The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

by Tom Wolfe

  … Life … Even down in a place like La Jolla, in north San Diego, the poshest resort on the Pacific beaches, T————, one of the great young surfers, turns up one day with a three-wheel trunk motorcycle, the kind drugstore delivery boys use, and he pulls up into one driveway after another and the kids come out and—help yourself!—and he’s got every pill and capsule you ever imagined, plus lids of grass, and … The Life is on. Even devoted surfing cliques like the Pump House Gang—the mysterioso sea and all that!—are easing into The Life, and some move up the beach from the Pump House, away from the everlasting sets of goodsurfing waves they used to wait for like Phrygian sacristans, up from the Pump House to the Parking Lot, where they sit in cars with special amethyst-tinted windows and grok in fullness the Pacific sun as it comes through the weird glass and the cops wonder what in hell they’re doing in cars all day instead of being on the beach, and they roust them and search the cars and find nothing, but warn—We know you kids are drinking beer out here … Beer! … One of the Pump House Gang leaders, Artie, pulls into Haight-Ashbury, because this is the underground word in The Life in all the high schools in California already, even though Haight-Ashbury has never been mentioned in the newspapers … Haight-Ashbury! they know the whole new legend, right down to Owsley, now known as The White Rabbit, the paranoid acid genius … Artie pulls into Haight-Ashbury, walking along amid those endless staggers of bay windows, slums with a view, and who is sitting out on a curbing on Haight Street but J————of Pump House days gone by, just sitting there with an Emporium shopping bag beside him.

  “Hi, J———!”

  J————just barely glances at him and says, “Oh, hi, Artie,” as if naturally they’re both in Haight-Ashbury and have been for years, and then he says, “Here, have a lid,” and he reaches in the shopping bag and just offers him a whole lid of grass, free, out in the open … Artie looks up Anchovy’s communal pad. Anchovy, who was little known in La Jolla in the old surfing days, he wasn’t a surfer, is now a beautiful person and the good shepherd in Haight-Ashbury for all the La Jolla kids up here. Artie makes the rounds in Haight-Ashbury and it’s … a carnival!—everybody working for the Management in wondrous ways, popping Owsley LSD up from out of Pez candy dispensers, smoking grass, taking methedrine and fucking and carrying on wherever and whenever they feel like it, on the streets practically … Later Anchovy has love-ins called Trans-Love Airways going on the San Diego campus of the University, and everybody is freaking out on the grass to the loudest rock ’n’ roll in history and smoking grass in a goddamned green cloud, f’r chrissake, and taking movies of it all for … the archives, and they’re allied now with real people, Good People, a motorcycle band known as the Pallbearers, the local version … of the Hell’s Angels … ah ummmmm … and Artie leans up against a tree smoking a fake joint rolled of plain Bull Durham tobacco, because you got to look like you’re into the thing at all times … but, in fact, it is getting to be too much … About nine different constabularies stage a mass raid to wipe out the dope plague from the San Diego County high schools and they pounce on La Colonia Tijuana, which means the Tijuana Slums, name here in La Jolla underground for the apartments a lot of people in The Life share this summer near the beach, and some good Pump House souls are busted, but that is The Life, the world divided into surfer heads and surfer lames … Besides, it was a laugh and a half, the look on the cops’ faces when they saw the ceilings of La Colonia Tijuana, canopied in huge laceworks of interlocked pop-top rings off beer cans billowing in such groovy silvery ripples of grokkable reflections …

  The Probation Generation! Not the Lost Generation or the Beat Generation or the Silent Generation or even the Flower Generation, but the Probation Generation, with kids busted right and left up and down the coast for grass, and all get off the first time, on probation—What’s probation!—with this millennium at hand, and it is, because there’s no earthly stopping this thing. It’s like a boulder rolling down a hill—you can watch it and talk about it and scream and say Shit! but you can’t stop it. It’s just a question of where it’s going to go. Right now there are two ways it can go in Haight-Ashbury. One is the Buddhist direction, the Leary thing. There are good heads like Michael Bowen and Gary Goldhill who want to start the League for Spiritual Discovery here and pull the whole movement together into one church and give it a focus and even legal respectability. And they have given up much for this dream. Goldhill is a beautiful head! He is an Englishman who was writing this experimental stuff for TV in England and the BBC sent him to the U.S. to apply for a big grant, a Guggenheim or something, and he took a vacation in Mexico and ran into some American heads in San Miguel de Allende who said, Man, you got to come back here when the rainy seasons start and take some magic mushrooms, and damned if they didn’t send him a telegram in Guadalajara or wherever—RAINS CAME MUSHROOMS UP—and he returned out of curiosity and took the mushrooms, just as Leary had, and discovered the Management and gave up all, all the TV BBC game and dedicated himself to The Life … And Bowen has an apartment with India-print spreads lining the walls and couches on the floor and hand-made Indian teapots and cups and three small crystals suspended from the ceiling by almost invisible threads and picking up lights like jewels in the air, a place devoid of all the shit and gadgetry of the modern American plastic life, for, as Leary has said, a home should be a place of purity that the Gautama Buddha himself could walk into from 485 B.C. and feel at home. For some day grass must grow again in the streets, in pastoral purity, for life is shit, a duress of bad karmas, endless fight against catastrophe, which is to be warded off finally only by utter purification of the soul, utter passivity in which one becomes nothing … but a vessel of the All … the All-one …

  … as against the Kesey direction, which has become the prevailing life style of Haight-Ashbury … beyond catastrophe … like, picking up on anything that works and moves, every hot wire, every tube, ray, volt, decibel, beam, floodlight and combustion of American flag-flying neon Day-Glo America and winding it up to some mystical extreme carrying to the western-most edge of experience—

  The Day … was coming, but the movement lacked a single great charismatic leader, a visionary who could pull the whole thing together. Leary was too old, heading toward fifty years old, and too remote somehow, holed up in Millbrook, N.Y. As for Kesey—he is swamp-bound in exile in some alligator-infested Mexican hideaway, it was presumed … Yet here come the Merry Pranksters pulling back into San Francisco from Mexico via their own route … The Calliope Company gives them their Warehouse on Harriet Street to live in for a month, a place Tara wants to turn into a theater, an old garage in an abandoned hotel in the Tenderloin where Jack Dempsey used to train in a special amphitheater with a sloping wooden floor now all fully claimed by the vermin and the winos—but Colored Power! and the Day-Glo bus and the Pranksters come rolling in, and good heads start gathering around in the Day-Glo gloom of the place, like the Telepathic Kid who gets unspoken messages—we need beds—and he climbs a ladder and starts rigging the platforms on the theater scaffolding in here … as the Pranksters assemble from all over, Hermit—back from dark adventures in Napa Valley; Stewart Brand and Lois Jennings—back from the Southwest; Paul Foster—back from India … all joining the veteran Mexican band, Cassady, Babbs, Gretch, Mountain Girl, Faye and the children, Ram Rod, Hagen, Page, Doris Delay, Zonker, Black Maria …

  … and all at once it dawns, the main truth, spreading over the jungle drums all over the Haight-Ashbury: Kesey himself is back, too ::::: The Man ::::

  SUCH WAS THE BACKGROUND OF THE UNDERGROUND SUMMIT meeting between Kesey and Owsley. It was as crazy a scene as anybody ever dreamed up. For a start, it was in the apartment of Margot St. James, which looks like she once read a historical novel about a Roman banquet. The meeting began to shape up as a debate. Owsley, the White Rabbit, was sitting over here—and Kesey, the Fugitive, was sitting over there. Owsley was dressed like an uptown head—long hair, a dueling shirt with billowing sleeves, a sleev
eless jacket, and beads, amulets, mandalas hanging down over his chest, tight pants and high boots. Kesey had on his buckskin shirt and tight ginger-corduroy pants and the Guadalajara red Prankster boots—and he was in a chuckling, giggling mood. Standing around, along with Margot, were various Pranksters, Haight-Ashbury heads, San Francisco State heads, Berkeley heads, and two or three Hell’s Angels, including Terry the Tramp.

  Kesey presents his theory of going “beyond acid.” You find what you came to find when you’re on acid and we’ve got to start doing it without acid; there’s no use opening the door and going through it and then always going back out again. We’ve got to move on to the next step … This notion has Owsley slightly freaked, naturally. He has his voice wound all the way up:

  “Bullshit, Kesey! It’s the drugs that do it. It’s all the drugs, man. None of it would have happened without the drugs”—and so forth.

  Kesey keeps cocking his head to one side and giggling in the upcountry manner and saying: “No, it’s not the drugs. In fact”—chuckle, giggle—“I’m going to tell everyone to start doing it without the drugs”—and so forth.

  People in the room start following this exchange like a tennis match, the heads batting this way and that. One unfortunate kid from San Francisco State happens to get into this state of obsession about one foot in front of Terry the Tramp. He keeps edging closer and batting his head around, and edging in closer, until he is standing in front of Terry the Tramp and cutting off his line of vision, which is bad enough, but then he has to take out a cigarette and light it, all of this practically in Terry the Tramp’s face, or within a couple of feet of it, which is all the same to Terry.

  One billow comes up from the kid’s cigarette and Terry the Tramp says, “Hey, man, how about a cigarette?”

  He says it with a tone you have to hear to fully comprehend. It is the patented Hell’s Angels tone of soft grinning menace, kind of like the tone the second-story man uses on the watchdog, “Come here, fel-la … (so I CAN SQUASH YOUR HEAD WITH THIS BRICK).” He says it soft, but it stops the whole room like High Noon.

  “Hey, man, how about a cigarette?”

  The kid smells debacle in the air. It registers from his solar plexus to his earthworm lips. But he hasn’t quite figured out what it’s all about. He just hurries into his shirt pocket and takes out the cigarettes and shakes one free and offers it to Terry the Tramp, who takes it and puts it in his pocket. Then he says, with the soft grin menace smile snaking up out of his beard:

  “How about another one?”

  The kid mumbles O.K. and fishes into his pocket and shakes loose another cigarette and Terry the Tramp takes it and puts it into his pocket. The kid, meantime, is frozen, like a rabbit frozen by the eyebeams of a cougar. He knows it is time to split, but he can’t move. He is stricken and fascinated by his own impending destruction. It’s like there is nothing to do but play out the sequence. He puts the cigarettes back in his pocket—and precisely then, naturally, comes again the milky atropine:

  “How about another one?”

  O.K.—and Terry the Tramp takes another one and the kid puts them back in his pocket and Terry the Tramp says,

  “How about another one?”

  O.K.—and Terry the Tramp takes another one, and now every eye in the room watches the rabbit and the snake, panting for the next broken hyoid bone—how many cigarettes does the kid have left, fans? Eight—ten?—and what then, after all the cigarettes are gone?

  How about your shirt?

  O.K.—uhhh—

  How about your boots?

  O.K.—uhh—

  How about your pants?

  O.K.—uhhh—

  And now your HIDE, mother!

  My … hide!

  Your very HIDE, mother! Your very ASS! The last vestige of your pride and honor! AAARRRRRRRCHHHHHHHHH!!!! … and his bones crunched like baked baby ortolans …

  Everyone in the room can see the entire movie in an instant, like some crucible of the prison brutes, Terry the Tramp slowly picking meat off the turkey—fascinating!—stay tuned in for next week’s broken hyoid bone!—

  —until a couple of Pranksters intervene, with overtones of He’s just a baby, Terry, don’t snuff him. So the Kesey-Owsley debate resumed.

  It was a small moment. No heads were broken. Certainly, the Angels have done worse. The kid even got away that night with a whole half a pack of cigarettes. Yet it stuck in the throat. One way or another, the Hell’s Angels came to symbolize the side of the Kesey adventure that panicked the hip world. The Angels were too freaking real. Outlaws? they were outlaws by choice, from the word go, all the way out in Edge City. Furthur! The hip world, the vast majority of the acid heads, were still playing the eternal charade of the middle-class intellectuals—Behold my wings! Freedom! Flight!—but you don’t actually expect me to jump off that cliff, do you? It is the eternal game in which Clement Attlee, bald as Lenin, lively as a toy tank, yodels blood to the dockworkers of Liverpool—and dies buried in striped pants with a magenta sash across his chest and a coin with the Queen’s likeness upon each eyelid. In their heart of hearts, the heads of Haight-Ashbury could never stretch their fantasy as far out as the Hell’s Angels. Overtly, publicly, they included them in—suddenly, they were the Raw Vital Proles of this thing, the favorite minority, replacing the spades. Privately, the heads remained true to their class, and to its visceral panics … One trouble with this Kesey was, he really meant it.

  BUT! STEP UP THE MOVIE. HE SUDDENLY TURNED UP ONE AFTERNOON at Ed McClanahan’s creative-writing class at Stanford. He sticks his head in the door and smiles from underneath a cowboy hat and says, “Happy birthday, Ed …” In truth, it is his birthday. Then he comes on in, the Fugitive in buckskin shirt and red Guadalajara boots; tells the students why he wants to move beyond writing to more … electric forms … then vanishes, that damned Pimpernel.

  Then the Haight-Ashbury heads held the first big “be-in,” the Love Festival on October 7, on the occasion of the California law against LSD going into effect. Thousands of heads piled in, in high costume, ringing bells, chanting, dancing ecstatically, blowing their minds one way and another and making their favorite satiric gesture to the cops, handing them flowers, burying the bastids in tender fruity petals of love. Oh christ, Tom, the thing was fantastic, a freaking mindblower, thousands of high-loving heads out there messing up the minds of the cops and everybody else in a fiesta of love and euphoria. And who pops up in the middle of it all, down in the panhandle strip of the Golden Gate Park, but the Pimpernel, in Guadalajara boots and cowboy suit, and just as the word gets to ricocheting through the crowd real good—Kesey’s here! Kesey’s here—he vanishes, accursed Pimpernel.

  Just in case there was anybody left who didn’t get the Gestalt here, Kesey made his big move in the press. He met with Donovan Bess, a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, and gave him the story of his flight to Mexico and his plans, as The Fugitive. The story was a real barn burner, Secret Interview with Fugitive Wanted by FBI, with all the trimmings, awash in screamers all across the San Francisco Chronicle. The line that captured all imaginations was where Kesey said:

  “I intend to stay in this country as a fugitive, and as salt in J. Edgar Hoover’s wounds.”

  Then—this next prank was beautiful. A TV interview. The Fugitive on TV, while all, F. B. Eyes and everyone, watch helpless as the full face of the Fugitive, Kesey, beams forth into every home and bar and hospital and detective bureau in the Bay Area. It was beautiful to even think about, this prank. It was set up, much sly planning, with Roger Grimsby, a San Francisco television personality, on Station KGO, the local ABC outlet. The fantasy was that Grimsby would tape an interview with Kesey in a hideaway in the Portrero section of San Francisco, which was far away from both Haight-Ashbury and North Beach, and then put it on the air a couple of days later, October 20, a Friday. This fantasy came off like a dream. Grimsby taped the interview, and all was cool, and on Friday afternoon Kesey’s face beamed into every home, bar
, hospital and detective bureau, saying it all again, in person:

  “I intend to stay in this country as a fugitive, and as salt in J. Edgar Hoover’s wounds …”

  See the very hunted coons

  Salt J. Edgar Hoover’s wounds!

  Yah! the cops and robbers game.

  All that remains to be done is the grand finale. Fugitive Extraordinaire! In this fantasy Kesey will present himself in person, in the flesh—Kesey!—only inches away from the greatest collection of cops in the history of the drug scene and then

  VANISH

  like Mandrake. The Pranksters will hold a monster trips festival, the Acid Test of all times, the ultimate, on Halloween, in San Francisco’s largest hall, Winterland, for all the heads on the West Coast or coast to coast and galaxy to galaxy. Naturally, the cops will converge on this hideous bacchanal to watch for Kesey and other felons and bad actors. But of course! An integral part of the fantasy! It will be a masked ball, this Test. Nobody will know which freak is who. At the midnight hour, Kesey, masked and disguised in a Superhero costume, on the order of Captain America of the Marvel Comics pantheon, will come up on stage and deliver his vision of the future, of the way “beyond acid.” Who is this apocalyptic—Then he will rip off his mask—Why—it’s Ken Kee-zee!—and as the law rushes for him, he will leap up on a rope hanging down from the roof at center stage and climb, hand over hand, without even using his legs, with his cape flying, straight up, up, up, up through a trap door in the roof, to where Babbs will be waiting with a helicopter, Captain Midnight of the U.S. Marines, and they will ascend into the California ozone looking down one last time into the upturned moon faces of all the put-on, nonplused, outwitted, befuddled befreaked shucked! constables and sleuths Yeah! Yeah! Right! Right! Right!