The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (12 page)

The trip had started out as a great bursting forth out of the forest fastness of La Honda, out into an unsuspecting America. And for Sandy, anyway, that was when the trip went best, when the Pranksters were out among them, and the citizens of the land were gawking and struggling to summon up the proper emotion for this—what in the name of God are the ninnies
doing.
But the opposite was happening, too. On those long stretches of American superhighway between performances the bus was like a pressure cooker, a crucible, like one of those chambers in which the early atomic scientists used to compress heavy water, drive the molecules closer and closer together until the very atoms exploded. On the bus all traces of freakiness or competition or bitterness or whatever were intensified. They were right out front, for sure.

Jane Burton, who was now known as Generally Famished, and Sandy—Dismount—took to going off whenever they could, like in Houston, for a square meal.

Square on every level, Tonto. They would just go right into one of those Square American steak houses with the big plate-glass window with the corny little plastic windmill in the window advertising Heineken's Beer and the Diners Club and American Express stickers on the plate-glass door and go in and have a square steak and square French fries and boiled bland peas and carrots and A-l sauce. Jane, now ravaged from lack of sleep, and ravenously hungry, generally famished, or slightly bilious the whole time, wondering what the hell they were now doing on the southern rim of the United States when New York was way up there. Sandy—with this subliminal urge to get off the bus, and yet be
on the bus
—on
that
level—and neither of them knowing what to make of Kesey—always Kesey ...

AND THE HEAT. FROM HOUSTON THEY HEADED EAST THROUGH the Deep South, and the Deep South in July was ... lava. The air rushing into the open windows of the bus came in hot and gritty like invisible smoke, and when they stopped, it just rolled over them, pure lava. The rest in Houston didn't do too much good, because the heat just started it all again, nobody slept, and it was like all you could do to cut through the lava with speed and grass and acid.

New Orleans was a relief, because they got out and walked around the French Quarter and down by the docks in their red and white striped shirts and Day-Glo stuff and the people freaked over them. And the cops came while they were down by the docks, which was just comic relief, because by now the cops were a piece of cake.

The city cops were no more able to keep their Cop Movie going than the country cops. Hassler talked sweet to them like the college valedictorian and Kesey talked sweet and down-home and Hagen filmed it all like this was some crazed adventure in cinema verité and the cops skedaddled in a herd of new Ford cruisers with revolving turret lights. Sayonara, you all.

They just kept walking around New Orleans in their striped shirts and wearing shorts, and they could all see Kesey's big muscular legs, like a football player's, striding on up ahead like he owned the place, like they all owned the place, and everybody's spirits picked up. So they head out to Lake Pontchartrain, on the northern edge of New Orleans. They all took acid, but a small dose, about 75 micrograms—

everybody happy and high on acid, and rock 'n' roll records blaring, Martha and the Vandellas and Shirley Ellis, all that old stuff pounding away. Lake Pontchartrain is like a great big beautiful spacious—space!—park on the water. They pull the bus up in a parking area and there are nice trees round and all that endless nice water and they put on their bathing suits. Walker, who has a hell of a build, puts on a pair of red, yellow, and black trunks, and Kesey, who has a hell of a build, puts on a pair of blue and white trunks, and Zonker, who has a hell of a build, only leaner, puts on a pair of orange trunks, and the blue of the water and the scorched-out green of the grass and the leaves and—a little breeze?—it is all swimming in front of their old acid eyes like a molten postcard—water! What they don't know is, it is a segregated beach, for Negroes only. The spades all sitting there on benches sit there staring at these white crazies coming out of a weird bus and heading for New Or-leans 30th-parallel Deep South segregated water. Zonker is really zonked this time, and burning up with the heat, about 100 degrees, and he dives in and swims out a ways and pretty soon he sees he is surrounded by deep orange men, Negroes, all treading water around him and giving him rotten looks. One of them has a gold tooth in the front with a star cut out in it, so that a white enamel star shows in the middle of the gold, and the gold starts flashing out at him in the sun—
cheeeakkk
—in time with his heartbeat which is getting faster all the time, these goddamn flashes of gold and white star after-images, and the Golden Mouth says, "Man, there sure is a lotta trash in the water today."

"You ain't shittin', man," says another one of them.

"Lotta fuckin' trash, man," says another one, and so on.

Suddenly Golden Mouth is speaking straight to Zonker: "What's all this trash doing in the water, man?"

Zonker is very nonplused, partly because the whole day has turned orange on him, because of the acid—orange trunks, orange water, orange sky, orange menacing spades.

"Boy, what you doing here!" Golden Mouth says very sharp all of a sudden.

Orange and big and orange hulking fat back big as an orange manta ray. "Boy, you know what we gonna do? We gonna cut yo' little balls off. We gonna take you up on that beach and
wail
with you!"

"Heh-hehhhhhhhhhhhh!" The others start this wailing moaning laugh.

For some reason, however, this makes Zonker smile. He can feel it spreading across his face, like a big orange slice of orange sugar-jelly candy and he is suspended there treading water and grinning while the Golden Mouth flashes and flashes and flashes.

Then the Golden Mouth says, "Well, it sure is
some kinda trash,"
and starts laughing, only amiably this time, and they all laugh, and Zonker laughs and swims back to shore.

By this time a big crowd of Negroes has gathered around the mad bus. Funky music is blasting off the speakers, a Jimmy Smith record. Zonker gets on the bus. It seems like thousands of Negroes are dancing around the bus, doing rock dances and the dirty boogie. Everything is orange and then he looks at the writhing mass of Negroes, out every window, nothing but writhing Negroes mashed in around the bus and writhing, and it all starts turning from orange to brown. Zonker starts getting the feeling he is inside an enormous intestine and it is going into peristaltic contractions.

He can feel the whole trip turning into a horrible bummer. Even Kesey, who isn't afraid of anything, looks worried. "We better get out of here," Kesey says. But squeezed out?—in bummer brown peristaltic contractions? Luckily for Zonker, maybe for everybody, the white cops turn up at that point and break up the crowd and tell the white crazies to drive on, this is a segregated beach, and for once they don't pile out and try to break up the Cop Movie. They go with the Cop Movie and get their movie out of there.

ON INTO THE FLATLANDS OF MISSISSIPPI AND ALABAMA, Biloxi, Mobile, U.S. Route 90, the flatlands and the fields and the heat doesn't let up ever. They are heading for Florida. Sandy hasn't slept in days:::::how many:::::like total insomnia and everything is
bending
in curvy curdling lines. Sun and flatlands. So damned hot—and everything is getting torn into opposites. The dead-still heat-stroked summertime deep Southland—and Sandy's heart racing at a constant tachycardia and his brain racing and reeling out and so essential to...
keep moving, Cassady!...
but there are two Cassadys. One minute Cassady looks 58 and crazy—
speed!
—and the next, 28 and peaceful—
acid
—and Sandy can tell the peaceful Cassady in an instant, because his nose becomes... long and smooth and almost patrician, whereas the wild Cassady looks beat-up. And Kesey—
always Kesey!
Sandy looks. .. and Kesey is old and haggard and his face is lopsided ... and then Sandy looks and Kesey is young, serene, and his face is lineless, and round and smooth as a baby's as he sits for hours on end reading comic books, absorbed in the plunging purple Steve Ditko shadows of Dr. Strange attired in capes and chiaroscuro, saying: "How could they have known that this gem was merely a device to bridge dimensions! It was a means to enter the dread purple dimension—from our own world!" Sandy may wander .. . off the bus, but it remains all Kesey. Dr. Strange! Always seeing two Keseys. Kesey the Prankster and Kesey the organizer. Going through the steams of southern Alabama in late June and Kesey rises up from out of the comic books and becomes Captain Flag. He puts on a pink kilt, like a miniskirt, and pink socks and patent-leather shoes and pink sunglasses and wraps an American flag around his head like a big turban and holds it in place with an arrow through the back of it and gets up on top of the bus roaring through Alabama and starts playing the flute at people passing by. The Alabamans drawn into the PINK DIMENSION do a double-freak take for sure and it is
Too
Much!
as George Walker always says, too mullyfogging much. They pull into a gas station in Mobile and half the Pranksters jump out of the bus, blazing red and white stripes and throwing red rubber balls around in a crazed way like a manic ballet of slick Servicenter flutter decoration while the guy fills up the tank, and he looks from them to Captain Flag to the bus itself, and after he collects for the gas he looks through the window at Cassady in the driver's seat and shakes his head and says:

"No wonder you're so nigger-heavy in California." FORNIA-FORNIA-FORNIA-FORNIA-FORNIA-FOR-NIA-FORNIA-FORNIA as it picked up inside the bus in variable lag, and that breaks everybody up.

That was when it was good ... grinding on through Alabama, and then suddenly, to Sandy, Kesey is old and haggard and the organizer. Sandy can see him descending the ladder down from the roof of the bus and glowering at him, and he knows—intersubjectivity!—that Kesey is thinking. You're too detached, Sandy, you're not out front, you may be sitting right here grinding and roaring through Alabama but you're

... off the bus ... And he approaches Sandy, hunched over under the low ceiling of the bus, and to Sandy he looks like an ape with his mighty arms dangling, like The Incredible Hulk, and suddenly Sandy jumps up and crouches into an ape position, dangling his arms and mimicking him—and Kesey breaks into a big grin and throws his arms around Sandy and hugs him—

He approves! Kesey approves of me! At last I have
responded
to something, brought it all out front, even if it is resentment,
done
something, done my thing—and in that very action, just as he taught, it is gone, the resentment... and I am back on the bus again, synched in .. .

Always Kesey! And in that surge of euphoria—
Kesey approves!
—Sandy knew that Kesey was the key to whatever was going right and whatever was going wrong on this trip, and nobody, not one of them who ever took this trip, got in this movie, would ever have even the will to walk up to Kesey and announce irrevocably: I am off the bus. It would be like saying, I am off this... Unspoken Thing we are into ...

PENSACOLA, FLORIDA. 110 DEGREES. A FRIEND OF BABBS HAS A little house near the ocean, and they pull in there, but the ocean doesn't help at all. The heat makes waves in the air, like over a radiator. Most of the Pranksters are in the house or out in the yard. Some of the girls are outside the bus barbecuing some meat.

Sandy is by himself inside the bus, in the shade. The insomnia is killing him. He has got to get some sleep or keep moving. He can't stand it in here stranded in between with his heart pounding. He goes to the refrigerator and takes out the orange juice.

The acid in New Orleans, the 75 micrograms, wasn't enough. It's like he hasn't had a good high the whole trip, nothing ... blissful. So he hooks down a big slug of Unauthorized Acid and sits back.

He would like something nice and peaceful, closed in softly alone on the bus. He puts on a set of earphones. The left earphone is hooked into a microphone inside the house and picks up Kesey's cousin Dale playing the piano. Dale, for all his country ways, has studied music a long time and plays well and the notes come in like liquid drops of amethyst vibrating endlessly in the . .. acid . . . atmosphere and it is very nice. The right earphone is hooked into a microphone picking up the sounds outside the house, mainly the barbecue fires crackling. So Dale concerto and fire crackling in these big padded earphones closed in about his head ... only the sounds are somehow sliding out of control. There is no synch. It is as if the two are fighting for his head. The barbecue crackles and bubbles in his head and the amethyst droplets crystallize into broken glass, and then tin, a tin piano. The earphones seem to get bigger and bigger, huge padded shells about to enclose his whole head, his face, his nose—amok sound overpowering him, as if it is all going to end right here inside this padded globe—

panic
—he leaps up from the seat, bolts a few feet with the earphones still clamped on his skull, then rips them off and jumps out of the bus—Pranksters everywhere in the afternoon sun, in red and white striped shirts. Babbs has the power and is directing the movie and is trying to shoot something—Acid Piper. Sandy looks about. Nobody he can tell it to, that he has taken acid by himself and it is turning into a bummer, he can't bring this out front... He runs into the house, the walls keep jumping up so goddamn close and all the angles are under extreme stress, as if they could break. Jane Burton is sitting alone in the house, feeling bilious. Jane is the only person he can tell.

"Jane," he says, "I took some acid ... and it's really weird ..." But it is such an effort to talk ...

The heat waves are solidifying in the air like the waves in a child's marble and the perspectives are all berserk, walls rushing up then sinking way back like a Titian banquet hall. And the heat—Sandy has to do something to pull himself together, so he takes a shower. He undresses and gets in the shower and ... flute music, Babbs! flute music comes spraying out of the nozzle and the heat is inside of him, it is like he can look down and see it burning there and he looks down, two bare legs, a torso rising up at him and like he is just noticing them for the first time. They exist apart from, like another human being's, such odd turns and angles they take amid the flute streams, swells and bony processes, like he has never seen any of this before, this flesh, this stranger. He groks over that—only it isn't a stranger, it is his . . . mother . .. and suddenly he is back in this body, only it is his mother's body—and then his father's—