The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

by Tom Wolfe

  Hagen couldn’t believe it. “Why—we’ve been pranked!” he said.

  Pranksters—and the Pranked.

  Things being like they were to begin with, the prank took on fundamental meaning. Those who got pranked finally made their way back to the moldering Sans Souci, and Babbs & Co. had cleared out of there, too, taking all the money and the food. Babbs left word that they, the inner nucleus, were going off to hold a Test of their own and would rejoin the Satellites for the UCLA Acid Test, scheduled for March 19. “The great idea still kept us together”—and Norman, Cassady, Hagen, Paul Foster, Roy Seburn, Marge and a couple others made a stab at preparing for the UCLA Test. But UCLA backed out of the deal because of the notoriety after the Watts Test, and that did it. All began drifting off. It was a strange time and a strange feeling. Nobody could figure why Babbs had pranked Cassady; the others maybe—although that Hagen would get pranked was pretty strange, too—but Cassady—that was unbelievable.

  Cassady said fuck it and headed for San Francisco. Norman and Paul Foster went to stay at Hugh Romney’s. Then by and by Norman got a chance to go to New York with Marge the Barge and Evan Engber, so they headed east by car.

  “HARDLY HAD LEO LEFT US, WHEN FAITH AND CONCORD amongst us was at an end; it was as if the life-blood of our group flowed away from an invisible wound.”

  One day Paul Foster cranked up the great God Rotor and sat down and worked on a very intricate illuminated billhead. When he got through, there was an ornate black border, and in the middle the words

  IN MEMORIAM

  in florid Old English lettering, and at the bottom: January 23, 1966, the day Kesey disappeared. Nothing else, just In Memoriam and the date. He hung it up on the wall.

  chapter XXI

  The Fugitive

  HAUL ASS, KESEY. MOVE. SCRAM. SPLIT FLEE HIDE VANISH DISINTEGRATE. Like run.

  Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrevrevrevrevrevrevrevrevrevrev or are we gonna have just a late Mexican re-run of the scene on the rooftop in San Francisco and sit here with the motor spinning and watch with fascination while the cops they climb up once again to come git you—

  THEY JUST OPENED THE DOOR DOWN BELOW, ROTOR ROOTER, SO YOU HAVE MAYBE 45 SECONDS ASSUMING THEY BE SLOW AND SNEAKY AND SURE ABOUT IT

  Kesey sits in a little upper room in the last house down the beach, $80 a month, on paradise-blue Bandarias Bay, in Puerto Vallarta, on the west coast of Mexico, state of Jalisco, one step from the floppy green fronds of the jungle, wherein flourish lush steamy baboon lusts of paranoia—Kesey sits in this little rickety upper room with his elbow on a table and his forearm standing up perpendicular and in the palm of his hand a little mirror, so that his forearm and the mirror are like a big rear-view mirror stanchion on the side of a truck and thus he can look out the window and see them but they can’t see him—

  COME ON, MAN, DO YOU NEED A COPY OF THE SCRIPT TO SEE HOW THIS MOVIE GOES? YOU HAVE MAYBE 40 SECONDS LEFT BEFORE THEY COME GET YOU

  —a Volkswagen has been cruising up and down the street for no earthly reason at all, except that they are obviously working with the fake telephone linesmen outside the window who whistle—

  THERE THEY GO AGAIN

  —whistle in the slow-brain brown Mexican huarache day-laborer way, for no earthly reason except that they are obviously synched in, finked in, with the Volkswagen. Now a tan sedan comes along the street, minus a license plate but plus a stenciled white number—exactly like a prison stencil—police and two coatless guys inside, both in white shirts so they’re not prisoners—

  ONE TURNED LOOKED BACK!

  IF YOU WERE WATCHING ALL THIS ON A MOVIE SCREEN YOU KNOW WHAT YOUR REACTION WOULD BE THROUGH A MOUTHFUL OF POPCORN FROM THE THIRD ROW: “WHAT MORE DO YOU NEED, YOU DOLT! SCREAM OUTTA THERE …”

  —But he has just hooked down five dexedrines and the old motor is spinning and rushing most nice and euphorically in fascination and a man can’t depart this nice $80-a-month snug harbor on paradise-blue Bandarias Bay just yet with a cool creek of speed rush in his veins. It is such a tiny little fink scene as he sees it in the hand mirror. He can tilt it and see his own face entropied with the strain and then tilt it—a sign!—a sparrow, fat and sleek, dives through the dwindling sun into a hole in one of the lampposts; home.

  MORE TELEFONO TRUCKS! TWO LOUD WHISTLES THIS TIME—FOR NO EARTHLY REASON EXCEPT TO COME GIT YOU. YOU HAVE MAYBE 35 SECONDS LEFT

  —Kesey has Cornel Wilde Running Jacket ready hanging on the wall, a jungle-jim corduroy jacket stashed with fishing line, a knife, money, DDT, tablet, ball-points, flashlight, and grass. Has it timed by test runs that he can be out the window, down through a hole in the roof below, down a drain pipe, over a wall and into thickest jungle in 45 seconds—well, only 35 seconds left, but head start is all that’s needed, with the element of surprise. Besides, it’s so fascinating to be here in subastral projection with the cool rushing dex, synched into their minds and his own, in al its surges and tributaries and convolutions, turning it this way and that and rationalizing the situation for the 100th time in split seconds, such as: If they have that many men already here, the phony telephone men, the cops in the tan car, the cops in the Volkswagen, what are they waiting for? why haven’t they crashed right in through the rotten doors of this Rat building—But he gets the signal even before he finishes the question:

  WAITING! THEY KNOW THEY’VE GOT YOU, FOOL, HAVE KNOWN FOR WEEKS. BUT THEY’RE CERTAIN YOU’RE CONNECTED WITH ALL THE LSD BEING SMUGGLED UP FROM MEXICO AND THEY WANT TO TAKE IN AS BIG A HAUL AS POSSIBLE WHEN THEY FINALLY SLAM IT. LIKE LEARY; THEY MUST HAVE BEEN WATCHING A DREADFUL LONG TIME BEFORE THEY WERE CONTENT THEY HAD SOMETHING WORTH HIS SIZE. THIRTY YEARS. FOR A HARVARD DOCTOR WITH GRASS. THAT’S HOW BAD THEY WANTED THE WHOLE BUSINESS LOCKED AWAY. THAT’S HOW DANGEROUS THEY CONSIDER THE WHOLE BUSINESS. AND THEY WERE COMPLETELY CORRECT—IF NOT IN THEIR FANTASY, THEN AT LEAST IN THEIR EVALUATION OF THE PRESENT AND EVER-GROWING PSYCHEDELIC THREAT

  A NOISE DOWN BELOW.

  THEM?

  30 SEGUNDOS LEFT?

  —maybe it’s Black Maria, come back with good things for eating and stuff for the new disguise, Steve Lamb, mild-mannered reporter and all-around creep—

  RUN, FOOL!

  —Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Such a quiet secret muffled smile will be on Black Maria’s face.

  Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrevrevrevrevrevrevrevrevrevrev It could have been all so quiet, just him and Zonker and the smoldering Black Maria in this $80-a-month paradise-blue Bandarias Bay in Puerto Vallarta. If the suicide ruse and the rest of the main Fugitive fantasy had but worked.

  The trip into Mexico was easy, because everything with Boise was easy. Boise always knew. They picked up Zonker in L.A., and then Jim Fish, and they coasted on over the line at Tijuana. No hassle to cross over into Mexico. The border at Tijuana is like a huge superhighway toll station, a huge concrete apron and ten or fifteen customs booths in a row for all the cars pouring over into Tijuana from San Diego and points north, all plastic green and concrete like part of suburban superhighway America. So they rolled on over the line with Kesey hidden in the back of Boise’s old panel truck and heart don’t even thump too bad. Spirits up, a little of the Prankster élan back in the cosmos. In true Prankster fashion they spent one third their money stash on a Madman Muntz autostereo rig to go along with all the other valuables, like tape recorders and many tapes.

  The next likely hassle is visas, because this shapes up as a long stay. Might be hot to try to get Kesey one in Tijuana, because Tijuana is just a California annex, really, the slums of San Diego, and they just might very well know about the case.

  “We’ll do it in Sonoita, man,” says Boise. “They don’t give a shit there. Put down a couple of bucks and they can’t see anything else.”

  Sonoita is almost due east of Tijuana, just south of the Arizona border. Kesey uses his good shuck ID there and all is jake in Sonoita. Fugitive!—real-life and for sure now.

  Then south down so-called Route 2 and so-called Route 15, bounci
ng and grinding along through the brown dust and scrawny chickens and animal dung brown dust fumes of western Mexico, towns of Coyote, Caborca, Santa Ana, Querobabi, Cornelio, El Oasis, hee, Hermosillo, hah, Pocitos Casas, Cieneguito, Guaymas, Camaxtli, Mixcoatl, Tlazolteotl, Quetzalcoatl, Huitzilopochtli, Tezcatlipoca haunting the Dairy Queen Rat Queen crossroads in the guise of a Rat, a Popoluactli-screeing rat, Tetzcotl, Yaotl, Titlacahuan he whose slaves we are, Ochpaniiztl priesty Angel-freaked out in a motorcycle made from the vaseline skin of Gang Bang Girl Meets White Trash … A confetti of skulls and death in western Mexico, the Rat lands. Not one inch of it is picturesque burros and shawls or nova Zapata hats or color-TV pink chunks of watermelon or water lilies or gold feathers or long eyelashes or high combs or tortillas and tacos and chili powder or fluty camote vendors or muletas or toreros or olés or mariachi bands or water lilies or blood of the dahlia or tinny cantinas or scrapes or movie black marias with shiny black hair and steaming little high round pubescent bottoms. None of the old Mexico we know and love on the 21-day excursion fare. Just the boogering brown dust and bloated rat corpses by the road, goats, cows, chickens with all four feet up in the air at the Tezcatlipocan skull rot crossroads of Mexico.

  To Kesey it was a hopeless flea-bitten desert he was fleeing into. But Boise made it bearable. Boise always knew. Boise was wizened and thin-faced and he had the awfulest New England high flat whine, and he didn’t belong anywhere near here, but he was here, now, and he knew. The truck breaks down for the fourteenth time—

  “No hassle, man. We just back it up on a rock, man … Then we just take the tire off and fix it.”

  More flat, Rat country, mosquito and flea, into total nothing, like the lines of perspective in a surrealist painting, but Boise makes you realize it is all the same, here as anywhere. Boise lecherously scanning the streets as they bounce through the dead chicken towns just like it was only Saturday night on Broadway in North Beach, spotting a good looking gringa muchacha padding along the side of the road with honest calves,

  25 SECONDS LEFT, FOOL!

  and he says, “Shall we get her over and ball her, man?” all in the same New England whine, as if he were saying, Wanna Coke, or not? Kesey looks at Boise’s lined face and his thin lips, looks ancient, only a glitter comes out of the eyes, nice and lecherous, dead certain and crazy alive at the same time. And Boise in that moment is in the tiny knot of Perfect Pranksters, the inner circle, ascending into the sangha for good.

  In Guaymas, on the gulf, Jim Fish wants out. An early attack of paranoia, Jim Fish? and catches a bus back to the U.S., leaving Kesey, Boise and Zonker and the equipment. But was it not ever so? You’re either on the bus or off the bus. Kesey’s spirits were picking up. Boise was pulling everything together ::: this crazy New Englander is here in these Rat lands.

  “Hey, man …” Boise points at a construction scene they’re going by. “ … see that?” as if to say, There’s the whole thing, right there.

  A whole gang of workmen are trying to put the stucco on the ceiling of a building they’re finishing up. One fat man is mixing up the stucco in a washtub. One skinny one is scooping the stucco up out of the tub with a little trowel and pitching it up underhanded at the ceiling. A little of it sticks—and three or four guys stand on a plank scaffolding taking stabs at smoothing it out—but most of it falls down on the floor and three or four more are hunkered down there scraping it up off the floor and shoveling it back in the tub and the skinny guy skinnies up another little gob with his skinny trowel and they all stare again to see what happens. They are all hunkering around in huaraches, worthless flat Rat woven sandals, up on the scaffolding, down on the floor, waiting to see what happens, how fate brings it off with this little gob of nothing pitched up at the Rat expanse …

  And it’s all there—the whole Mexico Trip—

  “They have a saying, ‘Hay tiemp—’” Boise hooks the steering wheel to get around an ice-cream vendor in the middle of the road “‘—o,’ ‘There is time.’”

  20 SECONDS, IDIOT!

  Huaraches, which are the Rat shoe. It all synches. Mexico is the Rat paradise. But of course! It is not worthless—it is perfection. It is as if the Rat things of all the Rat lands of America, all the drive-ins, mobile-home parks, Dairy Queens, superettes, Sunset Strips, auto-accessory stores, septic-tank developments, souvenir shops, snack bars, lay-away furniture stores, Daveniter living rooms, hot-plate hotels, bus-station paperback racks, luncheonette in-the-booth jukebox slots, raw-concrete service-station toilets with a head of urine in the bowl, Greyhound bus toilettes with paper towels and vomit hanging over the hockeypuckblack rim, Army-Navy stores with Bikini Kodpiece Briefs for men, Super Giant racks with matching green twill shirts and balloon-bottom pants for honest toilers, $8,000 bungalows with plastic accordion-folding partitions and the baby asleep in there in a foldaway crib of plastic net, picnic tables with the benches built onto them used in the dining room, Jonni-Trot Bar-B-Q sandwiches with a carbonated fruit drink, aluminum slat awnings, aluminum sidings, lukewarm coffee-“with” in a china mug with a pale brown pool in the saucer and a few ashes, a spade counter chef scraping a short-order grill with a chalky Kitchy-Brik and he won’t take your order till he’s through, a first-come-first-serve doctor’s waiting room with modest charwomen with their dresses stuck on the seats of shiny vinyl chairs and they won’t move to get loose for fear you’ll look up their dress, plaid car coats from Sears and a canvas cap with a bill, synthetic dresses for waitresses looking like milky cellophane, Rat cones, Rat sodas, Rat meat-salad sandwiches, Rat cheezis, Ratburgers—it is as if the Rat things of all the Rat lands of America had been looking for their country, their Canaan, their Is-ra-el, and they found it in Mexico. It has its own Rat aesthetic. It’s hulking beautiful …

  Then they reached Mazatlan, the first full-fledged resort you reach on the west coast of Mexico, coming down from the States. Everybody’s trip was fishing in Mazatlan. Along the old Avenida del Mar and the Paseo Claussen, white walls with nice artistic Rat fishing scenes and hotel archways with great shiny blue marlins hanging inside the arches and gringos with duckbill caps here to catch some marlin. Mariachi music at last, with the trumpets always breaking and dropping off the note and then struggling up again. Zonker has the bright idea of going to O’Brien’s Bar, on the beach front, place he got beat up out back of once by thirteen Mexican fags. Zonker enjoys revisiting scenes of previous debacles. Like also spends hours on the beach telling them how his true and fiercest fear is of being attacked by a shark while swimming … as he picks flea-bite scabs until his legs stream blood to the luscious world … then goes swimming.

  O’Brien’s brings on the paranoia right away. It is a break in the Rat movie. It is dark and a Mexican band plays—signaling to the Rat sensibility that it will cost too much. Rat souls everywhere fear dark, picturesque restaurant, knowing instinctively they will pay dearly for the bullshit ambiance, dollar a drink probably. O’Brien’s was crowded, and then through the cocktail gloom: heads. A bunch of kids with the jesuschrist hair, the temple bells and donkey beads, serape vests, mandalas; in short, American heads. Zonker recognizes them immediately. They’re not only American heads, but from San Jose, and some had been to the Acid Tests. Just what the Fugitive needs to blow the whole suicide ruse. “Guess who I saw in Mexico …” Naturally, Zonk, with his zest for debacle, hails them over. Kesey is introduced as “Joe,” and nobody pays him much mind except for one dark little girl, Mexican-looking, with long black hair.

  “When were you born?” she says to Kesey. She doesn’t sound Mexican. She sounds like Lauren Bacall speaking through a tube.

  “I’m a Virgo.” No sense hitting a ball three bits you can see coming if you can cut across the fourth.

  “I thought so. I’m a Scorpio.”

  “Beautiful.”

  The black Scorpio obviously knows Zonk best. She knows him when. But Zonk belongs to the ages and it comes to pass that Zonk or no Zonk, she and Kesey relax out in the open air on the
pier one night down by a Mazatlan Rat beach, all dirt and scrabble, but the waves and the wind and the harbor lights do it up right and the moon hits some kind of concrete shaft there, putting her in the dark, in the shadow, and him in the light, lit up by the moon, as if some designer drew a line precisely between their bodies. Black Maria, he decides.

  So Black Maria joins the Fugitive band and they go off to Puerto Vallarta. Puerto Vallarta is out of the Rat lands. All picture-book Mexico. Paradise-blue Bandarias Bay and a pure white beach and white latino cottages right up against the jungle, which is a deep raw green, and clean. Fat green fronds lapping up against the back of the houses on the beach. Macaw sounds, or very near it. Secret poisonous orchid and orange pops and petals winking out when the foliage moves. A nice romantic Gothic jungle. Zonker hassles with an oily little real-estate man and gets the last house on the edge of town for $80 a month. The rent is low because the jungle is too close for the tourists, the jungle and too many Mexican kids and chickens and the rural dung dust. Boise heads back to the U.S. and Kesey, Zonker and Black Maria move in. They have the upper half of the house, one floor and a spiral staircase up to the roof. Up on the roof is a kind of thatched hut, the highest perch around, a perfect lookout post and a snug harbor. Kesey decides to risk a phone call to the States to let Faye and everybody know he’s O.K. He goes into town and calls Peter Demma in the Hip Pocket Book Store in Santa Cruz. A little metallic clanking about by the telefonista señoritas down at central. And then,