The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

by Tom Wolfe

  Deep into the Unspoken Thing,

  The Pranksters now aligned

  Along a sheerly dividing line:

  Before the bus and

  After the bus,

  On the bus or

  Off the bus,

  A sheerly Diluvial divide:

  Did you take the Epoch Ride?

  One-way ticket into the nirvana thickets

  Of the ex redwood cathedra Unspoken Thing.

  Most peaceful synching in,

  Serene bacchanal

  For all …

  … except Sandy. For Sandy, the bus had stopped but he hadn’t. It was as if the bus had hit a wall and he had shot out the window and was living in the suspended interminable moment before he hit—what? He didn’t know. All he knew was that there would be a crash unless the momentum of the Pranksters suddenly resumed and caught up with him the way the Flash, in the Pranksters’ ubiquitous comic books, caught speeding bullets by streaking at precisely their speed and reaching out and picking them up like eggs …

  Sandy went about wide-eyed and nervous, an endless ratchet of activity that no one quite comprehended at first. The bus was parked out in front of the log house and Kesey would be inside the bus doing something and Sandy, outside the door, would suddenly begin arguing with him over some esoteric point of the sound system. Kesey was keeping the tapes on a hick level, he was saying. Kesey was, like, rustling cellophane in front of a microphone for “fire,” and so forth and so on. So many complaints! Until Kesey puts his arms up on the walls of the bus in the Christ on the Cross gesture—which is precisely what one of Sandy’s brothers used to do when he started complaining—and this drives Sandy into a rage and he yells Fuck you! and gives Kesey the finger. Kesey streaks out of the door of the bus and pins Sandy up against the side of the bus—and it is all over as fast as that. Sandy is overwhelmed. He has never seen Kesey use his tremendous strength against anyone before, and it is overwhelming, the idea of it even. But it is all over in no time. Kesey is suddenly calm again and asks Sandy to come with him to the backhouse, the shack by the creek. He wants to talk to him.

  So they go out there and Kesey talks to Sandy about Sandy’s attitude. Sandy is still Dis-mount, still getting off the bus continually, and why? You don’t understand, says Sandy. You don’t understand my dis-mounting. It’s like climbing a mountain. Would you rather climb the mountain or have a helicopter deposit you on the top? The continual climb, the continual remounting, makes it a richer experience, and so on. Kesey nods in a somewhat abstracted way and says O.K., Sandy …

  But Sandy feels paranoid … what do they really think of him? What are they planning? What insidious prank? He can’t get it out of his mind that they are building up to some prank of enormous proportions, at his expense. A Monstrous Prank … He can’t sleep, his brain keeps going at the furious speed of the bus on the road, like an eternal trip on speed.

  Then Kesey devised a game called “Power.” He took a dartboard and covered it with Masonite and put a spinner in the middle and marked off spoke lines forming one section for each Prankster. Each person’s Prankster name was written in his section, Intrepid Traveler for Babbs, Mal Function for Hagen, Speed Limit for Cassady, Hassler for Ron Bevirt, Gretchen Fetchin for Paula—in truth, her old name and persona were gone entirely and she was now a new person known as Gretchen Fetchin or Gretch. Sandy looked and in his section it said: “dis-MOUNT,” with the heavy accent on Mount, even as he had explained it to Kesey in the backhouse. He was overwhelmed with relief and gratitude. Kesey knew! Kesey understood! He was back in the bus.

  Everybody was to write out some “tasks” on slips of paper and they would all be put in a big pile. Then the spinner was spun, and if it landed on you, you reached into the pile and pulled out a “task,” which you then had to do, and the others gave you points according to how well you had done the task, on a scale of one to five points, five being the best. A lot of the tasks were very pranked-up, like “put on an article of somebody else’s clothing.” There was a scoreboard and everybody moved his counter up the scoreboard as he picked up points. Everybody made his own counter. Sandy was making his out of Sculpt Metal. He stretched it to a long spidery length, then suddenly compressed it into an ugly wad, because that was the way he was beginning to feel. So Page picked it up and made a nice little form out of it, like a bridge, and everybody said that’s the way it should be done—and Sandy feels the paranoia coming back …

  The prize for winning was: Power. Thirty minutes of absolute power in which your word was law and everyone had to do whatever you wanted. Very allegorical, this game. By and by Babbs won a game and he ordered everybody to bring everything they possessed into the living room. Everybody went forth and hauled in all their stuff, out to the bedrooms, tents, Kampers, sleeping bags, the bus, and brought in a ragamuffin mountain of clothes, shoes, boots, toys, paint pots, toothbrushes, books, boxes, capsules, stashes, letters, litter, junk. It was all piled up in the center of the room, a marvelous Rat mountain of junk. “Now,” said Babbs, “we redistribute the wealth.” And he would hold up some piece of it and say, “Who wants one 1964 Gretchen Fetchin toothbrush?” and somebody would hold up his hand and it would go to him and somebody else would catalogue it all solemnly on a legal pad.

  Then the pointer hits Sandy and he picks up a task, a slip of paper. It is in Gretch’s handwriting, and it says: “Go out and build a fire.” He reads it out loud and just keeps staring at it. Then they all stare at him, waiting for him to get up and go out and build a fire, and he feels them staring and then he knows—it is a very clever plot to get him out of the house, get him outside in the dark, and then pull the Monstrous Prank—

  And he starts blurting it all out. I can’t do it. Can’t you see how it is? It’s getting awful—I can’t sleep and everything is like this:

  He lays the fingers of one hand over the fingers of the other, forming a trellis pattern, and peers through the spaces in between to show how everything keeps breaking up, fragmenting, his whole field of vision, ever since the DMT trip at Millbrook, and the sea of flames and the paranoia, the everlasting paranoia, he blurts it all out, everything that is hanging him up and rocketing him toward—what?

  And suddenly it is very quiet in the log house. Every Prankster eye is upon him, absorbed, giving him total … Attention, He has come all the way out front. The furious motion stops, and he suddenly feels :::: peace.

  “How many points do we give him?” says Kesey.

  And around the circle everyone says “Five!” “Five!” “Five!” “Five!” “Five!”—

  “Three,” says Gretch, who had written the task in the first place—and Sandy—a small microgram of paranoia creeps back in like a mite …

  THE PRANKSTERS NOW REALIZED THAT SANDY WAS IN A BAD way. Kesey had a saying, “Feed the hungry bee.” So the Pranksters set about showering … Attention on Sandy, to try to give him a feeling of being at the cool center of the whole thing. But he kept misinterpreting their gestures. Why are they staring? His insomnia became more and more severe. One night he walked down the road to the housing development, Redwood Terrace, to try to borrow some Sominex. He was just going to walk up to a door in the middle of the night and knock and ask for some Sominex. Somehow he had the old New York apartment-house idea that you walk down the hall and borrow a cup of sugar, even if you don’t know the people. So he starts knocking on doors and asking for Sominex. Of course, they all either panic and shut the door or tell him to fuck off. The people of Redwood Terrace were a little paranoid themselves by this time about the crazies down the road at Kesey’s.

  By day it was no better. As his insomnia got worse, he started having more fragmented vision and finally … he looks at the wild-painted bus and the lurid chaos of the swirls changes into … the tunnel! A tunnel they had gone through, a long tunnel, in which he had been possessed by intense claustrophobia and the paranoid certainty that they would never emerge from the tunnel, and now the tunnel appears on the side of the bus
in horrifying detail. He turns away … there is the cool limelit bower, cathedral in the redwoods, serenity … he turns back to the bus slowly :::::::: IT IS STILL THERE! THE TUNNEL! ::::: THE BUS! ::::: NOW PAINTED AS IF BY A MASTER, A VERY TITIAN :::: AN HIERONYMUS BOSCH :::: A MATTHIAS GRÜNEWALD :::: WITH THE MOST HORRIFYING SCENES OF MY LIFE.

  SALVATION? KESEY ANNOUNCES THEY ARE GETTING BACK ON the bus—moving again—and going up to Esalen Institute up in Big Sur, four hours drive to the south. Esalen was an “experiment in living,” as they say, a sort of Roughin-it resort perched on a cliff about 1,000 feet above the Pacific. A very dramatic piece of Nature, in the nineteenth-century seascape fashion. Waves crashing way down below and sparkling air way up here and a view of half the world, mountains, ocean, sky, the whole show, in a word, for which Big Sur is famous. There was a lodge and a swimming pool and a stretch of greensward out to the edge of the cliff and some hot sulphur springs about 100 yards away, also perched on the side of a cliff, in which one could bathe and gaze out over the eternal ocean. Behind the lodge were rows of tiny cabins and a few trailers. These were for the clientele. The clients—well, to put it simply, Esalen was a place where educated middle-class adults came in the summer to try to get out of The Rut and wiggle their fannies a bit.

  The main theoretician at Esalen was a Gestalt psychologist named Fritz Perls. Perls was a great goateed man in his seventies who went about in a jump suit made of blue terrycloth. He had the air of a very learned, dignified, and authoritative blue bear. Perls was the father of the Now Trip. His theory was that most people live fantasy lives. They live totally in the past or in terms of what they expect in the future, which amounts to fear, generally. Perls tried to teach his patients, pupils, and the clients at Esalen to live Now for a change, in the present, to become aware of their bodies and all the information their senses brought them, to shelve their fears and seize the moment. They went through “marathon encounters,” in which a group stayed together for days and brought everything out front, no longer hiding behind custom, saying what they really felt—shouts, accusations, embraces, tears—a perfect delight, of course: “You want to know what I really think of you …” One of the exercises at Esalen was the Now Trip exercise, in which you try to catalogue the information your senses are bringing you in the present moment. You make a rapid series of statements beginning with the word “Now”: “Now I feel the wind cooling the perspiration on my forehead … Now I hear a bus coming up the drive in low gear … Now I hear a Beatles record playing over a loudspeaker …”

  A bus? A Beatles record? The Pranksters are here, Now Trippers. Kesey had been invited to Esalen to conduct a seminar entitled “A Trip with Ken Kesey.” Nobody had quite counted on the entire fully wired and wailing Prankster ensemble, however. The clientele at Esalen had come a long way in a few weeks and many were beginning to peek over the edge of The Rut. And what they saw … it could be scary out there in Freedomland. The Pranksters were friendly, but they glowed in the dark. They pranked about like maniacs in the serene Hot Springs. Precious few signed up for a trip with Ken Kesey, even in seminar form.

  Sandy, meanwhile, was swinging wildly from feelings of paranoia to feelings of godly … Power. And the trip was always the bus. One moment it was covered with the Hieronymus Bosch scenes of his most private Hell. The next—he controls the bus. One night he discovers he can unpaint the bus just by staring at it. He has psychokinetic powers. His stare bears the power of life or death. The waves crash below the Esalen cliff—and he stares at the bus and … unpaints it. He strips one whole side down to its original sunny school-bus yellow. The whole Prankster overlay is gone. A trick of the mind? He looks away, out over the Pacific and at the stars—then swings back suddenly toward the bus ::::: IT IS STILL UNPAINTED :::: STILL VIRGIN SCHOOL-BUS YELLOW.

  He has the power—but can it ward off the Monstrous Prank? The Pranksters take the bus into Monterey to see a movie, The Night of the Iguana. He sits in the back of the bus, so he can watch them. If any of them tries anything, with one stare he can … They go into the theater and he lags behind, then sits several rows behind them. To keep an eye out … There is a Tom and Jerry cartoon on the screen. The mouse, Jerry, tricks the cat, Tom, and the cat goes off a cliff and hits, flattened in an explosion of eyeballs, thousands of eyeballs. Everyone is laughing, but to Sandy it is sickening, incredibly brutal. He jumps up and runs out of the theater and wanders around Monterey for an hour and a half or so. Then he wanders back to the theater, and Hagen is standing outside.

  “Where the hell have you been? Kesey is looking all over for you.”

  Sandy runs back into the theater. Kesey! He looks up on the screen—and the mouse, Jerry, tricks the cat, Tom, and the cat goes off a cliff and hits, flattened in an explosion of eyeballs, thousands of eyeballs … Sandy flees again. Kesey is now waiting outside. He coaxes Sandy on to the bus and they head back to Esalen.

  Back in Esalen, in his cabin, Sandy falls half asleep into … DREAM WARS! It is his Power vs. Kesey’s, like Dr. Strange vs. Aggamon, and one of them will kill the other in the Dream War … He exerts the utmost psychic energy … opens his eyes and makes out a machine in the cabin—a heater? It looks like a heater but it is Kesey’s death instrument, and in that moment the thermostat turns on the machine and a tiny red light comes on—Kesey’s ray gun—has triumphed, killed him, and Sandy falls off the bed, dead, lying on the floor, and he leaves his body in astral projection and sails out over the Pacific, out from the Esalen cliff, out for 40 or 50 miles, soaring, and the wind goes in gusts, huhhhhhhnnnhh, huhhhhhhhhhnnnh, huhhhhhhhhhnnnh, and he is the wind, not even a compact spirit flying but a totally diffuse being, dissolved in the upper ethers, and he can see the whole moonlit ocean and Esalen way back there. Then he comes to, and he is on the floor of the cabin, breathing hard, huhhhhhhhhnnnh, huhhhhhhhhhnnh, huhhhhhhhnnnh.

  “San-dy! San-dy! San-dy!”—daylight, and they’re outside the cabin, calling him, the Pranksters … what Monstrous Prank?—

  In fact, Kesey had instructed the Pranksters to give Sandy total Attention to try to bring him around, to put him at the center of everything. Sandy comes out, sees them staring but takes it for glowers and aggression … Nevertheless—on to the bus, and they ride out along Big Sur in the sunlight. Kesey and the Pranksters have prepared a long Sandy document, twelve pages of text and drawings, very fanciful, like a psychic brief, bringing all of Sandy’s fears out front and dispelling them in camaraderie—and it begins to work. Then as they roll along the cliff highway Kesey takes Sandy up on top of the bus for a Now Trip. They sit up there in the sun with the wind streaming by and Kesey is grooving off the designs on the hood of the bus: “Now I see the green snake form going into the red and the edge of it melts into …” and so forth, and Sandy grooves off Kesey’s Now Trip—Kesey!—Total Attention!—and it is like he is coming around at last, he feels on the bus again. And then he decides to take Kesey on a Now Trip, sailing along the cliff highway. “Now,” says Sandy, “I see the ocean like a sheet of ice slanting in toward the shore … Now I see three suns …”—in truth! the vibration of the bus has thrown him into the DMT reaction. He gets a triple image from the vibration and shaking of the bus, but instead of refocusing on one sun, he keeps seeing three. Kesey looks up at the sky, and says, “Yeah, yeah,” grooving with it, which makes Sandy feel very good …

  But then nighttime. “San-dy! San-dy!” They’re trying to coax him out of the cabin again. For—what? Why, the Monstrous Prank, naturally, but … he has Power. Outside—they have candles, the Pranksters do, and they’re beginning a candlelight march down a path in a ravine that cuts down through the cliff, all the way to the water’s edge. For—what? Why, the Monst—But then Kesey’s wife, Faye, comes up very silent and smiling and loving and gives him a candle and lights it, and Faye is like complete honesty and love, so he starts off, following them down the path, holding candles, while the surf booms up the ravine from below. Why do they want him to join this spooky procession? Why, for
the most Monstrous Prank of all—to kill him at the water’s edge, but he has the power—the candle dims in the wind, and then comes back up, burning full—but it is not the wind, it is Sandy—he can make it shrink and dim down just by staring at it, psychokinesis, then draw it back up, all with his mind, he can control the flame utterly, and it can control him, for they are one and the same, God, and he trudges down the ravine, becoming more and more powerful—but a girl named Lola has stopped ahead of him. He draws closer and she has a candle and is tilting it so that the wax drips on her fingers and she is grooving over the wax dripping over her fingers and grinning, and her hand, in wax, turns white and dead, a skeleton, and her grin, lit from beneath by the candle, turns waxy and zombie—THE DEATH STARTS HERE—and Sandy bolts, charging back up the ravine—

  —not knowing that the whole procession had been set up as a ceremony of love, a love trip, for him, to bring him around, a candlelit celebration of Sandy down by the water—

  —but he is long gone, running down the cliff highway now, toward Monterey, running until his lungs give out, then walking, then running up to the lights in the houses on the cliffs over the water, Big Sur summer places, and knocking on the door, screaming incoherently about jumping off the cliffs; until the police come. Gotcha! Which is a joke, because he can annihilate them any moment he chooses, with a psychokinetic ray—

  They put him in the back seat, streaking down Route 1 toward Monterey, wheeling around the curves, faster and faster—

  “Don’t go so fast!” Sandy says.

  “What?”

  “Don’t go so fast!”

  “Listen,” the cop says. “I’ll slow down if you stop staring at the back of my head.”

  “Ahhhhhh.”

  “Look out the window or something. Look at the scenery. Stop staring at the back of my head.”

  So he takes his eyes out of the back of the cop’s skull. Two fever hole depressions. Another moment—