The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

by Tom Wolfe

  —out the corner of his eye he sees a train easing over the siding on the tracks, coming around the bend slow—

  —Haul ass! Rotor Rooter! Kesey plunges into the brush toward the tracks, thorns and razor leaves raking his legs, the light from the train shaking that weird sick ochre cast over the spiky brush clumps, thrashing through this shit, up against the side of the train jumps up on top of a coupling, grabs a ladder to the top of the boxcar. Rain comes in a sudden sheet, lightning breaks out, lighting up the whole scene and his body—Federales huffing and galomping through the scrub like comic-movie Mexicans popping buttons off their guts and screaming ¡hoy! ¡pronto! and then

  HRHAAAAAAAAAAMMMNNNNNNNNNN

  The bastards are shooting at him! Mama don’t ‘low no grass-smokin’ in hyar! Testy out here on edges of professed belief— blackness—then Cosmo let him in on it for an instant with a flash of lightning—more huffing harroomping

  HRHAAAAAAAAMMMNNNNNNNNNN

  comic latino cops—until the train picks up speed and he lies battened down to the top of the car heading off to somebody’s Edge City somewhere.

  Which turns out to be Guadalajara. He has no money on him, no grass, no nothing. He heads for the inevitable mariachi square, hunkers down in the dark, wet and shivering. Wonder do they tolerate gringo bums in this town? Daylight a Mexican comes through the park and strikes up a conversation, speaks English. He is a slender guy in his twenties, very handsome like a Valentino, almost feminine

  ¡QUEER!

  offers to let Kesey rest up in his hotel room

  ¡QUEER!

  so beat and shivering he takes him on it. The hotel is one step above a flophouse, but clean. He has a neat little room, this Mario, a snug harbor. “Go ahead, get some sleep.” Kesey tries to fight off the sleep fantasy

  ¡QUEER ASSAULT!

  but he falls asleep anyway, wakes up a long time later, all intact. Mario is broke himself, but gets off a collect telegram to Manzanillo under Kesey’s new alias, Sol Almande. Salamander, you understand—the beast that lives in fire. Wait around all day and the next, Mario being nothing but a totally sweet person.

  WHAT’S HIS GAME?

  Down to the holy telégrafo to pray. All the huarache telégrafo workers sitting around under fluttering leaves of telegrams piling up. Hay tiempo. You have to know how to approach them, says Mario. Goes upstairs in the telégrafo. Presently the Huarache Chief rummages through the whole heap for a message for the burning Almande. But—nothing.

  Next morning Kesey decides to risk it, goes down to the American consulate as a poor broke grizzled balding American fisherman stranded and got to get back to Manzanillo. A girl there, a Miss Hitchcock, gives him 27 pesos for third-class bus fare to Manzanillo, and he gets on, with Mario waving a sweet valedictory goodbye. That was your bummer, Kesey, not to understand that the pure humble Mexican strain of sweetness—that was all that Mario was about, just a muy simpático human being. The bus ride was horrible, eighteen hours of bouncing through the Rat lands, half road and half no road, the Rat lands and yet so many open faces. They look at you just like a head, totally open, wanting to find something rather than hide something. Many piss stops, and Kesey can only struggle around grizzled, waiting for the driver to get on with it. Kesey is hungry and burnt out like a husk. About ten hours out, they’re stopped and the driver walks back and stares at Kesey with the wide-open simpático look and gives him six pesos, just like that, without a word, worth about 17 cents but good for a taco or suchlike, and walks on back to the front of the bus. A strange land, this Rat land Sometimes they know. There is hope!—not just for the Superaware elected few, but for the unsuspected multitudes who open up and look. They are waiting, here in this Rat land.

  Back in Manzanillo, and the adrenaline was flowing again. Hagen and Rain Rod were salted away in jail. Like everything in Mexico, the jail scene was tough and soft at the same time. It was filthy, crawling with ticks, lice, scorpions, the whole scene. The food was filthy, too. But you could have anything you wanted to put down your gullet sent in, if you could pay for it, from luscious enchilada meals to grass, speed and acid. Hagen and Ram Rod stayed delightfully high and miserable.

  In any case, Kesey began to feel like it was only a matter of time before they closed in. It wasn’t so much the Mexicans he was worried about. The Mexicans were always ready to make a deal. It was the Stateside zealots. The FBI bodysnatchers worried him. He knew about Morton Sobell, the atom spy, who suddenly turned up one day at a border town in the custody of an FBI agent, walking across the border with the Feds. If the FBI can grab you in Mexico, physically, the Mexicans will play along with that, too. And the zealous head-buff San Mateo County cops. Word was that San Mateo cops were taking their vacations in Mexico for no other reason than to go Kesey-hunting and make more fat headlines. La casa grande and the Rat Shack becoming steadily more uncool as first one head and then another showed up, with big comradely grins on, kids from California, even from New York, who had somehow learned where Kesey is. They always came on like naturally the Pranksters would be shining with joy to see them—we holy few, we initiates of the acid scene—with the grins spilling out over the edge of their lower teeth. Obviously it was a big thing on the acid scene in the States to know where Kesey is. That was being very inside the thing. Yeah—I saw Kesey down there. Then—various Pranksters brought friends over. Including girls, of course. And Page struck up with a tall blond girl, kind of a Danish maiden sort, whom they all called Doris Delay. It was getting like La Honda, the tropical annex, La Honda in the Tropic of Cancer. People were bunked in and straggled all over the place, in the house, in the Rat Shack, on the bus. A girl named Jeannie got bit by a scorpion one night. Everybody woke up and what to do. They pondered awhile and decided to go with the flow and they all went back to sleep. She survived.

  Kesey remained very permissive about the whole thing. Nobody got shunted off. Put my professed beliefs to the Test. In any case, it was no longer possible to believe there was any semblance of secrecy about the whole Fugitive movie now. It was just a matter of time or lackadaisicalityityityityityityity … The whole scene would get Kesey up tight and he would get in a car and drive up on a bluff overlooking the ocean and smoke grass and watch the ocean … like Black Maria, come to think of it.

  Black Maria was going through a private hell. Namely, she was lonely as hell. Lonely? One means, how could a truly out-front person feel lonely amid so many truly out-front people doing so many things together and getting high together all the time. Would Mountain Girl ever feel lonely? Would Mountain Girl ever feel desperate? It was unthinkable; Mountain Girl was synched into this whole thing. She, Black Maria, was probably the only person in the history of this whole thing to get lonely … in the Prankster hierarchy.

  Prankster hierarchy? There wasn’t supposed to be any Prankster hierarchy. Even Kesey was supposed to be the non-navigator and non-teacher. Certainly everybody else was an equal in the brotherhood, for there was no competition, there were no games. They had left all that behind in the straight world … but … call it a game or what you will. Right now, among the women, Mountain Girl was first, closest to Kesey, and Faye was second, or was it really vice versa, and Black Maria was maybe third, but actually so remote it didn’t matter. Among the men, there was Babbs, always the favorite … and no games … but sometimes it seemed like the old personality game … looks, and all the old aggressive, outgoing charm, even athletic ability—it won out here, like everywhere else …

  Yet by and by Black Maria was a Prankster. It was just there, in the air, the fact that she was now a Prankster. She had altered the flow, and not by accepting it, either.

  Page’s girl, Doris Delay, was going through the same thing. There was something she wanted to ask somebody, but how could she ask it. Finally she came up to Sandy Lehmann-Haupt and said, “What do they mean—Never trust a Prankster?”

  chapter XXV

  Secret Agent Number One

  AFTERNOON—PAGE COMES BUSTING
IN LA CASA GRANDE saying,

  “Hey! There’s a guy across the road taking pictures of us!”

  Sure enough. There is a guy peeking over the edge of a window in an unfinished cottage across the beach road, another cinderblock Rat wonder. The sun highlights off his camera lens. Kesey gets the adrenaline pumping for a run, but Page charges across the road to the cottage like he owns the place, followed shortly by Babbs.

  Inside the cottage he finds a Mexican, dressed like a businessman, metallic suit, white shirt and tie, looks like he’s in his thirties.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” says Page.

  “Hello, amigo!” the guy says, looking fairly cool. He speaks English. “I theenk maybe I buy thees house. You like the beach here?”

  “Yeah! Yeah! Right! Right! Right!” says Babbs. Babbs has his friendly put-on grin turned up to such maximum intensity the guy flinches his cool momentarily, but he gets it back.

  “Yes?”

  “Yeah! Yeah! Right! Right! Right!”

  “Yes. I am glad. I like another person’s opeenion in thees theengs. Well—so long, amigos!”—and he steps outside like he’s going.

  “Send us some pictures if they turn out good,” says Babbs.

  “Some pictures?”

  “Yeah! Yeah! Right! Right! Right!”

  “What pictures?”

  “Of us. We like pictures. We have a whole scrapbook. We like candid pictures, you know? I bet you took some good ones.”

  “Yes.” The Mexican looks very thoughtful. “I tell you, fren, maybe you can help me.”

  “Yeah! Yeah! Right! Right! Right!”

  “I am weeth the Mexican Naval Intelligence, and maybe you can help … us. We have reports of Russian submarines operating in these waters.”

  “Sub-ma-rines!” says Babbs in total put-on wonderment.

  Several Pranksters have gathered in front of la casa grande to watch Babbs and Page and the Mexican outside the Rat cottage.

  “Yes,” says the Mexican. “We have reports that thees submarines are coming een to shore at night, in thees waters. Have you notice eeny such acteevity?”

  “No-tice!” says Babbs. “Well I reckon by Christ we have! You oughta come out here some night! Some nights there’s so goddamn many of them, you can’t go to sleep for the signal lights. Shine right in the windows, blinking something fierce, and it’s a tough code. A tough code. But we’ll break it yet. We got a lotta good heads working on it. Why, this fella right here”—pointing to Page, and rattling on about the incredible brazen activity of the Russian submarines in these waters—while Cassady comes across the road, flipping his sledge hammer, singles, doubles, triples, way up in the air looping it, catching it behind his back, and so on, but not looking at them for a second. Cassady sets a brick up on a fence about fifteen feet from the Mexican, but doesn’t say a word or even look, ratcheting his arms and legs this way and that to his private Joe Cuba. Then he heads back across the road.

  “Yes,” says the Mexican. “Please may I ask you thees. We have a report on one of thees Russian who maybe was landing here from a submarine. He ees about five feet eleven, he ees a … muscular man … he looks about thirty years old … he has … blond hair, hees hair ees curly and he ees a leetle bald on the top … Have you seen eeny such person?”

  “One of these Russians!” says Babbs. “Have you been to Eat Alley?”

  “Eat Alley?”

  “Yeah! Yeah! Right! Right! Right! The marketplace. All you hear in the marketplace is Russian. They’re all over the place. This thing is wide open already, man!”

  The guy cocks his head and stares at Babbs through his shades as if maybe this will bring him into focus—

  —just then—

  FEEOOFEEOOFEEOOFEEOOFEEOOFEEOOFEEOOFEEOO

  ¡WHOP!

  —Cassady—twenty feet away across the beach road has suddenly wheeled and fired the four-pound sledge hammer end-over-end like a bolo and smashed the brick on top of the fence into obliteration, fifteen feet from the Mexican.

  “Yes,” says the Mexican. “Thank you, fren.” And he wheels and walks off at a good clip, down the road, and gets into a sedan and hauls out of there.

  THE NEXT DAY, HOWEVER, THE LITTLE DUDE IS BACK, WALKING along the beach road with a bounce, so Babbs goes out to meet him.

  “Amigo!” the guy says. “Have you seen any Russians today!” —this with a big sparkling grin, as if to say it’s all been a grand joke among us fellows who are in on it.

  So Babbs thinks it over and says, Let’s go up to the Polynesian palace and have a talk about the whole thing. Man to man.

  So the Mexican says O.K. and they head up toward town toward a Polynesian restaurant up the way. Well, that gets the guy away from la casa grande, at least. Kesey has been primed for this, ready to make a run for it in one of the cars. He could head for the jungle, but the jungle is such a total bummer. On the other hand the road out is no bargain, either. If they are really closing in, they could have Route 15 bottled up so fast he’d never make it. Well, get out of la casa grande, in any case. So he and Stone get into Stone’s car and drive up to the bluff overlooking the ocean and have a couple of tokes to assess the situation.

  They park up on the bluff and look down at the festering red tide. The focking festering red tide. They turn the situation this way and that, and then Kesey decides: it is no use running either into the jungle or up the road. That’s their game, the cops-and-robbers game. That’s their movie, and they know their movie backward and forward, and they know how that one comes out, and we know how it comes out. Justice triumphs after a merry chase and the Fugitive eats dung dust in the last reel to show the horror of his dope-fiend ways. The only way out is to make it the Prankster movie and imagine this metallic little dude into the Prankster movie. There’s no one to run to to say, Mommy, this movie is no fun any more, it’s too real, Mommy. Up tight against the professed beliefs, Major, and you better believe! or else draggle your ass inaudible … They get to talk about Fugitive movies they have seen in which the Fugitive wins out, and they hit upon Casablanca, the Humphrey Bogart picture. Bogart was a fugitive in Casablanca, in the Moroccan desert, operating a restaurant during World War II, aiding and abetting Resistance fighters from Europe, and the Nazi-type or Vichy France-type FBI man, the cop heavy, in any case, comes in to question him.

  “Why did you come to Casablanca?” he says.

  “For the waters,” says Bogart.

  “There is no water here,” says the cop heavy. “We are in the middle of the desert.”

  “Oh?” says Bogart. “I was misinformed.”

  There it is! The Movie! So Stone and Kesey drive back and join Babbs and the Mexican dude in the Polynesian bar.

  The Mexican dude and Babbs have been having quite a time. Six or eight beer bottles are on the table, and the Mexican dude is waxing very high and expansive, gesturing grandly, urging them to sit down and carrying on. He wants to know Kesey’s name and Kesey says Sol Almande. Babbs has given him a shuck name of his own, and Stone says he is from Esquire magazine. He studies an expense voucher from Esquire that Stone has as if it is a highly suspicious document. Then he whips out his billfold from inside his coat and flips it open, displaying a big badge with the number 1 on it.

  “What’s that?” says Babbs.

  “That! I am Agent número uno!”

  “Se-cret A-gent Num-ber One!” says Babbs.

  “Yeah! Yeah! Right! Right! Right!” says Agent Number One, drawing his head back and taking an angle on Babbs. It is like a cross between Zorro and Nero.

  Then he goes into a history of his famous cases.

  “Eleezabeth Taylor ees coming to Mexico City? Si. That ees my case. I know her very well. Sí. I am going around to her hotel, and she has all thees people—Uhhh”—he turns his hands up and pulls his chin down under his collarbone as if to say it is doubtful they could even comprehend how many people she has—“all thees functionaries doing thees and doing that, een the corridor ou
tside even, and one of theem, thees beeg maricón”—meaning queer—“he tells me, ‘No one can go een! No one.’”

  “‘No one, ay,’ I tell heem. He ees a beeg maricón. I can tell. There ees a look they have, thees maricóns. They have cojinas the size of habichuelas, one can see it een the face, een the voice … they are soft like sheet, thees maricóns …

  “‘MARICÓN!’ I say to heem.

  “Hees voice, eet jes ‘oops!’—you know?—like a leetle theeng of water.

  “‘OUT OF MY WAY, MARICÓN!’”—Agent Number One half leaps out of his chair with the reenactment, his eyes bouncing off his shades, shooting up like he is galvanized with a thousand volts.

  Then he sinks back.

  “We-e-e-ellll,” he says very softly, and smiles like someone getting ready to drop off to sleep. The way he says it, you can see the maricón collapsing, dissolving, turning into little driblets of jelly and opening the door to Miss Taylor’s suite.

  There is no stopping Agent Number One now. Exploit after exploit bubbles up in his brain. Cornered like a rat, he faces them down. About to be cut down in fusillades, he whips his revolver and fires one shot, one shot, amigo, and that takes care of that. The sonsabeetches theenk they have him outsmarted, ready to make their move, and he has already made his move and is waiting for them, like a bucket under a faucet, and so on.

  The strange thing, however, is that none of these fabulous cases has anything to do with celebrities. They’re all marijuana cases, usually involving Americans. Yes.