The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (15 page)

Next down to Boise, Idaho, and everywhere Kesey and Babbs up top the bus with flutes, mercilessly tootling the people of America as they crowd around the bus and getting pretty good at it even. Winces here and there as some little cringing shell in the population pinioned in his crispy black shiny shoes knows, no mistake, that it is
him
they have singled out—they are playing my song, the desperate sound track from my movie—and Kesey and Babbs score again and again, like the legendary Zen archers, for they no longer play their music
at
people but
inside
them. They play inside them, oh merciless flow. And many things are clear in the flow. They are above the multitudes, looking down from the Furthur heights of the bus, and the billion eyes of America glisten at them like electric kernels, and yet the Pranksters are grooving with this whole wide-screen America and going with its flow with American flags flying from the bus and taking energy, as in solar heat, from its horsepower and its neon and there is no limit to the American trip. Bango!—that's it!—the trouble with Leary and his group is that they have turned
back.
But of course! They have turned back into that old ancient New York intellectual thing, ducked back into the romantic past, copped out of the American trip. New York intellectuals have always looked for

. .. another country, a fatherland of the mind, where it is all better and more philosophic and purer, gadget-free, and simpler and pedigreed: France or England, usually—oh, the art of living, in France, boys. The Learyites have done the same thing, only with them it's—India—the East—with all the ancient flap-doodle of Gautama Buddha or the Rig-Veda blowing in like mildew, and Leary calls for blue grass growing in the streets of New York, and he decrees that everyone should have such a dwelling place of such pristine antique décor, with everyone hunkered down amid straw rugs and Paisley wall hangings, that the Gautama Buddha himself from 485 B.C. could walk in and feel at home instantly. Above all, keep quiet, for God's sake, hold it down, whisper, moan, mumble, meditate, and for chris-sake, no
gadgets
—no tapes, video tapes, TV, movies, Hagstrom electric basses, variable lags, American flags, no neon, Buick Electras, mad moonstone-faced Servicenters, and no manic buses, f r chrissake, soaring, doubledyclutch doubledyclutch, to the Westernmost edge—

And in Boise they cut through a funeral or wedding or something, so many dressed-up people in the sun gawking at Pranksters gathered at a fountain and all cutting up in the sunspots, and a kid—they have tootled
his song,
and he likes it, and he runs for the bus and they all pile on and pull out, just ahead of him, and he keeps running for the bus, and Kesey keeps slowing down and then pulling out just out of his reach, six or eight blocks this way, and then they speed up for good, and they can still see him floating away in the background, his legs still running, like a preview—

—allegory of life!—

—of the multitudes who very shortly will want to get on the bus . . . themselves . . .

Back at Kesey's in La Honda,

Deep into the rusky-dusky neon dusty,

More synched in than

They had ever been,

Deep into the Unspoken Thing,

The Pranksters now aligned

Along a sheerly dividing line:

Before the bus and

After the bus,

On the bus or

Off the bus,

A sheerly Diluvial divide:

Did you take the Epoch Ride?

One-way ticket into the nirvana thickets

Of the
ex
redwood
cathedra
Unspoken Thing.

Most peaceful synching in,

Serene bacchanal

For all...

... except Sandy. For Sandy, the bus had stopped but he hadn't. It was as if the bus had hit a wall and he had shot out the window and was living in the suspended interminable moment before
he
hit—what? He didn't know. All he knew was that there would be a crash unless the momentum of the Pranksters suddenly resumed and caught up with him the way the Flash, in the Pranksters' ubiquitous comic books, caught speeding bullets by streaking at precisely their speed and reaching out and picking them up like eggs...

Sandy went about wide-eyed and nervous, an endless ratchet of activity that no one quite comprehended at first. The bus was parked out in front of the log house and Kesey would be inside the bus doing something and Sandy, outside the door, would suddenly begin arguing with him over some esoteric point of the sound system. Kesey was keeping the tapes on a hick level, he was saying. Kesey was, like, rustling cellophane in front of a microphone for "fire," and so forth and so on. So many complaints! Until Kesey puts his arms up on the walls of the bus in the Christ on the Cross gesture—which is precisely what one of Sandy's brothers used to do when he started complaining—and this drives Sandy into a rage and he yells
Fuck you!
and gives Kesey the finger. Kesey streaks out of the door of the bus and pins Sandy up against the side of the bus—and it is all over as fast as that. Sandy is overwhelmed.

He has never seen Kesey use his tremendous strength against anyone before, and it is overwhelming, the idea of it even. But it is all over in no time. Kesey is suddenly calm again and asks Sandy to come with him to the backhouse, the shack by the creek. He wants to talk to him.

So they go out there and Kesey talks to Sandy about Sandy's attitude. Sandy is still
Dis-mount,
still getting off the bus continually, and why? You don't understand, says Sandy. You don't understand my dis-mounting. It's like climbing a mountain. Would you rather climb the mountain or have a helicopter deposit you on the top? The continual climb, the continual
remounting,
makes it a richer experience, and so on.

Kesey nods in a somewhat abstracted way and says O.K., Sandy ...

But Sandy feels paranoid . .. what do they
really
think of him? What are they planning? What insidious prank? He can't get it out of his mind that they are building up to some prank of enormous proportions, at his expense. A Monstrous Prank ... He can't sleep, his brain keeps going at the furious speed of the bus on the road, like an eternal trip on speed.

Then Kesey devised a game called "Power." He took a dart-board and covered it with Masonite and put a spinner in the middle and marked off spoke lines forming one section for each Prankster. Each person's Prankster name was written in his section, Intrepid Traveler for Babbs, Mai Function for Hagen, Speed Limit for Cassady, Hassler for Ron Bevirt, Gretchen Fetchin for Paula—in truth, her old name and persona were gone entirely and she was now a new person known as Gretchen Fetchin or Gretch. Sandy looked and in his section it said: "dis-MOUNT," with the heavy accent on Mount, even as he had explained it to Kesey in the backhouse. He was overwhelmed with relief and gratitude. Kesey
knew!
Kesey understood! He was back in the bus.

Everybody was to write out some "tasks" on slips of paper and they would all be put in a big pile. Then the spinner was spun, and if it landed on you, you reached into the pile and pulled out a "task," which you then had to do, and the others gave you points according to how well you had done the task, on a scale of one to five points, five being the best. A lot of the tasks were very pranked-up, like "put on an article of somebody else's clothing." There was a scoreboard and everybody moved his counter up the scoreboard as he picked up points. Everybody made his own counter. Sandy was making his out of Sculpt Metal. He stretched it to a long spidery length, then suddenly compressed it into an ugly wad, because that was the way he was beginning to feel. So Page picked it up and made a nice little form out of it, like a bridge, and everybody said that's the way it should be done—and Sandy feels the paranoia coming back ...

The prize for winning was: Power. Thirty minutes of absolute power in which your word was law and everyone had to do whatever you wanted. Very allegorical, this game. By and by Babbs won a game and he ordered everybody to bring everything they possessed into the living room. Everybody went forth and hauled in all their stuff, out to the bedrooms, tents, Kampers, sleeping bags, the bus, and brought in a ragamuffin mountain of clothes, shoes, boots, toys, paint pots, toothbrushes, books, boxes, capsules, stashes, letters, litter, junk. It was all piled up in the center of the room, a marvelous Rat mountain of junk. "Now," said Babbs, "we redistribute the wealth." And he would hold up some piece of it and say, "Who wants one 1964

Gretchen Fetchin toothbrush?" and somebody would hold up his hand and it would go to him and somebody else would catalogue it all solemnly on a legal pad.

Then the pointer hits Sandy and he picks up a task, a slip of paper. It is in Gretch's handwriting, and it says: "Go out and build a fire." He reads it out loud and just keeps staring at it. Then they all stare at him, waiting for him to get up and go out and build a fire, and he feels them staring and then he
knows
—it is a very clever plot to get him out of the house, get him outside in the dark, and then pull the Monstrous Prank—

And he starts blurting it all out. /
can't do it. Can't you see how it is? It's getting
awful
—/
can't sleep and everything is like this:
He lays the fingers of one hand over the fingers of the other, forming a trellis pattern, and peers through the spaces in between to show how everything keeps breaking up, fragmenting, his whole field of vision, ever since the DMT trip at Millbrook, and the sea of flames and the paranoia, the everlasting paranoia, he blurts it all out, everything that is hanging him up and rocketing him toward—what?

And suddenly it is very quiet in the log house. Every Prankster eye is upon him, absorbed, giving him total... Attention, He has come all the way out front. The furious motion stops, and he suddenly feels :::: peace.

"How many points do we give him?" says Kesey.

And around the circle everyone says "Five!" "Five!" "Five!" "Five!" "Five!"—

"Three," says Gretch, who had written the task in the first place—and Sandy—a small microgram of paranoia creeps back in like a mite...

THE PRANKSTERS NOW REALIZED THAT SANDY WAS IN A BAD

way. Kesey had a saying, "Feed the hungry bee." So the Pranksters set about showering . . . Attention on Sandy, to try to give him a feeling of being at the cool center of the whole thing. But he kept misinterpreting their gestures. Why are they staring? His insomnia became more and more severe. One night he walked down the road to the housing development, Redwood Terrace, to try to borrow some Sominex.

He was just going to walk up to a door in the middle of the night and knock and ask for some Sominex. Somehow he had the old New York apartment-house idea that you walk down the hall and borrow a cup of sugar, even if you don't know the people. So he starts knocking on doors and asking for Sominex. Of course, they all either panic and shut the door or tell him to fuck off. The people of Redwood Terrace were a little paranoid themselves by this time about the crazies down the road at Kesey's.

By day it was no better. As his insomnia got worse, he started having more fragmented vision and finally ... he looks at the wild-painted bus and the lurid chaos of the swirls changes into ... the tunnel ! A tunnel they had gone through, a long tunnel, in which he had been possessed by intense claustrophobia and the paranoid certainty that they would never emerge from the tunnel, and now the tunnel appears on the side of the bus in horrifying detail. He turns away ... there is the cool limelit bower, cathedral in the redwoods, serenity... he turns back to the bus slowly :::::::: IT

IS STILL THERE! THE TUNNEL! ::::: THE BUS! ::::: Now PAINTED AS IF BY A MASTER, A VERY TITIAN :::: AN HIERONYMUS BOSCH :::: A MATTHIAS GRÜNEWALD :::: WITH THE

MOST HORRIFYING SCENES OF MY LIFE.

SALVATION? KESEY ANNOUNCES THEY ARE GETTING BACK ON

the bus—moving again—and going up to Esalen Institute up in Big Sur, four hours drive to the south. Esalen was an "experiment in living," as they say, a sort of Roughin-it resort perched on a cliff about 1,000 feet above the Pacific. A very dramatic piece of Nature, in the nineteenth-century seascape fashion. Waves crashing way down below and sparkling air way up here and a view of half the world, mountains, ocean, sky, the whole show, in a word, for which Big Sur is famous. There was a lodge and a swimming pool and a stretch of greensward out to the edge of the cliff and some hot sulphur springs about 100 yards away, also perched on the side of a cliff, in which one could bathe and gaze out over the eternal ocean. Behind the lodge were rows of tiny cabins and a few trailers. These were for the clientele. The clients—

well, to put it simply, Esalen was a place where educated middle-class adults came in the summer to try to get out of The Rut and wiggle their fannies a bit.

The main theoretician at Esalen was a Gestalt psychologist named Fritz Perls. Perls was a great goateed man in his seventies who went about in a jump suit made of blue terrycloth. He had the air of a very learned, dignified, and authoritative blue bear.

Perls was the father of the Now Trip. His theory was that most people live fantasy lives. They live totally in the past or in terms of what they expect in the future, which amounts to fear, generally. Perls tried to teach his patients, pupils, and the clients at Esalen to live Now for a change, in the present, to become aware of their bodies and all the information their senses brought them, to shelve their fears and seize the moment. They went through "marathon encounters," in which a group stayed together for days and brought everything out front, no longer hiding behind custom, saying what they really felt—shouts, accusations, embraces, tears—a perfect delight, of course: "You want to know what I really think of you ..." One of the exercises at Esalen was the Now Trip exercise, in which you try to catalogue the information your senses are bringing you in the present moment. You make a rapid series of statements beginning with the word "Now": "Now I feel the wind cooling the perspiration on my forehead ... Now I hear a bus coming up the drive in low gear ... Now I hear a Beatles record playing over a loudspeaker ..."