The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (29 page)

There had been about forty of them, all roaring or fulminating or arguing cogently, which was always worse. The idea at these things is to keep building up momentum and tension and suspense until finally when it is time for action—in this case, the march—the signal launches them as one great welded body of believers and they are ready to march and take billy clubs upside the head and all the rest of it.

All the shock workers of the tongue were there, speakers like Paul Jacobs, and M.

S. Arnoni, who wore a prison uniform to the podium because his family had been wiped out in a German concentration camp during World War II—and out before them was a great sea of students and other Youth, the toggle-coat bohemians—toggle coats, Desert Boots, civil rights, down with the war in Vietnam—"... could call out to you from their graves or from the fields and rivers upon which their ashes were thrown, they would implore this generation of Americans not to be silent in the face of the genocidal atrocities committed on the people of Vietnam ..." and the words rolled in full forensic boom over the PA. systems.

* * *

THE FIRST PERSON IN THE VIETNAM DAY COMMITTEE CIRCLE to notice Kesey approaching the speaker's platform was Paul Krassner, the editor of
The
Realist
magazine. Most of the Pranksters were still on the bus, fooling around with the guns for the befuddlement of the gawkers who happened by. Kesey, Babbs, Gretchen Fetchin and George Walker came on over the platform, Kesey in his orange Day-Glo coat and World War I helmet. Krassner ran his magazine as pretty much a one-man operation and he knew Kesey subscribed to it. So he wasn't so surprised that Kesey knew him. What got him was that Kesey just started talking to him, just like they had been having a conversation all along and something had interrupted them and now they were resuming... It is a weird thing. You feel the guy's charisma, to use that one, right away, busting out even through the nutty Day-Glo, or maybe sucking one in, the way someone once wrote of Gurdjieff: "You could not help being drawn, almost physically, towards him ... like being sucked in by a vast, spiritual vacuum cleaner."

At the time, however, Krassner thought of Flash Gordon.

"Look up there," Kesey says, motioning up toward the platform.

Up there is Paul Jacobs. Jacobs tends toward the forensic, anyway, and the microphone and loudspeakers do something to a speaker. You can hear your voice rolling and thundering, powerful as Wotan, out over that ocean of big ears and eager faces, and you are omnipotent and more forensic and orotund and thunderous minute by minute—
It is written, but I say unto you ... the jackals of history-ree-ree-ree-ree ..
.

From where they are standing, off to the side of the platform, they can hear very little of what Jacobs is actually saying, but they can hear the sound barking and roaring and reverberating and they can hear the crowd roaring back and baying on cue, and they can see Jacobs, hunched over squat and thick into the microphone, with his hands stabbing out for emphasis, and there, at sundown, silhouetted against the florid sky, is his jaw, jutting out, like a cantaloupe ...

Kesey says to Krassner: "Don't listen to the words, just the sound, and the gestures... who do you see?"

And suddenly Krassner wants very badly to be right. It is the call of the old charisma. He wants to come up with the right answer.

"Mussolini... ?"

Kesey starts nodding, Right, right, but keeping his eye on the prognathous jaw.

By this time more of the Pranksters have come up to the platform. They have found some electrical outlets and they have run long cords up to the platform, for the guitars and basses and horns. Kesey is the next to last speaker. He is to be followed by some final Real Barnburner of a speaker and then—the final surge and the march on Oakland.

From the moment Kesey gets up there, it is a freaking jar. His jacket glows at dusk, and his helmet. Lined up behind him are more Day-Glo crazies, wearing aviator helmets and goggles and flight suits and Army tunics, Babbs, Gretch, Walker, Zonker, Mary Microgram, and little Day-Glo kids, and half of them carrying electric guitars and horns, mugging and moving around in Day-Glo streaks. The next jar is Kesey's voice, it is so non-forensic. He comes on soft, in the Oregon drawl, like he's just having a conversation with 15,000 people:

You know, you're not gonna stop this war with this rally, by marching... That's
what
they
do
...
They hold rallies and they march . .. They've been having wars for ten
thousand years and you're not gonna stop it this way ... Ten thousand years, and this
is the game they play to do it... holding rallies and having marches
...
and that's the
same game you're playing...
their
game ...

Whereupon he reaches into his great glowing Day-Glo coat and produces a harmonica and starts playing it right into the microphone,
Home, home on the range,
hawonking away on the goddamn thing—
Home... home ... on the ra-a-a-a-ange hawonkawonk
...

The crowd stands there in a sudden tender clump, most of them wondering if they heard right, cocking their heads and rolling their heads to one another. First of all, that conversational tone all of a sudden, and then random notes from the Day-Glo crazies behind him ripped out offen the electric guitars and the general babble of the place feeding into the microphone—did anybody hear right—

—all the while Kesey is still up there hawonking away on the freaking harmonica.

Home, home on the ra-a-a-a-a-a-a-ange
—

—ahhhh, that's it—they figure it's some calculated piece of stage business, playing
Home, home on the range
—building up to something like Yah! We know about that
home!
We know about that
range!
That rotten U.S. home and that rotten U.S.

range!— —but instead it is the same down-home drawling voice—
I
was just looking
at the speaker who was up here before me... and I couldn't hear what he was saying...

but I could hear the sound of it... and I could hear
your
sound coming back at him ...

and I could see the gestures
—

—and here Kesey starts parodying Paul Jacobs's stabbing little hands and his hunched-over stance and his—

—
and I could see his jaw sticking out like this
...
silhouetted against the sky
...
and
you know who I saw ... and who I heard?... Mussolini... I saw and I heard Mussolini
here just a few minutes ago
...
Yep
...
you're playing their game
...

Then he starts hawonking away again, hawonking and hawonking
Home, home on
the range
with that sad old setter harmonica-around-the-campfire pace—and the Pranksters back him up on their instruments, Babbs, Gretch, George, Zonker, weaving up there in a great Day-Glo freakout

—and what the hell—a few boos, but mainly confusion—what in the name of God are the ninnies—

—We've all heard all this and seen all this before, but we keep on doing it... I went to see the Beatles last month... And I heard 20,000 girls screaming together at the Beatles. .. and I couldn't hear what they were screaming, either... But you don't have to ... They're screaming Me! Me! Me! Me! ... I'm Me! ... That's the cry of the ego, and that's the cry of this rally!... Me! Me! Me! Me!... And that's why wars get fought...

ego ... because enough people want to scream Pay attention to Me... Yep, you're playing their game...

—and then more hawonkawonkawonkawonkawonka— —and the crowd starts going into a slump. It's as if the rally, the whole day, has been one long careful inflation of a helium balloon, preparing to take off—and suddenly somebody has pulled the plug. It's not what he is saying, either. It's the sound and the freaking sight and that goddamn mournful harmonica and that stupid Chinese music by the freaks standing up behind him. It's the only thing the martial spirit can't stand—a put-on, a prank, a shuck, a goose in the anus.

—Vietnam Day Committee seethe together at the edge of the platform: "Who the hell invited this bastard!" "You invited him!" "Well, hell, we figured he's a writer, so he'll be against the war!" "Didn't you have enough speakers?" says Krassner. "You need all the big names you can get, to get the crowd out." "Well, that's what you get for being celebrity fuckers," says Krassner. If they had had one of those big hooks like they had on amateur night in the vaudeville days, they would have pulled Kesey off the podium right then. Well, then, why doesn't somebody just go up there and edge him off! He's ruining the goddamn thing. But then they see all the Day-Glo crazies, men and women and children all weaving and electrified, clawing at guitars, blowing horns, all crazed aglow at sundown ... And the picture of the greatest anti-war rally in the history of America ending in a Day-Glo brawl to the tune of Home, home on the range ...

—suddenly the hawonking on the freaking harmonica stops. Kesey leans into the microphone—

There's only one thing to do . .. there's only one thing's gonna do any good at all...

And that's everybody just look at it, look at the war, and turn your backs and say ...

Fuck it...

—hawonkawonkawonkawonka—

—They hear that all right. The sound of the phrase—Fuck it—sounds so weird, so shocking, even here in Free Speech citadel, just coming out that way over a public loudspeaker, rolling over the heads of 15,000 souls—

—Home, home on the range hawonkawonkawonka, and the Pranksters beginning to build up most madly on their instruments now, behind the harmonica, sounding like an insane honky-tonk version of Juan Carrillo who devised 96 tones on the back seat of a Willys Jeep, saved pennies all through the war to buy it, you understand, zinc pennies until the blue pustules formed under his zither finger nether there, you understand .. .

—Just look at it and turn away and say ... Fuck it

—say ... Fuck it ...

hawonkawonkawonka blam

—Fuck it—

Hawonkafuckit. . .friends . . .

THERE WAS NO WAY ONE COULD PROVE KESEY HAD DONE

IT. Nevertheless, something was gone out of the anti-war rally. The Real Barnburner spoke, and the Vietnam Day Committee tried to put in one last massive infusion of the old spirit and then gave the signal and the great march on Oakland began, through the gloaming. Fifteen thousand souls ... shoulder to shoulder like in the old strike posters.

At the Oakland-Berkeley line there was an arrow-shaped phalanx of police and National Guard. The Vietnam Day Committee marched in frantic clump at the head, trying to decide whether to force the issue, have a physical confrontation, heads busted, bayonets—or turn back when they ordered them to. Nobody seemed to have any resolve. Somebody would say, We have no choice, we've got to turn back—and somebody else would call him a Martin Luther King. That was about the worst thing you could call anybody on the New Left at that time. Martin Luther King turned back at the critical moment on the bridge at Selma. We can't risk submitting the crania of our devoted people to fracturization and degradation by those who do not shrink from a cowardly show of weaponry, he had said, going on like Social Science Negro in his sepulchral voice—the big solemn preachery Uncle Tom. Yah! yuh Tuskegee-headed Uncle Tom, yuh, yuh Booker T Washington peanut-butter lecture-podium Nobel Prize medal head, yuh—
Uncle Tom
—by the time it was all over, Martin Luther King was a stupid music-hall Handkerchief Head on the New Left—and here they were, calling each other Martin Luther Kings and other incredible things—but nobody had any good smashing iron zeal to carry the day—O where is our Zea-lot, who Day-glowed and fucked up our heads—and there was nothing to do but grouse at the National Guard and turn back, which they did. What the hell has happened to us? Who did this? Why, it was the Masked Man—

So the huge march turned around and headed for Civic Center Park in Berkeley and stood around there eating hamburgers and listening to music by a jug band—a group that later became known as Country Joe and the Fish—and wondering what the hell had happened. Then somebody started throwing tear gas from a rooftop and Bob Scheer was bravely telling everybody to lie down on the grass, because tear gas rises—but the jug band just stood there, petrified, with their hands and their instruments frozen in the same position as when the gas hit. It seems the jug band was high on something or other, and when the gas hit, the combination of the gas and whatever they were already up on—it
pet
rified
them and they stood there
in
stark stiff
medias res
as if they were posing for an Iwo Jima sculpture for the biggest antiwar rally in the history of the American people. The whole rally now seemed like a big half ass, with the frozen jug band the picture of how far they had gotten.

Departures

PREPARE FOR MEXICO

And then Kesey posted cryptic words on his log-house Prankster bulletin board: Let every thought, our whole direction, prepare for Mexico.

Every morsel you eat, every book you read, every high, every low, every Day-Glo deed ...

But he never said why or when they might expect to go.

MOUNTAIN GIRL RETURNS TO POUGHKEEPSIE

NOW, Mountain Girl groks fully of the Pranksters' psychic takeoff And is the very radiometer of their superpsychic pace.

No one ever plunged more fully in the psychedelic risk-all Or ever blazed more radiant through the splays of inner space.

Yet not even a very Isis is immune against the crisis

That stamps a woman's psyche when she is going to bear a child.

It could never be easy to be three thousand miles from Kesey But she had to Stop!

And try to grok

more fully . .. and go back East awhile

SANDY RETURNS TO NEW YORK

The path was soft as velvet, but Sandy heard it coming—

Ahor! rising, materializing from the mists of his devotion.

The demon Speed starts wrenching, leaves Sandy flinching in a bummer, Dazed again in a half-crazed demonic DMT implosion