Read The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test Online
Authors: Tom Wolfe
Tags: #United States, #Social Science, #General, #Popular Culture, #History, #20th Century
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (16 page)
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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 Girlâand 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:
wonderful countryfied voice was going to sing out something like:
“Hey! Guess what we're gonna do! We were just up to Baw's”âthe general storeâ“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!”âand 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 â¦
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 stellarâ
Mal Function!
âHagen 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.
Mal Function!
âHagen 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.
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!
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 â¦
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.
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 â¦
Sssss
â
ssss
â
ssss
âBradley. Bradley, Bradley Hodgeman, had been a college tennis star. He was short but very muscular. He turned upâor came on, Bradley was always coming onâacting 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 stationâinsoluble flying objects, nitrateâcreasey greens by the back porchâRay Bradbury interlining of the lone chrome nostril, you understand”âsidling 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
â
ssss
â
ssss
â
ssss
âuntil 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
â¦
Sssss
â
ssss
â
ssss
â
ssss
⦔
Sssss
â
ssss
â
ssss
âBradley. Bradley, Bradley Hodgeman, had been a college tennis star. He was short but very muscular. He turned upâor came on, Bradley was always coming onâacting 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 stationâinsoluble flying objects, nitrateâcreasey greens by the back porchâRay Bradbury interlining of the lone chrome nostril, you understand”âsidling 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
â
ssss
â
ssss
â
ssss
âuntil 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
â¦
Sssss
â
ssss
â
ssss
â
ssss
⦔
ACTUALLY, THERE WERE A LOT OF KIDS IN THE EARLY 1960s who were. 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 againâhomes 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 kidsâOur own thing!âfrom our own status sphere, without having to work at a
job,
and live on our own termsâUs! and people our age!âit was â¦
beautiful,
it was a â¦
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 itselfâone 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
hereânever 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.
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 againâhomes 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 kidsâOur own thing!âfrom our own status sphere, without having to work at a
job,
and live on our own termsâUs! and people our age!âit was â¦
beautiful,
it was a â¦
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 itselfâone 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
hereânever 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.
El ⦠Es ⦠Dee ⦠se-cret-ly ⦠Timothy Leary, Alpert, and a few chemists like Al Hubbard and the incognito “Dr. Spaulding” had been pumping LSD out into the hip circuit with a truly messianic conviction. LSD, peyote, mescaline, morning-glory seeds were becoming the secret new
thing
in the hip life. A lot of kids who were into it were already piled into amputated apartments, as I called them. The seats, the tables, the bedsânone of them ever had legs. Communal living on the floor, you might say,
although nobody used terms like “communal living” or “tribes” or any of that. They had no particular philosophy, just a little leftover Buddhism and Hinduism from the
beat
period, plus Huxley's theory of opening doors in the mind, no distinct life style, except for the Legless look ⦠They were ⦠well,
Beautiful People!â
not “students,” “clerks,” “salesgirls,” “executive trainees”âChrist, don't give me your occupation-game labels! we are Beautiful People, ascendent from your robot junkyard :::::: and at this point they used to sit down and write home the Beautiful People letter. Usually the girls wrote these letters to their mothers. Mothers all over California, all over America, I guess, got to know the Beautiful People letter by heart. It went:
thing
in the hip life. A lot of kids who were into it were already piled into amputated apartments, as I called them. The seats, the tables, the bedsânone of them ever had legs. Communal living on the floor, you might say,
although nobody used terms like “communal living” or “tribes” or any of that. They had no particular philosophy, just a little leftover Buddhism and Hinduism from the
beat
period, plus Huxley's theory of opening doors in the mind, no distinct life style, except for the Legless look ⦠They were ⦠well,
Beautiful People!â
not “students,” “clerks,” “salesgirls,” “executive trainees”âChrist, don't give me your occupation-game labels! we are Beautiful People, ascendent from your robot junkyard :::::: and at this point they used to sit down and write home the Beautiful People letter. Usually the girls wrote these letters to their mothers. Mothers all over California, all over America, I guess, got to know the Beautiful People letter by heart. It went:
“Dear Mother,
“I meant to write to you before this and I hope you haven't been worried. I am in [San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Arizona, a Hopi Indian Reservation!!!! New York, Ajijic, San Miguel de Allende, Mazatlán, Mexico!!!!] and it is really beautiful here. It is a beautiful scene. We've been here a week. I won't bore you with the whole thing, how it happened, but I really tried, because I knew you wanted me to, but it just didn't work out with [school, college, my job, me and Danny] and so I have come here and it a really beautiful scene. I don't want you to worry about me. I have met some BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE and ⦔
⦠and in the heart of even the most unhip mamma in all the U.S. of A. instinctively goes up the adrenal shriek: beatniks, bums, spadesâ
dope.
dope.
AT KESEY'S THE DAYS BEGANâWHEN? THERE WERE NO clocks around and nobody had a watch. The lime light would be sparkling down through the redwoods when you woke up. The first sounds, usually, would be Faye calling the childrenâ“Jed! Shannon!”âor a cabinet door slamming in the kitchen or a pan being put down on the drainboard. Faye the eternalâThen maybe a car coming over the wooden bridge and parking in the
dirt area out front of the house. Sometimes it would be one of the regulars, like Hagen, coming back. He was always going off somewhere. Sometimes it would be the everlasting visitors, from god knows where, friends of friends of friends, curiosity seekers, some of them, dope seekers, some of them, kids from Berkeley, you could never tell. People around the house would just start to be getting up. Kesey emerges in his undershorts, walks out front to the creek and dives in that mothering cold water, by way of shocking himself awake. George Walker is sitting on the porch with just a pair of Levi's on, going over his muscles, his arms, shoulders and torso and all the muscles, with his hands, looking for flaws, picking off hickies, sort of like the ministrations of a cat. There would be a great burst of activity in the late afternoon, people working on various projects, the most complicated of which, endless, it seemed like, was The Movie.
dirt area out front of the house. Sometimes it would be one of the regulars, like Hagen, coming back. He was always going off somewhere. Sometimes it would be the everlasting visitors, from god knows where, friends of friends of friends, curiosity seekers, some of them, dope seekers, some of them, kids from Berkeley, you could never tell. People around the house would just start to be getting up. Kesey emerges in his undershorts, walks out front to the creek and dives in that mothering cold water, by way of shocking himself awake. George Walker is sitting on the porch with just a pair of Levi's on, going over his muscles, his arms, shoulders and torso and all the muscles, with his hands, looking for flaws, picking off hickies, sort of like the ministrations of a cat. There would be a great burst of activity in the late afternoon, people working on various projects, the most complicated of which, endless, it seemed like, was The Movie.
The Pranksters spent much of the fall of 1964, and the winter, and the early spring of 1965, working on ⦠The Movie. They had about forty-five hours of color film from the bus trip, and once they got to going over it, it was a monster. Kesey had high hopes for the film, on every level. It was the world's first acid film, taken under conditions of total spontaneity barreling through the heartlands of America, recording all
now,
in the moment. The current fantasy was ⦠a total breakthrough in terms of expression ⦠but also something that would amaze and delight many multitudes, a movie that could be shown commercially as well as in the esoteric world of the heads. But The Movie was a monster, as I say. The sheer labor and tedium in editing forty-five hours of film was unbelievable. And besides ⦠much of the film was out of focus. Hagen, like everybody else, had been soaring half the time, and the bouncing of the bus hadn't helped especiallyâ
but that was the trip!
Still ⦠Also, there were very few establishing shots, shots showing where the bus was when this or that took place. But who needs that old Hollywood thing of long shot, medium shot, closeup, and the careful cuts and wipes and pans and dolly in and dolly out, the old bullshit.
Still ⦠plunging in on those miles of bouncing, ricocheting, blazing film with a splicer was like entering a jungle where the greeny vines grew faster than you could chop them down in front of you.
now,
in the moment. The current fantasy was ⦠a total breakthrough in terms of expression ⦠but also something that would amaze and delight many multitudes, a movie that could be shown commercially as well as in the esoteric world of the heads. But The Movie was a monster, as I say. The sheer labor and tedium in editing forty-five hours of film was unbelievable. And besides ⦠much of the film was out of focus. Hagen, like everybody else, had been soaring half the time, and the bouncing of the bus hadn't helped especiallyâ
but that was the trip!
Still ⦠Also, there were very few establishing shots, shots showing where the bus was when this or that took place. But who needs that old Hollywood thing of long shot, medium shot, closeup, and the careful cuts and wipes and pans and dolly in and dolly out, the old bullshit.
Still ⦠plunging in on those miles of bouncing, ricocheting, blazing film with a splicer was like entering a jungle where the greeny vines grew faster than you could chop them down in front of you.
The film had already cost a staggering sum, about $70,000, mostly for color processing. Kesey had put everything he had gotten from his two novels plus the play adaptation of
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
into Intrepid Trips, Inc. His brother, Chuck, who had a good creamery business in Springfield, Oregon, invested to some extent. George Walker's father had set up a trust fund for him, with strings on it, but he contributed when he could. By the end of 1965, according to Faye's bookkeeping, Intrepid Trips, Inc., had spent $103,000 on the various Prankster enterprises. Living expenses for the whole group ran to about $20,000 for the year, a low figure considering that there were seldom fewer than ten people around to be taken care of and usually two or three vehicles. Food and lodging were all taken care of by Kesey.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
into Intrepid Trips, Inc. His brother, Chuck, who had a good creamery business in Springfield, Oregon, invested to some extent. George Walker's father had set up a trust fund for him, with strings on it, but he contributed when he could. By the end of 1965, according to Faye's bookkeeping, Intrepid Trips, Inc., had spent $103,000 on the various Prankster enterprises. Living expenses for the whole group ran to about $20,000 for the year, a low figure considering that there were seldom fewer than ten people around to be taken care of and usually two or three vehicles. Food and lodging were all taken care of by Kesey.
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