance and abuse on all whose equals we are not … and ‘will to equality’ shall henceforth be the name for virtue; and against all that has power we want to raise our clamor!” Hank Stamper was, quite intentionally, Captain Marvel. Once known as … Überm
ensch. The current fantasy …