The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (17 page)

Zoroaster hauling haoma water along the road and—
-flash!
—he runs into the flaming form of the Archangel Vohu Mano, messenger of Ahura Mazda, and the beginning of Zoroastrianism. Saul of Tarsus walking along the road to Damascus and—
flash!
—he hears the voice of the Lord and becomes a Christian. Plus God knows how many lesser figures in the 2,000 years since then, Christian Rosenkreuz and his "God-illuminated" brotherhood of Rosicrucians, Emanuel Swedenborg whose mind suddenly "opened" in 1743, Meister Eck-hart and his disciples Suso and Tauler, and in the twentieth-century Sadhu Sundar Singh—with—
flash!
—a vision at the age of 16

and many times thereafter; ".. . often when I come out of ecstasy I think the whole world must be blind not to see what I see, everything is so near and clear ... there is no language which will express the things which I see and hear in the spiritual world ..."

Sounds like an acid head, of course. What they all saw in... a flash was the solution to the basic predicament of being
human,
the personal
I
,
Me,
trapped, mortal and helpless, in a vast impersonal
It,
the world around me. Suddenly!—All-in-one!—

flowing together,
I
into
It,
and
It
into
Me,
and in that flow I perceive a power, so near and so clear, that the whole world is blind to. All the modern religions, and the occult mysteries, for that matter, talk about an Other World—whether Brahma's or the flying saucers'—that the rational work-a-day world is blind to. The—
so called!
friends—

rational world. If only
they,
Mom&Dad&Buddy&Sis, dear-but-square ones, could but know the
pairos,
the supreme moment... The historic
visions
have been explained in many ways, as the result of epilepsy, self-hypnosis, changes in metabolism due to fasting, or actual intervention by gods—or drugs: Zoroastrianism began in a grand bath of haoma water, which was the same as the Hindu soma, and was unquestionably a drug.
The experience!

And following
the experience
—after I got to know the Pranksters, I went back and read Joachim Wach's paradigm of the way religions are founded, written in 1944, and it was almost like a piece of occult precognition for me if I played it off against what I knew about the Pranksters:

Following a profound new experience, providing a new illumination of the world,
the founder, a highly charismatic person, begins enlisting disciples. These followers
become an informally but closely knit association, bound together by the new
experience, whose nature the founder has revealed and interpreted. The association
might be called a
circle,
indicating that it is oriented toward a central figure with
whom each of the followers is in intimate contact. The followers may be regarded as
the founder's companions, bound to him by personal devotion, friendship and loyalty.

A growing sense of solidarity both binds the members together and differentiates them
from any other form of social organization. Membership in the circle requires a
complete break with the ordinary pursuits of life and a radical change in social
relationships. Ties of family and kinship and loyalties of various kinds were at least
temporarily relaxed or severed. The hardships, suffering and persecution that loomed
for those who cast their lot with the group were counterbalanced by their high hopes
and firm expectations ...
and so on. And of the founder himself: he has "visions, dreams, trances, frequent ecstasies" ... "unusual sensitiveness and an intense emotional life" ... "is ready to interpret manifestations of the divine" . . . "there is something elemental about [him], an uncompromising attitude and an archaic manner and language" . . . "He appears as a renewer of lost contracts with the hidden powers of life" .. . "does not usually come from the aristocracy, the learned or refined; frequently he emerges from simpler folk and remains true to his origin even in a changed environment" ... "speaks cryptically, with words, signs, gestures, many metaphors, symbolic acts of a diverse nature" . .. "illuminates and interprets the past and anticipates the future in terms of the
kairos
(the supreme moment)"—

The
kairos!
—the
experience!

—in one of two ways, according to Max Weber: as an "ethical" prophet, like Jesus or Moses, who outlines rules of conduct for his followers and describes God as a super-person who passes judgment on how they live up to the rules. Or as an

"exemplary" prophet, like Buddha: for him, God is impersonal, a force, an energy, a unifying flow, an All-in-one. The exemplary prophet does not present rules of conduct. He presents his own life as an example for his followers . . .

In all these religious circles, the groups became tighter and tighter by developing their own symbols, terminology, life styles, and, gradually, simple cultic practices,
rites,
often involving music and art, all of which grew out of the
new experience
and seemed weird or incomprehensible to those who have never had it. At that point they would also ... "develop a strong urge to extend the message to all people."

... all people ... Within the religious circle, status was always a simple matter. The world was simply and sheerly divided into "the aware," those who had had the experience of being vessels of the divine, and a great mass of "the unaware," "the unmusical," the unattuned." Or:
you're either on the bus or off the bus.
Consciously, the Aware were never snobbish toward the Unaware, but in fact most of that great jellyfish blob of straight souls looked like hopeless cases—
and the music of your flute
from up top the bus
just brought them up tighter.
But these groups treated anyone who showed possibilities, who was a potential brother, with generous solicitude ...

. . . THE POTENTIALLY ATTUNED . . . BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE

started showing up at Kesey's in La Honda, and no one was turned away. They could stay there, live there, if they ...seemed attuned. Mountain Girl was waiting out front of Kesey's house when the bus came around the last bend on Route 84 and into the redwood gorge. Mountain Girl was a big brunette with a black motorcycle, wearing a T-shirt and dungarees. She was only 18 but big, about five-foot-nine, and heavy; and loud and sloppy, as far as that went. But it was funny ... she had beautiful teeth and a smile that lit up one's gizzard ... Her name was Carolyn Adams, but she became Mountain Girl right away. As far as I know, nobody ever called her anything else after that, until the police got technical about it nine months later with her and eleven other Pranksters...

Cassady had turned Mountain Girl on to Kesey's place. She had been working as a technician in a biological laboratory in Palo Alto. She had a boyfriend who—well, he probably thought of himself as a "beatnik" in his square hip way. Only he never did anything, this boyfriend of hers. They never went anywhere. They never went out. So she went out by herself. She ended up one night in St. Michael's Alley, one of Palo Alto's little boho rookeries, at a birthday party for Cassady. Cassady said over the mountain and down under the redwoods was where it was at.

Mountain Girl was a big hit with the Pranksters from the very start. She seemed always completely out front, without the slightest prompting. She was one big loud charge of vitality. Here comes Mountain Girl—and it was a thing that made you pick up, as soon as you saw her mouth broaden into a grin and her big brown eyes open, open, open, open until they practically exploded like sunspots in front of your eyes and you knew that wonderful countryfied voice was going to sing out something like:

"Hey! Guess what we're gonna do! We were just up to Baw's"—the general store—"and we're gonna git some seeds and plant some grass in Baw's window box!

Can't you see it! The whole town's gonna git turned on in six months!"—and so on.

But underneath all the gits and gonnas, she turned out to be probably the brightest girl around there, with the possible exception of Faye. Faye said very little, so it was a moot point. Mountain Girl turned out to be from a highly respectable upper-middle-class background in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., a family of Unitarians. In any case, she caught on to everything right away. She was decisive and had all the nerve in the world. Also she was getting more beautiful every day. All it took was a few weeks of the rice and stew and irregular eating around Kesey's, the old involuntary macrobiotic diet, so to speak, and she started thinning out and getting beautiful. None of this was lost on Kesey. He was the Mountain Man and she was the Mountain Girl. She was just right for him ...

Mountain Girl moved into a tent up on a little plateau on the hill behind the house, under the redwoods. Page Browning had a tent up there, too. So did Babbs and Gretch. Mike Hagen had his Screw Shack. The Screw Shack was a very stellar—
Mal
Function!
—Hagen production. None of the boards lay true and none of the nails ever quite made it all the way in. The boards seemed to be huddled together in a tentative agreement. One day Kesey took a hammer and hit a single nail on the peak of the shack and the whole shack fell down.

"Nothing lasts,
Hagen!" yelled Mountain Girl, and her laugh boomed through the redwoods.

And the Hermit's Cave... One day Faye looked out the kitchen window and there was a little creature at the foot of the hill behind the house, peering out from the edge of the woods like a starved animal. He was a small, thin kid, barely five feet tall, but he had a huge black beard, like some Ozark g-nome in Barney Google. He just stood there with these big starveling eyes bugging out of his wild black shag, looking at the house. Faye brought him out a plate of tuna fish. He took it without saying anything and ate it; and never left. The Hermit!

The Hermit hardly ever said anything, but he turned out to be perfectly literate, and he would talk to people he trusted, like Kesey. He was only 18. He had lived with his mother somewhere around La Honda. He had had a lot of trouble in school. He had had a lot of trouble everywhere. He was the Oddball. Finally he took off for the woods and lived up there barefoot, just wearing a shirt and Levi's, killing animals and spearing fish for food. People caught glimpses of him now and again and high-school kids used to try to hunt him down and demolish his lean-tos and otherwise torment him. His wandering had brought him up to the woods up behind Kesey's house, a wild stretch that had been designated "Sam McDonald Park" but never cleared.

The Hermit built himself a Hermit's Cave down in a pit in a dark green moldy mossy gully that dropped off the path up into the woods. He filled it with objects that winked and blinked and cooed. He was also keeper of the communal acid stash down there in the cave. And he had other secrets, such as his diaries... the Hermit Memoirs, in which real life and his Hermit fantasy ran together in wriggling rivers of little boys and lost hunters whom only the Hermit could rescue ... Nobody ever knew his real name at all until a few months later when, as I say, the police would get technical about it...

Then Babbs discovered Day-Glo, Day-Glo paint, and started painting it up the very trunks of the redwoods, great zappers of green, orange, yellow. Hell, he even painted the leaves, and Kesey's place began to glow at night. And resound. More and more people were showing up for long or short stays. Cassady brought in a Scandinavian-style blonde who was always talking about hangups. Everybody had hangups. She became June the Goon. Then a girl who wore huge floppy red hats and granny glasses, the first anybody had ever seen. She became Marge the Barge. Then a sculptor named Ron Boise, a thin guy from New England with a nasal accent like Titus Moody, only a Titus Moody who spoke the language of Hip: "Man, like, I mean, you know," and so on. Boise brought in a sculpture of a hanged man, so they ran it up a tree limb with a hangman's noose. He also built a great Thunderbird, a great Thor-and-Wotan beaked monster with an amber dome on its back and you could get inside of it. Inside were some mighty wire strings, which you could pull, which they did, and the Thunderbird twanged out across the gorge like the mightiest vibrating bass beast in the history of the world. Then he brought in a Kama Sutra sculpture, a huge sheetmetal man with his face in the sheetmetal groin of a big sheetmetal babe. She had her left leg sticking up in the air. It was hollow and Babbs ran a hose up it and turned the water on and it spurted out, so they left it running, eternally spurting. It looked like she was having an eternal orgasm out of her left foot.

And ...
Sssss
—
ssss
—
ssss
—Bradley. Bradley, Bradley Hodgeman, had been a college tennis star. He was short but very muscular. He turned up—or came on, Bradley was always coming on—acting so weird, people would stand there and look at him, even at Kesey's. He talked in clots of words, "Fell down by the wino station—

insoluble flying objects, nitrate—creasey greens by the back porch—Ray Bradbury interlining of the lone chrome nostril, you understand"—sidling through the room with a nonspecific grin on and his hair combed down over his face like a surfer, his back hunched over, and then going into a stopped-up laugh,
Sssss
—
ssss
—
ssss
—

ssss
—until somebody would try to break up his sequence by asking him how was the tennis playing going these days and he would widen his grin and open his eyes to a horizon of vast significance and say, "One day I hit the ball up in the air ... and it
never came down ... Sssss
—
ssss
—
-ssss-
—
ssss
..."

ACTUALLY, THERE WERE A LOT OF KIDS IN THE EARLY 1960S

who were ... yes;
attuned.
I used to think of them as the Beautiful People because of the Beautiful People letters they used to write their parents. They were chiefly in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York City, these kids. They had a regular circuit they were on, and there was a lot of traffic from city to city. Most of them were from middle-class backgrounds, but not upper bourgeois, more petit bourgeois, if that old garbanzo can stand being written down again—homes with Culture but no money or money but no Culture. At least that was the way it struck me, judging by the Beautiful People I knew. Culture, Truth, and Beauty were important to them . .. "Art is a creed, not a craft," as somebody said ... Young! Immune! Christ, somehow there was enough money floating around in the air so that one could do this thing, live together with other kids—Our own thing!—from our own status sphere, without having to work at
a
job,
and live on our own terms—Us! and people our age!—it was...
beautiful,
it was a...
whole feeling,
and the straight world never understood it, this thing of one's status sphere and how one was only nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two or so and not starting out helpless at the bottom of the ladder, at all, because the hell with the ladder itself—one was already up on a ... level that the straight world was freaking
baffled
by! Straight people were always trying to figure out what is
wrong
here—never having had this feeling themselves. Straight people called them beatniks. I suppose the Beautiful People identified with the Beat Generation excitement of the late 1950s, but in fact there was a whole new motif in their particular bohemian status sphere: namely, psychedelic drugs.