The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

by Tom Wolfe

  We shall shuck you on the landing grounds

  We shall shuck you in the fields, in the streets, on the hills

  And in the trees.

  Groovy plot

  Hot movie

  In these trees.

  See the very hunted coons

  Salt J. Edgar Hoover’s wounds!

  Yah! the cops and robbers game.

  Kesey holes up at his old friend————’s house in Palo Alto. He is in a strange state of mind. He is in the cops’ movie now, the Cops and Robbers Game, and eventually they will win, because it is their movie—Gotcha! Unless he makes it his movie, which will take the utmost risk and daring. Here I am, boys … In the cops and robbers game you creep and skulk about in a state of tachycardia, and they like to think of you in your reptile misery—so—

  BREAK SKULK!

  In short, the fantasy is now to become a kind of Day-Glo Pimpernel, popping up here and there, right out in public, then vanishing, reeking legend in the wake. He will be like one of those movie criminals who send florid coded notes to the police about au pair girls he intends to garrote—and then does it—while all the world pants for next week’s broken hyoid bone. Only he hasn’t been strangling, merely smoking grass. You would never know that, however, from the excitement in San Francisco …

  A strange sort of guest to have in the house—and——hardly knows what to make of the performance, Kesey veering wildly from paranoia and hyper-security to extraordinary disregard for his own safety, one state giving way to the other in no fixed order. Kesey gets up about noon or 1 P.M., eats, then goes out in the garden out back and sits there in his buckskin shirt playing a Prankster flute. If one plays anything much more bizarre than a transistor radio out back in the garden in Palo Alto, it amounts to freaking insurrection; let alone a big muscular Mountain Man in a buckskin shirt playing a flute. Then at night—a few tokes here, a few tokes there, it adds up, Major, Kesey and a Prankster or two start to rapping, gently

  Rapping

  Cortex tapping

  Rat-tat-tatting

  Tatter-ratting

  Fooling, puling, ululation

  Skeel goose screeling glossolalia

  Crested screamers! Megascops!

  Bust the eardrums! FREAK THE COPS! until 2 A.M. the house would be reeling with enough Rat-tars, loon cries, tapes and howling grass euphoria to wake up all of sweet dream tunnel Palo Alto for the next fifteen years—but then suddenly at 4 A.M., or 5, after outlasting everyone in the mad howl, Kesey would suddenly decide it was time for maximum security precautions and would disappear into the cellar to a snug nest behind the packing cases, in the cobwebs. Well, at least the bastards won’t get him with Gestapo tap on the shoulder—All right, Kesey …

  That movie—but then awakening and starting his movie almost at once. Neal, Hugh Romney, Kesey and a small detachment of Hell’s Angels head for a three-day “trips festival” in progress at San Francisco State College, Saturday night, October 1. The seeds one has sown … The Acid Tests have already caught hold in the college world. San Francisco State has become the acid heads’ true universitas, sort of the way Ohio State is for football freaks. They are trying the whole thing, the Acid Test, with the utmost faithful eclecticism.

  Alpha,

  Beta,

  Delta Handa Poker.

  Movies at the smoker.

  Collegiate!

  Donkey beads,

  Temple bells,

  Sandles and

  Mandalas

  Psychedelic!

  The Hell’s Angels are riding shotgun for the Fugitive. They like this. They can freak out any approaching cops, in cruiser or battalion. For some suitable weird reason all the lights are left on in the campus buildings. The festival is in the gymnasium—full of scaffolding and people sweeping the ceilings with movies and light projections—Control towers—and the Grateful Dead on the bandstand, all careful homage to the original Acid Tests, and then suddenly

  KESEY

  will be there, broadcasting into the gymnasium from a campus radio station … a very tight ship, this fantasy, even up to Hell’s Angels standing guard outside the studio. Except that by the time they get all the wiring hooked up, and start rapping, Cassady with a microphone inside the hall—introducing

  KEN KEEEEE-ZEEEEEE

  it is about 4 A.M. Kesey is hidden in the studio, talking over the hugest Prankster hookup of wires, running long over the college campus to the gymnasium. Freewheeling Frank, the Hell’s Angel, zonked on acid, barges into the studio, and sees Kesey there sitting on a stool with an electric guitar and wires running all around his legs and his neck, branging on the guitar, rapping poetry into the microphone with fluorescent light and ON THE AIR sign filling up the room—The god of LSD—He’s so wired up it scares me—This god reminds me of a satellite that flies around in the skies—whereupon Frank hugs him and feels an immediate surge of electricity and sits down on the floor and starts playing a harmonica and Kesey raps on for the benefit of the hundreds watching the swirling light shows in the gymnasium: “You who stand sit and crawl around and about the floor about you and above you on the ceiling that madness that’s running in color is your brain!”—and then he stalks out of the room—

  He’s mad because he has not captured my mind—thinks Frank—he has so many million minds that he has captured that not even a smile is left on his face.

  But there were no millions or even hundreds left in the gymnasium because it was so late it was down to a group of hard-core heads, many of whom were so high they were used to all sorts of time and geography warps. Everything was real, Mani, Madame Blavatsky’s Chohan maya, Ken Kesey broadcasting over the p.a. system … Kesey finally comes out and walks through the residue, but they are all wacked out and he is hardly visible … in his Prankster suit of flaming Orlon paranoia …

  Nevertheless! the word is now out among the heads of Haight-Ashbury. Kesey is back, the Man, the Castro who won them what they have today in the first place. The seeds we …

  … HAVE SOWN … DOWN IN RAT LAND RED TIDE MANZANILLO, Kesey and the Pranksters had been so cut off they got almost no news from San Francisco. It was all perfect Devil’s Island down there. They had only a dim idea of what was going on among the heads in Haight-Ashbury. But now, like, you don’t even have to look for it. It hits you in the face. It’s a whole carnival … All you have to do is walk up into the Haight-Ashbury—and Kesey chances a run through … Hell, in Haight-Ashbury a muscular guy in cowboy boots and a cowboy hat—he … looks healthy. The cops are busy trying to figure out these new longhairs, these beatniks —these crazies are somehow weirder than the North Beach beatniks ever were. They glow blue like a TV tube. The hippie-dippies … their Jesus hair, men with hair falling down to the shoulders and beards to their chests, all lank and thin and limp like … lungers! Sergeant, they’re lollygagging up against the storefronts on Haight Street up near that Psychedelic Shop like somebody hocked a bunch of T.B. lungers up against windows and they’ve oozed down to the sidewalks, staring at you with these huge zombie eyes, just staring. And a lot of weird American Indian and Indian from India shit, beaded headbands and donkey beads and temple bells—and the live ones, promenading up and down Haight Street in costumes, or half-costumes, like some kind of a doorman’s coat with piping and crap but with blue jeans for pants and Mod boots … The cops!—oh, how it messed up their minds.

  The cops knew drunks and junkies by heart, and they knew about LSD, but this thing that was going on … The heads could con the cops blind and it was wild. Haight-Ashbury had always been a brave little tenement district up the hill from the Panhandle entrance to Golden Gate Park, with whites and Negroes living next door in peace. Rents had been going up in North Beach. A lot of young couples with bohemian enthusiasms had been moving to Haight-Ashbury. Some of the old beats had moved in. They hung around a place called the Blue Unicorn. But the Trips Festival of eight months before was what really kicked the whole thing off. Eight months!—and all of a sudden it
was like the Acid Tests had taken root and sprung up into people living the Tests like a whole life style.

  The Grateful Dead had moved into a house in Haight-Ashbury, and it wasn’t just the old communal living where everybody piled into some place. They lived in Prankster-style, as a group with a name and a mission, which was music and the psychedelic vision … Yes … A thin, almost caved-in guy with incredible freaking light-brown Jesus hair and beard flowing all over him and round wire-rim spectacles, named Chet Helms, had a group called the Family Dog. They also lived in Prankster-style, in a garage at 1090 Page, holding rock ‘n’ roll dances amid a lot of Indian symbols. They had taken part in the Trips Festival. Helms was a head but a very practical head. He saw it coming, with the Trips Festival, the whole wave. He started an ongoing Trips Festival, every week, selling tickets, at a ballroom, the Avalon, at Van Ness and Sutter. Bill Graham, the impresario for the Trips Festival, was into the thing too and had a Trips Festival scene going in the Fillmore Auditorium, a dancehall at Fillmore and Geary. Graham and Kesey had had a falling out at the Trips Festival itself over things like who was going to handle the gate and it ended in a badass moment when Graham put out his hand to shake and make up and Kesey just looked at it and walked away. But Graham picked up on the Acid Test format exactly. Both the Fillmore and the Avalon did the Pranksters Acid Test with all the mixed media stuff, the rock ‘n’ roll and movie projections and the weird intergalactic amoeba light shows. The Avalon even had it down to details like the strobes and sections of the floor where you could play with Day-Glo paint under black light. Everything but the … fourth dimension … Cosmo … the three o’clock thing … the experience, the kairos … They know where it is, but they don’t know what it is … Still, the ballrooms were like a big announcement and a front door … into The Life.

  The new communal groups themselves were into the pudding. Like the Diggers, led by a guy named Emmett Grogan, whose hero was Kesey. They went in for pranks. They had a Frame of Reference, a huge frame nine feet tall that they set up in the street and asked people to walk through … “so we’ll all be in the same frame of reference.” Then they started handing out free food to all comers, heads, winos, anybody, at 4 P.M. in the Panhandle part of the park. The food they cadged from wholesalers, and boosted, and so on. It was a goddamn sketch, seeing them ladle out the stew every day out of big milk cans … Up at Fulton and Scott is a great shambling old Gothic house, a freaking decayed giant, known as The Russian Embassy. A new group called the Calliope Company lives in there, led by Bill Tara, an actor. Many colorful characters like Paul Hawken, and Michael Laton, who always wears a Russian astrakhan hat, and Jack the Fluke, who is a laughing grizzly Irishman with a beard like an Airedale and a cab driver’s cap and flapping tweeds bought from the Slightly Soiled Shop … all of them sitting around the great parlor, bare but a glory of old carved wood, fourteen-foot ceilings … Jack the Fluke tells about his girlfriend Sandra, a teenage girl who just pulled in from Bucks County, Pa.:

  “I come in”—and he motions with his head up toward his room on the top floor—“and, dig: she has a joint rolled this big, like a cigar, man!—and she’s goofing off the radio and puffing on this, I mean, Corona corona joint and goofing and puffing—it was beautiful! It really takes me back.”

  But of course! the esoteric nostalgia of those first days of discovery, the first little easing open of the doors of the mind with marijuana and that thing you do at that stage!—that goofing off the radio thing—You know? And it’s beautiful, the kids beginning to pour in to Haight-Ashbury … for The Life … It’s a carnival! the Garden of Eden! one big urban La Honda scene! right out in the open! with all things available. Money is floating around in the air. That’s no hassle. Hell, in three hours you can pick up nine or ten bucks panhandling. Christ, when the straight citizens see a kid in a beard and beads and flowers with a sign around his neck saying My Heart is Prouder than my Stomach, it fucking blows their minds, and they lay quarters on you, dollar bills. It’s too much. And if worse comes to worse, there is always …

  “Anybody want a straight job?” says a girl named Jeannie, who lives here at The Embassy. Michael Laton says yeah, and it turns out Jeannie is working three or four hours a night as a Topless Shoe Shine girl in a little shoeshine shack on Broadway in North Beach, and they need a barker outside on the sidewalk to spiel in customers. Michael Laton takes this, yes, straight job, and stands out there at night in a tuxedo and a tall hat hawking in the dentists who are crawling all over North Beach panting over the Topless. They come inside the shack and climb up on the shoeshine stand and put their feet on the shoeshine stirrups and watch Jeannie’s tits dangle and jiggle for ninety seconds while she shines their shoes for two dollars and a big lugubrious spade stands by with his hand near a lead beer bottle to smash wiseguys and sex fiends with and they all come out saying the exact same thing: “And the funny part is, it’s a damned good shoeshine!”

  “ … so I dropped a little acid, like just for the flash, you know,” says Michael Laton, “and these two Marines come up, this big sergeant and another one, with hashmarks on their sleeves, like up to here. I’m eight feet tall by this time, and they’re like ants, I’m so stoned, and I yell right in their faces: ‘If they stop the war, you guys will be out of a job!’ And the sergeant says Yeahhh?—and man ! like it reverses—now they’re eight feet tall all of a sudden and I’m an ant! and …”

  A very carnival! and it wasn’t politics, what he said, just a prank, because the political thing, the whole New Left, is all of a sudden like over on the hip circuit around San Francisco, even at Berkeley, the very citadel of the Student Revolution and all. Some kid who could always be counted on to demonstrate for the grape workers or even do dangerous things like work for CORE in Mississippi turns up one day—and immediately everybody knows he has become a head. His hair has the long jesuschrist look. He is wearing the costume clothes. But most of all, he now has a very tolerant and therefore withering attitude toward all those who are still struggling in the old activist political ways for civil rights, against Vietnam, against poverty, for the free peoples. He sees them as still trapped in the old “political games,” unwittingly supporting the oppressors by playing their kind of game and using their kind of tactics, while he, with the help of psychedelic chemicals, is exploring the infinite regions of human consciousness … Paul Hawken here in The Embassy—in 1965 he was an outstanding activist, sweat shirts and blue jeans and toggle coats, went on the March from Selma, worked as a photographer for CORE in Mississippi, risked his life to take pictures of Negro working conditions, and so on. Now he’s got on a great Hussar’s coat with gold frogging. His hair is all over his forehead and coming around his neck in terrific black Mykonos curls.

  “I take it you aren’t too tight with CORE any more.”

  He just laughs.

  “What about all the things you were involved in last year?”

  “All that’s changed. You should have seen them leaving for Sacramento”—Cal students leaving Berkeley for Sacramento and a demonstration.

  “Yeah,” says Tara.

  “It was all fraternity men with sports shirts and crew cuts and their own cars and painted signs, you know, like you get from a commercial artist. There was a lot of bread out there.”

  “Yeah,” says Tara, “and they’re all talking about channels. They’re going to do this and that through existing channels, or they can’t do this or that through existing channels, they’re all talking about channels.”

  “Yeah,” says Paul, “and shaking their fists”—he raises his fist and shakes it in a big shuck way—“and saying, ‘We’re off to Sacramento to protest, with our dates!’ It’s all changed. It’s all a bunch of fraternity men in their Mustangs.”

  A bunch of fraternity men in their Mustangs! In the intellectual-hip world of California, there is no more scathing epithet imaginable. A bunch of fraternity men in their Mustangs. Just savor it. Oh Mario, and Dylan, and Joan Baez, oh Free Speech and An
ti-Vietnam—who in his right mind would have ever dreamed it could come to this in twelve months—abandoned to the supermarket and the breezeway scions—a bunch of fraternity men in Mustangs—and it is, unbelievably, all as the provocateur Kesey has prophesied it, droning on his goddamned harmonica and saying Just walk away and say fuck it …

  Square hip! Boy Scout bohemians! and the great rallies at Berkeley that used to pull 10,000 are now lucky to get a thousand. All changed! Even the thing with the spades. All of a sudden the Negroes are out of the hip scene, except for a couple of pushers like Superspade and a couple of characters like Gaylord and Heavy. The explanation around Haight-Ashbury is that Negroes don’t take to LSD. The big thing with spades on the hip scene has always been the quality known as cool. And LSD freaking well blows that whole lead shield known as cool, like it brings you right out front, hang-ups and all. Also the spades don’t get much of a kick out of the nostalgia for the mud that all the white middle-class kids who are coming to Haight-Ashbury like, piling into pads and living freaking basic, you understand, on greasy mattresses on the floor that the filthiest spade walkup in Fillmore wouldn’t have, and slopping up soda pop and shit out of the same bottle, just passing it around from mouth to mouth, not being hung up on that old American plumbing & hygiene thing, you understand, even grokking the weird medieval vermin diseases that are flashing through every groin—crab lice! you know that thing, man, where you first look down at your lower belly and see these little scars, they look like, little scabs or something, tiny little mothers, and like you pick one, root it out, and it starts crawling! Oh shit! and then they’re all crawling and you start exploring your mons pubis and your balls and they’re alive. It’s like a jungle you never saw before, in your own crotch, your own shag, and it’s alive, a freaking bestiary, in fact, the little bastids, like soft-shell crabs that could dance on the head of a pin, and you keeping picking them off but every time you look you see eight more creeping over the veld and the savannas and you practically go blind staring at the little Africa down there between your legs and it’s A-200 Time, man—A-200! Pyrinate Liquid—the only solution—that little green bottle, man! do you remember! and so on … Nostalgia for the mud! … The …