The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

by Tom Wolfe

  THE MONTEREY POLICE HELD HIM IN THE JAIL IN MONTEREY until his brother Chris could get there from New York. Chris ran into Kesey at the jail. We’ve got to get him out of here, said Kesey. What do you mean? We’ve got to get him back where he belongs, with the Pranksters. Chris took Sandy back to New York for treatment. It was a long time before Chris knew what in the hell Kesey had been talking about.

  chapter XI

  The Unspoken Thing

  HOW TO TELL IT! … THE CURRENT FANTASY … I NEVER heard any of the Pranksters use the word religious to describe the mental atmosphere they shared after the bus trip and the strange days in Big Sur. In fact, they avoided putting it into words. And yet—

  They got on the bus and headed back to La Honda in the old Big Sur summertime, all frozen sunshine up here, and no one had to say it: they were all deep into some weird shit now, as they would just as soon call it by way of taking the curse … off the Unspoken Thing. Things were getting very psychic. It was like when Sandy drove 191 miles in South Dakota and then he had looked up at the map on the ceiling of the bus and precisely those 191 miles were marked in red … Sandy ::::: back in Brain Scan country the White Smocks would never in a million years comprehend where he had actually been … which was where they all were now, also known as Edge City … Back in Kesey’s log house in La Honda, all sitting around in the evening in the main room, it’s getting cool outside, and Page Browning: I think I’ll close the window—and in that very moment another Prankster gets up and closes it for him and smi-i-i-i-les and says nothing … The Unspoken Thing—and these things keep happening over and over. They take a trip up into the High Sierras and Cassady pulls the bus off the main road and starts driving up a little mountain road—see where she goes. The road is so old and deserted the pavement is half broken up and they keep climbing and twisting up into nowhere, but the air is nice, and up at the top of the grade the bus begins bucking and gulping and won’t pull any more. It just stops. It turns out they’re out of gas, which is a nice situation because it’s nightfall and they’re stranded totally hell west of nowhere with not a gas station within thirty, maybe fifty miles. Nothing to do but stroke themselves out on the bus and go to sleep … hmmmmmm … scorpions with boots on red TWA Royal Ambassador slumber slippers on his big Stinger Howard Hughes in a sleeping bag on the floor in a marble penthouse in the desert

  DAWN

  All wake up to a considerable fetching and hauling and grinding up the grade below them and over the crest comes a

  CHEVRON

  gasoline tanker, a huge monster of a tanker. Which just stops like they all met somewhere before and gives them a tankful of gas and without a word heads on into the Sierras toward absolutely

  NOTHING

  Babbs—Cosmic control, eh Hassler!

  And Kesey—Where does it go? I don’t think man has ever been there. We’re under cosmic control and have been for a long long time, and each time it builds, it’s bigger, and it’s stronger. And then you find out … about Cosmo, and you discover that he’s running the show …

  The Unspoken Thing; Kesey’s role and the whole direction the Pranksters were taking—all the Pranksters were conscious of it, but none of them put it into words, as I say. They made a point of not putting it into words. That in itself was one of the unspoken rules. If you label it this, then it can’t be that … Kesey took great pains not to make his role explicit. He wasn’t the authority, somebody else was: “Babbs says …” “Page says …” He wasn’t the leader, he was the “non-navigator.” He was also the non-teacher. “Do you realize that you’re a teacher here?” Kesey says, “Too much, too much,” and walks away … Kesey’s explicit teachings were all cryptic, metaphorical; parables, aphorisms: “You’re either on the bus or off the bus.” “Feed the hungry bee,” “Nothing lasts,” “See with your ears and hear with your eyes,” “Put your good where it will do the most,” “What did the mirror say? It’s done with people.” To that extent it was like Zen Buddhism, with the inscrutable koans, in which the novice says, “What is the secret of Zen?” and Hui-neng the master says, “What did your face look like before your parents begat you?” To put it into so many words, to define it, was to limit it. If it’s this, then it can’t be that … Yet there it was! Everyone had his own thing he was working out, but it all fit into the group thing, which was—“the Unspoken Thing,” said Page Browning, and that was as far as anyone wanted to go with words.

  For that matter, there was no theology to it, no philosophy, at least not in the sense of an ism. There was no goal of an improved moral order in the world or an improved social order, nothing about salvation and certainly nothing about immortality or the life hereafter. Hereafter! That was a laugh. If there was ever a group devoted totally to the here and now it was the Pranksters. I remember puzzling over this. There was something so … religious in the air, in the very atmosphere of the Prankster life, and yet one couldn’t put one’s finger on it. On the face of it there was just a group of people who had shared an unusual psychological state, the LSD experience—

  But exactly! The experience—that was the word! and it began to fall into place. In fact, none of the great founded religions, Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, Jainism, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, none of them began with a philosophical framework or even a main idea. They all began with an overwhelming new experience, what Joachim Wach called “the experience of the holy,” and Max Weber, “possession of the deity,” the sense of being a vessel of the divine, of the All-one. I remember I never truly understood what they were talking about when I first read of such things. I just took their weighty German word for it. Jesus, Mani, Zoroaster, Gautama Buddha—at the very outset the leader did not offer his circle of followers a better state hereafter or an improved social order or any reward other than a certain “psychological state in the here and now,” as Weber put it. I suppose what I never really comprehended was that he was talking about an actual mental experience they all went through, an ecstasy, in short. In most cases, according to scriptures and legend, it happened in a flash. Mohammed fasting and meditating on a mountainside near Mecca and—flash!—ecstasy, vast revelation and the beginning of Islam. Zoroaster hauling haoma water along the road and—flash!—he runs into the flaming form of the Archangel Vohu Mano, messenger of Ahura Mazda, and the beginning of Zoroastrianism. Saul of Tarsus walking along the road to Damascus and—flash!—he hears the voice of the Lord and becomes a Christian. Plus God knows how many lesser figures in the 2,000 years since then, Christian Rosenkreuz and his “God-illuminated” brotherhood of Rosicrucians, Emanuel Swedenborg whose mind suddenly “opened” in 1743, Meister Eckhart and his disciples Suso and Tauler, and in the twentieth-century Sadhu Sundar Singh—with—flash!—a vision at the age of 16 and many times thereafter; “ … often when I come out of ecstasy I think the whole world must be blind not to see what I see, everything is so near and clear … there is no language which will express the things which I see and hear in the spiritual world …” Sounds like an acid head, of course. What they all saw in … a flash was the solution to the basic predicament of being human, the personal I, Me, trapped, mortal and helpless, in a vast impersonal It, the world around me. Suddenly! —All-in-one!—flowing together, I into It, and It into Me, and in that flow I perceive a power, so near and so clear, that the whole world is blind to. All the modern religions, and the occult mysteries, for that matter, talk about an Other World—whether Brahma’s or the flying saucers’—that the rational work-a-day world is blind to. The—so called! friends—rational world. If only they, Mom & Dad & Buddy & Sis, dear-but-square ones, could but know the kairos, the supreme moment … The historic visions have been explained in many ways, as the result of epilepsy, self-hypnosis, changes in metabolism due to fasting, or actual intervention by gods—or drugs: Zoroastrianism began in a grand bath of haoma water, which was the same as the Hindu soma, and was unquestionably a drug. The experience!

  And following the experience—after I got to know the Pran
ksters, I went back and read Joachim Wach’s paradigm of the way religions are founded, written in 1944, and it was almost like a piece of occult precognition for me if I played it off against what I knew about the Pranksters:

  Following a profound new experience, providing a new illumination of the world, the founder, a highly charismatic person, begins enlisting disciples. These followers become an informally but closely knit association, bound together by the new experience, whose nature the founder has revealed and interpreted. The association might be called a circle, indicating that it is oriented toward a central figure with whom each of the followers is in intimate contact. The followers may be regarded as the founder’s companions, bound to him by personal devotion, friendship and loyalty. A growing sense of solidarity both binds the members together and differentiates them from any other form of social organization. Membership in the circle requires a complete break with the ordinary pursuits of life and a radical change in social relationships. Ties of family and kinship and loyalties of various kinds were at least temporarily relaxed or severed. The hardships, suffering and persecution that loomed for those who cast their lot with the group were counterbalanced by their high hopes and firm expectations … and so on. And of the founder himself: he has “visions, dreams, trances, frequent ecstasies” … “unusual sensitiveness and an intense emotional life” … “is ready to interpret manifestations of the divine” … “there is something elemental about [him], an uncompromising attitude and an archaic manner and language” … “He appears as a renewer of lost contracts with the hidden powers of life” … “does not usually come from the aristocracy, the learned or refined; frequently he emerges from simpler folk and remains true to his origin even in a changed environment” … “speaks cryptically, with words, signs, gestures, many metaphors, symbolic acts of a diverse nature” … “illuminates and interprets the past and anticipates the future in terms of the kairos (the supreme moment)”—

  The kairos!—the experience!

  —in one of two ways, according to Max Weber: as an “ethical” prophet, like Jesus or Moses, who outlines rules of conduct for his followers and describes God as a super-person who passes judgment on how they live up to the rules. Or as an “exemplary” prophet, like Buddha: for him, God is impersonal, a force, an energy, a unifying flow, an All-in-one. The exemplary prophet does not present rules of conduct. He presents his own life as an example for his followers …

  In all these religious circles, the groups became tighter and tighter by developing their own symbols, terminology, life styles, and, gradually, simple cultic practices, rites, often involving music and art, all of which grew out of the new experience and seemed weird or incomprehensible to those who have never had it. At that point they would also … “develop a strong urge to extend the message to all people.”

  … all people … Within the religious circle, status was always a simple matter. The world was simply and sheerly divided into “the aware,” those who had had the experience of being vessels of the divine, and a great mass of “the unaware,” “the unmusical,” “the unattuned.” Or: you’re either on the bus or off the bus. Consciously, the Aware were never snobbish toward the Unaware, but in fact most of that great jellyfish blob of straight souls looked like hopeless cases—and the music of your flute from up top the bus just brought them up tighter. But these groups treated anyone who showed possibilities, who was a potential brother, with generous solicitude …

  … THE POTENTIALLY ATTUNED … BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE started showing up at Kesey’s in La Honda, and no one was turned away. They could stay there, live there, if they … seemed attuned. Mountain Girl was waiting out front of Kesey’s house when the bus came around the last bend on Route 84 and into the redwood gorge. Mountain Girl was a big brunette with a black motorcycle, wearing a T-shirt and dungarees. She was only 18 but big, about five-foot-nine, and heavy; and loud and sloppy, as far as that went. But it was funny … she had beautiful teeth and a smile that lit up one’s gizzard … Her name was Carolyn Adams, but she became Mountain Girl right away. As far as I know, nobody ever called her anything else after that, until the police got technical about it nine months later with her and eleven other Pranksters …

  Cassady had turned Mountain Girl on to Kesey’s place. She had been working as a technician in a biological laboratory in Palo Alto. She had a boyfriend who—well, he probably thought of himself as a “beatnik” in his square hip way. Only he never did anything, this boyfriend of hers. They never went anywhere. They never went out. So she went out by herself. She ended up one night in St. Michael’s Alley, one of Palo Alto’s little boho rookeries, at a birthday party for Cassady. Cassady said over the mountain and down under the redwoods was where it was at.

  Mountain Girl was a big hit with the Pranksters from the very start. She seemed always completely out front, without the slightest prompting. She was one big loud charge of vitality. Here comes Mountain Girl—and it was a thing that made you pick up, as soon as you saw her mouth broaden into a grin and her big brown eyes open, open, open, open until they practically exploded like sunspots in front of your eyes and you knew that wonderful countryfied voice was going to sing out something like:

  “Hey! Guess what we’re gonna do! We were just up to Baw’s”—the general store—“and we’re gonna git some seeds and plant some grass in Baw’s window box! Can’t you see it! The whole town’s gonna git turned on in six months!”—and so on.

  But underneath all the gits and gonnas, she turned out to be probably the brightest girl around there, with the possible exception of Faye. Faye said very little, so it was a moot point. Mountain Girl turned out to be from a highly respectable upper-middle-class background in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., a family of Unitarians. In any case, she caught on to everything right away. She was decisive and had all the nerve in the world. Also she was getting more beautiful every day. All it took was a few weeks of the rice and stew and irregular eating around Kesey’s, the old involuntary macrobiotic diet, so to speak, and she started thinning out and getting beautiful. None of this was lost on Kesey. He was the Mountain Man and she was the Mountain Girl. She was just right for him …

  Mountain Girl moved into a tent up on a little plateau on the hill behind the house, under the redwoods. Page Browning had a tent up there, too. So did Babbs and Gretch. Mike Hagen had his Screw Shack. The Screw Shack was a very stellar—Mal Function!—Hagen production. None of the boards lay true and none of the nails ever quite made it all the way in. The boards seemed to be huddled together in a tentative agreement. One day Kesey took a hammer and hit a single nail on the peak of the shack and the whole shack fell down.

  “Nothing lasts, Hagen!” yelled Mountain Girl, and her laugh boomed through the redwoods.

  And the Hermit’s Cave … One day Faye looked out the kitchen window and there was a little creature at the foot of the hill behind the house, peering out from the edge of the woods like a starved animal. He was a small, thin kid, barely five feet tall, but he had a huge black beard, like some Ozark g-nome in Barney Google. He just stood there with these big starveling eyes bugging out of his wild black shag, looking at the house. Faye brought him out a plate of tuna fish. He took it without saying anything and ate it; and never left. The Hermit!

  The Hermit hardly ever said anything, but he turned out to be perfectly literate, and he would talk to people he trusted, like Kesey. He was only 18. He had lived with his mother somewhere around La Honda. He had had a lot of trouble in school. He had had a lot of trouble everywhere. He was the Oddball. Finally he took off for the woods and lived up there barefoot, just wearing a shirt and Levi’s, killing animals and spearing fish for food. People caught glimpses of him now and again and high-school kids used to try to hunt him down and demolish his lean-tos and otherwise torment him. His wandering had brought him up to the woods up behind Kesey’s house, a wild stretch that had been designated “Sam McDonald Park” but never cleared.

  The Hermit built himself a Hermit’s Cave down in a p
it in a dark green moldy mossy gully that dropped off the path up into the woods. He filled it with objects that winked and blinked and cooed. He was also keeper of the communal acid stash down there in the cave. And he had other secrets, such as his diaries … the Hermit Memoirs, in which real life and his Hermit fantasy ran together in wriggling rivers of little boys and lost hunters whom only the Hermit could rescue … Nobody ever knew his real name at all until a few months later when, as I say, the police would get technical about it …

  Then Babbs discovered Day-Glo, Day-Glo paint, and started painting it up the very trunks of the redwoods, great zappers of green, orange, yellow. Hell, he even painted the leaves, and Kesey’s place began to glow at night. And resound. More and more people were showing up for long or short stays. Cassady brought in a Scandinavian-style blonde who was always talking about hangups. Everybody had hangups. She became June the Goon. Then a girl who wore huge floppy red hats and granny glasses, the first anybody had ever seen. She became Marge the Barge. Then a sculptor named Ron Boise, a thin guy from New England with a nasal accent like Titus Moody, only a Titus Moody who spoke the language of Hip: “Man, like, I mean, you know,” and so on. Boise brought in a sculpture of a hanged man, so they ran it up a tree limb with a hangman’s noose. He also built a great Thunderbird, a great Thor-and-Wotan beaked monster with an amber dome on its back and you could get inside of it. Inside were some mighty wire strings, which you could pull, which they did, and the Thunderbird twanged out across the gorge like the mightiest vibrating bass beast in the history of the world. Then he brought in a Kama Sutra sculpture, a huge sheetmetal man with his face in the sheetmetal groin of a big sheetmetal babe. She had her left leg sticking up in the air. It was hollow and Babbs ran a hose up it and turned the water on and it spurted out, so they left it running, eternally spurting. It looked like she was having an eternal orgasm out of her left foot.