The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (25 page)

Paul Sawyer was walking back to go to bed about 7 A.M. one morning after an all-night stand with the Pranksters when he was met by a delegation of conference officials. They wanted to have it out. They wanted to ask Kesey and the Pranksters to leave. Kesey might be sincere, they said, and he might not. But in any case he was disrupting the conference and causing a schism in the conferees, and setting an atrocious example for the Youth. It seemed that Dr. —, one of the Church's greatest liberals and a leader in the civil-rights movement, had already left the conference in protest and taken a couple of other ministers with him.

—Wait a minute, says Sawyer. We called this conference to shake the foundations.

And, well, now they are beginning to shake, and it's time to see whether we have the courage of our convictions.

—Well, yes, Paul, but there are these
things
they are doing, and the park officials are quite upset. First of all, there is a very strong suspicion that they are indulging in marijuana. There is a very peculiar smell around that bus. But let us leave that aside.

In any case, the bus is a very definite health nuisance, all those people living together on that bus by the side of the water. It isn't sanitary. But let us leave that aside, too.

There is also the incident of the shower room. Park personnel caught two of these. . .

Pranksters
taking a shower together, a man and a woman, in the men's shower room.

Now
we
might overlook that sort of thing, but what kind of an example is that for the young people? And this one they call Mountain Girl. Every time she sees Dr. George Washington Henry, who is after all one of our most distinguished Negro ministers and thinkers, she yells out,
"Watermelon Henry!"

—Watermelon Henry?

—Yes, it seems she saw him eating a watermelon the other day, and "enjoying it,"

as she insists on saying, and so now, every time she sees him, she sings out,

"Watermelon Henry!" And you know the kind of voice she has. I suppose that's

"bringing it all out front," or whatever they call it—but
really
—
Watermelon Henry
—

The upshot is, they want to throw the whole bunch out. But Sawyer holds his ground and says that if Kesey and the Pranksters are expelled, he is leaving too. This posed the possibility of a walkout of the Young Turks, which might create an even worse schism. So the elders agreed to ride it out.

—We think you're making a mistake, Paul, Kesey is
manipulating
this conference.

KESEY WAS, IN FACT, NOW TREMENDOUSLY INTERESTED IN THE whole phenomenon of. . . Control. He had discovered that the Pranksters had been able to control the flow of the conference, not by any Machiavellian planning, but simply by drawing the conference into their movie. The conference was on a schedule, but the Pranksters always arrived .. .
Now,
and in no time at all everyone had become a player in their movie. Kesey began to hold daily briefings for the Pranksters.

—From now on, he's saying, we've got to stick to the same costume every day.

Every Prankster's got to have a clear identity to everybody here, so that everywhere you go and they see you, you're
on,
it turns them on to your thing, the thing you're doing.

Kesey has on the Yin-Yang jacket. Mountain Girl has on the purple robe. Babbs has on an incredible pair of pants of many-colored stripes, made by Gretch. And so forth.

Mountain Girl objects.

—I think we ought to forgit our own identity and the costumes and just do our thing and keep it open.

—That's right, but that won't do any good if they don't have a clear idea of what our thing is.

So they stuck to the costumes and it worked. Hour by hour it became clear that the Pranksters were on to a secret of... Control, in each and every situation.

Kesey's sense of timing was perfect. By Friday, Kesey had done a lot of talking, on stage, off stage, down by the bus, and things had gotten to the point where people might start saying, well, for a guy who says talking won't get the job done, he has done an awful lot of talking. Kesey emerged from the bus that afternoon with a huge swath of adhesive tape plastered across his mouth. He went around the whole day like that, silent, plastered over, as if to say, I'm through talking.

All the kids at Asilomar thought this was great, too. More and more of them were hanging around the bus, while the Pranksters flung kelp about and played like very children themselves. Nighttime and one girl really feels into the thing, and she wants nothing more in this world than to go on an acid trip with the Pranksters. She has never taken acid before. So they give her some and a group of them take acid, down by the bus, by the ocean, and christ, she starts freaking out. She starts wailing away.

That's all they need. This one thing could wreck everything they've done. So Kesey quick says give her total Attention. So they gather around her, all the Pranksters, and bathe her in love and Attention and she breaks through the freakout, comes through the other side and starts grooving on it, and it's beautiful. It's like all the Pranksters'

theories and professed beliefs have been put to a test in the outside world, away from La Honda, and they're working now, and they have ... Control.

ON THE LAST DAY, SUNDAY, THE KIDS AT THE CONFERENCE PUT on a show, apparently a tradition at the conference. But this show is all about the Pranksters. They have a kid impersonating practically every Prankster. The best one they did was the Hermit, scuttling and sniggling and giggling around. But they also did Kesey and Babbs and some others. The grand finale of the show was a musical number, "Kelp I Need Somebody!", sung to the tune of the Beatles' song "Help!"

The Sports Shirts looked and endured. They had ridden it out and at least they had avoided a schism. Or had they? Hmmm-mmm....

Paul Sawyer looked at Kesey ... and he saw a prophetic figure. He had not
taught
or
preached.
Rather, he had created ... an experience, an awareness that flashed deeper than cerebration. Somehow he was in the tradition of the great prophets. The modern world knows prophets only in the stiff, reverent language of the texts and scholarly limnings of various religions. Somehow Kesey had created the prophetic
aura
itself, and through the Pranksters many people at the conference had not observed but
experienced
mystic brotherhood, albeit ever so bizarre ... a miracle in seven days.

THE FOLLOWING YEAR THERE WERE TWO CONFERENCES OF THE

Unitarian Church. One, as always, was at Asilomar. And the Sport Shirts were there, as always. The other was in the High Sierras. The Young Turks held their own conference, in the High Sierras, up in the thin air. Somehow it wasn't quite what they expected, however. A certain psychic decibel level was lacking. Nevertheless, the age of bullshit was over. They were on the bus for good. The next year Sawyer spent a month living in Haight-Ashbury, to explore the possibilities of a new kind of ministry for the young people; on the bus, as it were.

OH, THE VI-BRA-TIONS . . .

IT SO HAPPENED THAT ONE OF THE FEMALE DELEGATES TO THE

Unitarian conference at Asilomar had her own little résumé of the conference printed up, and she mailed it out. The Pranksters read it out loud in the living room at Kesey's:

"So the Prophet Kesey came before us"—and did such and such.

"And the Prophet Kesey said"—this and that.

"And the Prophet Kesey made a sign"—signifying Christ knows what.

"And it was good, for as the Prophet Kesey says"—

—repeating this phrase, the Prophet Kesey, and adorning it with all the biblical rhetoric—only she was serious! straight! rapt! a true believer! and probably thought the Prophet Kesey would beam when he saw it.

So the Pranksters all look at Kesey. He has his head down and he says in a melancholy way:

"We're not on the Christ Trip. That's been done, and it doesn't work. You prove your point, and then you have 2,000 years of war. We know where that trip goes."

All the same, it was a sensitive moment. The old girl had tried to put it all into so many words—Kesey's role and the whole direction the Pranksters were taking. All the Pranksters—
we're on some kind of trip, Christ knows.
They all had religion, all right.

It was ... like the whole Prankster thing was now building up some kind of conclusion, some ... ascension, and no one could give it a right name and still be called sane. A great burning column, reaching about the western horizon, perhaps .. .

Kesey himself was like someone possessed. The goddamn scene here is enough to drive anybody off the freaking platter. It's getting like a circus, every freak in California now showing up, heads, bums, students, raggy little girls come looking for excitement, looking to get spaced out on LSD or for Christ knows what reason. Even spades turning up, like Heavy, who rises up in the woods in the middle of the night among the tents croaking like a bullfrog:
Have no worry, have no fear, hash-smokin'

Heavy's here. ..

It's even gotten to Babbs, this motley collection. "This is a zoo!" he's saying to Kesey. "This is where the love stuff gets you!

But Kesey says, "When you've got something like we've got, you can't just sit on it.

You've got to move off of it. You can't just sit on it and possess it, you've got to move off of it and give it to other people. It only works if you bring other people into it."

So everybody who wanted could stay, Prankster or not, and the more—who gives a shit. Kesey also had his court appearances to contend with and more lying, finking, framing, politicking by the constables than a body could believe—he looked like he had aged ten years in three months. He was now some indeterminate age between thirty and forty. He was taking a lot of speed and smoking a lot of grass. He looked haggard, and when he looked haggard, his face seemed lopsided. One day he came stumbling out of the backhouse and Sandy saw him and one eye seemed to be aimed one way and one the other, as if there had been a horrible wrench . .. although the grim shit was beginning to hit Sandy again, too ...

No turning back, man! We're on the space ship now, fly by ... Control... and Attention . .. going with the flow and we can't duck the weird shit, no matter how weird it is. Kesey was doing some acid rapping, taking 500, 1,000, 1,500 micrograms instead of the normal 100 to 250. He had always been against that. Acid rappers, freaks who made a competition out of who could take the most acid—they all seemed to end up loose in the head, that breed. But now it was as if no experiment could be left undone.

One night Kesey took about 1,500 micrograms and several other Pranksters took lesser doses and they got down on the floor and started the Humanoid Radio. They started babbling, going into echolalia, ululation, all manner of nonverbal expression, talking in Tongues, as it were. The idea was to try to hit that beam and that mode that would enable you to communicate with beings on other planets, other galaxies ...

They were all high as hell, of course, but one thought shot through the manic dendrite raps like a subliminal legend:
What if
—
and you'll never know until you do it if you
have the

POWER! THEY'RE SITTING AROUND A BIG ROUND TABLE IN Kesey's living room. It is a big wooden table, now covered with the carved initials and inscriptions of Hell's Angels, "Ralph of Oakland," and so on, playing the game of Power. Page Browning wins and he orders: Now we all take DMT and hold hands, seated in a circle around the table.

And rrrrrrrrrrush those fantastic neon bubbles rushing up out of the heart square into the human squash and bursting into—
skull mirrors!
out of Nipponese kaleidoscope got it down Grant through a door of tesselated straw over the carvings of the Hell's Angels on the table here brought into
The Movie
because now, Hondo, on the space craft you can deal with
anyone
just imagine them into The Movie, get so totally into the
moment
that whichever way you move the entire moment moves with you, not
causing,
bub, just
flowing
—
Go with the flow
—
Go
OUTSIDE

Kesey hears a voice and it tells him to get up from the table, and he does, and there are Page and other Pranksters spaced out of their gourds and holding hands and ...

keening, with their eyes closed because like with DMT
opening your eyes doesn't
change a thing
—those eyelid movies just keep on pouring out into the living room and Kesey goes outside in the dark in the cool of the redwood dell and now it—

I am the Ace and Faye is the Red Queen

WHUMP?

in a flash the water heater out back of the house in the dark—meaning—if he gestures it will

BLOW UP

and he gestures and it is blown up, the heater, demolished, a hell of a blast—the voice says

Go OUT UPON THE MAIN ROAD

and he goes out over the wooden bridge, out onto Route 84 in the dark with only the smallest blowwwwwwnnn glow from the house to be seen, and a wind comes up.

Weird shit,
Major—the wind never comes up in this gorge with all these hills and trees around and strange the wind lifts under the thoracic box and every convex leaf and the balloon canopy cathedral bowers and now; he; is; GOD

It is crazy and delirious and zonked out and real, with half of the mesencephalon saying

You ARE HIGH

and the other half saying, Nevertheless

YOU ARE GOD

Car coming down the hill from La Honda around the last bend on Route 84, the lights swooping over the redwoods

THE ENEMY

heading straight for him at 50 miles an hour as he balances tamping the earth with his feet on the very center line. No undue cause for alarm and concern, however. He has but to

GESTURE

the car slows down and creeps around him, shuddering in the weird wind, trying to hold itself together in the face of

This surge and he knows with absolute certainty he has... all the Power in the world can do what he wants with the Enemy in whatever form—he flings out his arm GESTURES