The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (41 page)
Read The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test Online
Authors: Tom Wolfe
Tags: #United States, #Social Science, #General, #Popular Culture, #History, #20th Century
“I come in”âand he motions with his head up toward his room on the top floorâ“and, dig: she has a joint rolled
this big
, like a
cigar
, man!âand she's goofing off the radio and puffing on this, I mean,
Corona corona
joint and goofing and puffingâit was
beautiful!
It really takes me back.”
this big
, like a
cigar
, man!âand she's goofing off the radio and puffing on this, I mean,
Corona corona
joint and goofing and puffingâit was
beautiful!
It really takes me back.”
But of course! the esoteric nostalgia of those first days of
discovery,
the first little easing open of the doors of the mind with marijuana and
that thing you do
at that stage!âthat goofing off the radio thingâ
You know?
And it's beautiful, the kids beginning to pour in to Haight-Ashbury ⦠for The Life ⦠It's a carnival! the Garden of Eden! one big urban La Honda scene! right out in the open! with all things available. Money is floating around in the air. That's no hassle. Hell, in three hours you can pick up nine or ten bucks panhandling. Christ, when the straight citizens see a kid in a beard and beads and flowers with a sign around his neck saying
My Heart is Prouder than my Stomach,
it fucking blows their minds, and they lay quarters on you, dollar bills. It's too much. And if worse comes to worse, there is always â¦
discovery,
the first little easing open of the doors of the mind with marijuana and
that thing you do
at that stage!âthat goofing off the radio thingâ
You know?
And it's beautiful, the kids beginning to pour in to Haight-Ashbury ⦠for The Life ⦠It's a carnival! the Garden of Eden! one big urban La Honda scene! right out in the open! with all things available. Money is floating around in the air. That's no hassle. Hell, in three hours you can pick up nine or ten bucks panhandling. Christ, when the straight citizens see a kid in a beard and beads and flowers with a sign around his neck saying
My Heart is Prouder than my Stomach,
it fucking blows their minds, and they lay quarters on you, dollar bills. It's too much. And if worse comes to worse, there is always â¦
“Anybody want a straight job?” says a girl named Jeannie, who lives here at The Embassy. Michael Laton says yeah, and it turns out Jeannie is working three or four hours a night as a Topless Shoe Shine girl in a little shoeshine shack on Broadway in North Beach, and they need a barker outside on the sidewalk to spiel in customers. Michael Laton takes this, yes, straight job, and stands out there at night in a tuxedo and a tall hat hawking in the dentists who are crawling all over North Beach panting over the Topless. They come inside the shack and climb up on the shoeshine stand and put their feet on the shoeshine stirrups and watch Jeannie's tits dangle and jiggle for ninety seconds while she
shines their shoes for two dollars and a big lugubrious spade stands by with his hand near a lead beer bottle to smash wiseguys and sex fiends with and they all come out saying the exact same thing: “And the funny part is, it's a damned good shoeshine!”
shines their shoes for two dollars and a big lugubrious spade stands by with his hand near a lead beer bottle to smash wiseguys and sex fiends with and they all come out saying the exact same thing: “And the funny part is, it's a damned good shoeshine!”
“ ⦠so I dropped a little acid, like just for the flash, you know,” says Michael Laton, “and these two Marines come up, this big sergeant and another one, with hashmarks on their sleeves, like up to here. I'm eight feet tall by this time, and they're like
ants
, I'm so stoned, and I yell right in their faces: âIf they stop the war, you guys will be out of a job!' And the sergeant says
Yeahhh?
âand man ! like it
reverses
ânow
they're
eight feet tall all of a sudden and
I'm
an ant! and ⦔
ants
, I'm so stoned, and I yell right in their faces: âIf they stop the war, you guys will be out of a job!' And the sergeant says
Yeahhh?
âand man ! like it
reverses
ânow
they're
eight feet tall all of a sudden and
I'm
an ant! and ⦔
A very carnival! and it wasn't politics, what he said, just a prank, because the political thing, the whole New Left, is all of a sudden like
over
on the hip circuit around San Francisco, even at Berkeley, the very citadel of the Student Revolution and all. Some kid who could always be counted on to demonstrate for the grape workers or even do dangerous things like work for CORE in Mississippi turns up one dayâand immediately everybody knows he has become a head. His hair has the long jesuschrist look. He is wearing the costume clothes. But most of all, he now has a very tolerant and therefore withering attitude toward all those who are still struggling in the old activist political ways for civil rights, against Vietnam, against poverty, for the free peoples. He sees them as still trapped in the old “political games,” unwittingly supporting the oppressors by playing their kind of game and using their kind of tactics, while he, with the help of psychedelic chemicals, is exploring the infinite regions of human consciousness ⦠Paul Hawken here in The Embassyâin 1965 he was an outstanding activist, sweat shirts and blue jeans and toggle coats, went on the March from Selma, worked as a photographer for CORE in Mississippi, risked his life to take pictures of Negro working conditions, and so on. Now he's got on a great Hussar's coat with gold frogging. His hair is all over his forehead and coming around his neck in terrific black Mykonos curls.
over
on the hip circuit around San Francisco, even at Berkeley, the very citadel of the Student Revolution and all. Some kid who could always be counted on to demonstrate for the grape workers or even do dangerous things like work for CORE in Mississippi turns up one dayâand immediately everybody knows he has become a head. His hair has the long jesuschrist look. He is wearing the costume clothes. But most of all, he now has a very tolerant and therefore withering attitude toward all those who are still struggling in the old activist political ways for civil rights, against Vietnam, against poverty, for the free peoples. He sees them as still trapped in the old “political games,” unwittingly supporting the oppressors by playing their kind of game and using their kind of tactics, while he, with the help of psychedelic chemicals, is exploring the infinite regions of human consciousness ⦠Paul Hawken here in The Embassyâin 1965 he was an outstanding activist, sweat shirts and blue jeans and toggle coats, went on the March from Selma, worked as a photographer for CORE in Mississippi, risked his life to take pictures of Negro working conditions, and so on. Now he's got on a great Hussar's coat with gold frogging. His hair is all over his forehead and coming around his neck in terrific black Mykonos curls.
“I take it you aren't too tight with CORE any more.”
He just laughs.
“What about all the things you were involved in last year?”
“All that's changed. You should have seen them leaving for Sacramento”âCal students leaving Berkeley for Sacramento and a demonstration.
“Yeah,” says Tara.
“It was all fraternity men with sports shirts and crew cuts and their own cars and painted signs, you know, like you get from a commercial artist. There was a lot of bread out there.”
“Yeah,” says Tara, “and they're all talking about
channels.
They're going to do this and that through
existing channels,
or they can't do this or that through existing channels, they're all talking about channels.”
channels.
They're going to do this and that through
existing channels,
or they can't do this or that through existing channels, they're all talking about channels.”
“Yeah,” says Paul, “and shaking their fists”âhe raises his fist and shakes it in a big shuck wayâ“and saying, âWe're off to Sacramento to protest, with our dates!' It's all changed. It's all a bunch of fraternity men in their Mustangs.”
A bunch of fraternity men in their Mustangs!
In the intellectual-hip world of California, there is no more scathing epithet imaginable.
A bunch of fraternity men in their Mustangs.
Just savor it. Oh Mario, and Dylan, and Joan Baez, oh Free Speech and Anti-Vietnamâwho in his right mind would have ever dreamed it could come to this in twelve monthsâabandoned to the supermarket and the breezeway scionsâ
a bunch of fraternity men in Mustangs
âand it is, unbelievably, all as the
provocateur
Kesey has prophesied it, droning on his goddamned harmonica and saying
Just walk away and say fuck it â¦
In the intellectual-hip world of California, there is no more scathing epithet imaginable.
A bunch of fraternity men in their Mustangs.
Just savor it. Oh Mario, and Dylan, and Joan Baez, oh Free Speech and Anti-Vietnamâwho in his right mind would have ever dreamed it could come to this in twelve monthsâabandoned to the supermarket and the breezeway scionsâ
a bunch of fraternity men in Mustangs
âand it is, unbelievably, all as the
provocateur
Kesey has prophesied it, droning on his goddamned harmonica and saying
Just walk away and say fuck it â¦
Square hip! Boy Scout bohemians! and the great rallies at Berkeley that used to pull 10,000 are now lucky to get a thousand. All changed! Even the thing with the spades. All of a sudden the Negroes are out of the hip scene, except for a couple of pushers like Superspade and a couple of characters like Gaylord and Heavy. The explanation around Haight-Ashbury is that Negroes don't take to LSD. The big thing with spades on the hip scene has
always been the quality known as
cool.
And LSD freaking well blows that whole lead shield known as
cool,
like it brings you right out front, hang-ups and all. Also the spades don't get much of a kick out of the
nostalgia for the mud
that all the white middle-class kids who are coming to Haight-Ashbury like, piling into pads and living freaking
basic,
you understand, on greasy mattresses on the floor that the filthiest spade walkup in Fillmore wouldn't have, and slopping up soda pop and shit out of the same bottle, just passing it around from mouth to mouth, not being hung up on that old American plumbing & hygiene thing, you understand, even grokking the weird medieval vermin diseases that are flashing through every groinâ
crab lice!
you know that thing, man, where you first look down at your lower belly and see these little
scars,
they look like, little
scabs
or something, tiny little mothers, and like you pick one, root it out, and it starts
craw
ling! Oh shit! and then they're all crawling and you start exploring your mons pubis and your balls and they're
alive.
It's like a jungle you never saw before, in your own crotch, your own shag, and it's alive, a freaking bestiary, in fact, the little bastids, like soft-shell crabs that could dance on the head of a pin, and you keeping picking them off but every time you look you see
eight
more creeping over the veld and the savannas and you practically go
blind
staring at the little Africa down there between your legs and it's A-200 Time, manâA-200! Pyrinate Liquidâthe only solutionâthat
little green bottle
, man! do you
remember!
and so on â¦
Nostalgia for the mud!
⦠The â¦
always been the quality known as
cool.
And LSD freaking well blows that whole lead shield known as
cool,
like it brings you right out front, hang-ups and all. Also the spades don't get much of a kick out of the
nostalgia for the mud
that all the white middle-class kids who are coming to Haight-Ashbury like, piling into pads and living freaking
basic,
you understand, on greasy mattresses on the floor that the filthiest spade walkup in Fillmore wouldn't have, and slopping up soda pop and shit out of the same bottle, just passing it around from mouth to mouth, not being hung up on that old American plumbing & hygiene thing, you understand, even grokking the weird medieval vermin diseases that are flashing through every groinâ
crab lice!
you know that thing, man, where you first look down at your lower belly and see these little
scars,
they look like, little
scabs
or something, tiny little mothers, and like you pick one, root it out, and it starts
craw
ling! Oh shit! and then they're all crawling and you start exploring your mons pubis and your balls and they're
alive.
It's like a jungle you never saw before, in your own crotch, your own shag, and it's alive, a freaking bestiary, in fact, the little bastids, like soft-shell crabs that could dance on the head of a pin, and you keeping picking them off but every time you look you see
eight
more creeping over the veld and the savannas and you practically go
blind
staring at the little Africa down there between your legs and it's A-200 Time, manâA-200! Pyrinate Liquidâthe only solutionâthat
little green bottle
, man! do you
remember!
and so on â¦
Nostalgia for the mud!
⦠The â¦
⦠Life ⦠Even down in a place like La Jolla, in north San Diego, the poshest resort on the Pacific beaches, Tââââ, one of the great young surfers, turns up one day with a three-wheel trunk motorcycle, the kind drugstore delivery boys use, and he pulls up into one driveway after another and the kids come out andâ
help yourself!
âand he's got every pill and capsule you ever imagined, plus lids of grass, and ⦠The Life is on. Even devoted surfing cliques like the Pump House Gangâthe mysterioso sea and all that!âare easing into The Life, and some move up the
beach from the Pump House, away from the everlasting sets of goodsurfing waves they used to wait for like Phrygian sacristans, up from the Pump House to the Parking Lot, where they sit in cars with special amethyst-tinted windows and grok in fullness the Pacific sun as it comes through the weird glass and the cops wonder what in hell they're doing in cars all day instead of being on the beach, and they roust them and search the cars and find nothing, but warnâ
We know you kids are drinking beer out here
⦠Beer! ⦠One of the Pump House Gang leaders, Artie, pulls into Haight-Ashbury, because this is the underground word in The Life in all the high schools in California already, even though Haight-Ashbury has never been mentioned in the newspapers ⦠Haight-Ashbury! they know the whole new legend, right down to Owsley, now known as The White Rabbit, the paranoid acid genius ⦠Artie pulls into Haight-Ashbury, walking along amid those endless staggers of bay windows, slums with a view, and who is sitting out on a curbing on Haight Street but Jââââof Pump House days gone by, just sitting there with an Emporium shopping bag beside him.
help yourself!
âand he's got every pill and capsule you ever imagined, plus lids of grass, and ⦠The Life is on. Even devoted surfing cliques like the Pump House Gangâthe mysterioso sea and all that!âare easing into The Life, and some move up the
beach from the Pump House, away from the everlasting sets of goodsurfing waves they used to wait for like Phrygian sacristans, up from the Pump House to the Parking Lot, where they sit in cars with special amethyst-tinted windows and grok in fullness the Pacific sun as it comes through the weird glass and the cops wonder what in hell they're doing in cars all day instead of being on the beach, and they roust them and search the cars and find nothing, but warnâ
We know you kids are drinking beer out here
⦠Beer! ⦠One of the Pump House Gang leaders, Artie, pulls into Haight-Ashbury, because this is the underground word in The Life in all the high schools in California already, even though Haight-Ashbury has never been mentioned in the newspapers ⦠Haight-Ashbury! they know the whole new legend, right down to Owsley, now known as The White Rabbit, the paranoid acid genius ⦠Artie pulls into Haight-Ashbury, walking along amid those endless staggers of bay windows, slums with a view, and who is sitting out on a curbing on Haight Street but Jââââof Pump House days gone by, just sitting there with an Emporium shopping bag beside him.
“Hi, Jâââ!”
Jââââjust barely glances at him and says, “Oh, hi, Artie,” as if naturally they're both in Haight-Ashbury and have been for years, and then he says, “Here, have a lid,” and he reaches in the shopping bag and just offers him a whole lid of grass, free, out in the open ⦠Artie looks up Anchovy's communal pad. Anchovy, who was little known in La Jolla in the old surfing days, he wasn't a surfer, is now a beautiful person and the good shepherd in Haight-Ashbury for all the La Jolla kids up here. Artie makes the rounds in Haight-Ashbury and it's ⦠a carnival!âeverybody working for the Management in wondrous ways, popping Owsley LSD up from out of Pez candy dispensers, smoking grass, taking methedrine and fucking and carrying on wherever and whenever they feel like it, on the streets practically ⦠Later Anchovy has love-ins called Trans-Love Airways going on the San Diego campus of the University, and everybody is freaking
out on the grass to the loudest rock 'n' roll in history and smoking grass in a goddamned
green cloud
, f'r chrissake, and taking movies of it all for ⦠the
archives
, and they're allied now with
real people
, Good People, a motorcycle band known as the Pallbearers, the local version ⦠of the Hell's Angels ⦠ah ummmmm ⦠and Artie leans up against a tree smoking a fake joint rolled of plain Bull Durham tobacco, because you got to
look
like you're into the thing at all times ⦠but, in fact, it is getting to be
too much
⦠About nine different constabularies stage a mass raid to wipe out the dope plague from the San Diego County high schools and they pounce on La Colonia Tijuana, which means the Tijuana Slums, name here in La Jolla underground for the apartments a lot of people in The Life share this summer near the beach, and some good Pump House souls are busted, but that is The Life, the world divided into surfer
heads
and surfer
lames â¦
Besides, it was a laugh and a half, the look on the cops' faces when they saw the ceilings of La Colonia Tijuana, canopied in huge laceworks of interlocked pop-top rings off beer cans billowing in such groovy silvery ripples of grokkable reflections â¦
out on the grass to the loudest rock 'n' roll in history and smoking grass in a goddamned
green cloud
, f'r chrissake, and taking movies of it all for ⦠the
archives
, and they're allied now with
real people
, Good People, a motorcycle band known as the Pallbearers, the local version ⦠of the Hell's Angels ⦠ah ummmmm ⦠and Artie leans up against a tree smoking a fake joint rolled of plain Bull Durham tobacco, because you got to
look
like you're into the thing at all times ⦠but, in fact, it is getting to be
too much
⦠About nine different constabularies stage a mass raid to wipe out the dope plague from the San Diego County high schools and they pounce on La Colonia Tijuana, which means the Tijuana Slums, name here in La Jolla underground for the apartments a lot of people in The Life share this summer near the beach, and some good Pump House souls are busted, but that is The Life, the world divided into surfer
heads
and surfer
lames â¦
Besides, it was a laugh and a half, the look on the cops' faces when they saw the ceilings of La Colonia Tijuana, canopied in huge laceworks of interlocked pop-top rings off beer cans billowing in such groovy silvery ripples of grokkable reflections â¦
The Probation Generation! Not the Lost Generation or the Beat Generation or the Silent Generation or even the Flower Generation, but the Probation Generation, with kids busted right and left up and down the coast for grass, and all get off the first time, on probationâ
What's probation!
âwith this millennium at hand, and it is, because there's no earthly stopping this thing. It's like a boulder rolling down a hillâyou can watch it and talk about it and scream and say Shit! but you can't stop it. It's just a question of where it's going to go. Right now there are two ways it can go in Haight-Ashbury. One is the Buddhist direction, the Leary thing. There are good heads like Michael Bowen and Gary Goldhill who want to start the League for Spiritual Discovery here and pull the whole movement together into one church and give it a focus and even legal respectability. And they have given up much for this dream. Goldhill is a beautiful head! He is an Englishman who was writing this experimental
stuff for TV in England and the BBC sent him to the U.S. to apply for a big grant, a Guggenheim or something, and he took a vacation in Mexico and ran into some American heads in San Miguel de Allende who said, Man, you got to come back here when the rainy seasons start and take some magic mushrooms, and damned if they didn't send him a telegram in Guadalajara or whereverâRAINS CAME MUSHROOMS UPâand he returned out of curiosity and took the mushrooms, just as Leary had, and discovered the Management and gave up all, all the TV BBC game and dedicated himself to The Life ⦠And Bowen has an apartment with India-print spreads lining the walls and couches on the floor and hand-made Indian teapots and cups and three small crystals suspended from the ceiling by almost invisible threads and picking up lights like jewels in the air, a place devoid of all the shit and gadgetry of the modern American plastic life, for, as Leary has said, a home should be a place of purity that the Gautama Buddha himself could walk into from 485 B.C. and feel at home. For some day grass must grow again in the streets, in pastoral purity, for life is shit, a duress of bad karmas, endless fight against catastrophe, which is to be warded off finally only by utter purification of the soul, utter passivity in which one becomes
nothing â¦
but a vessel of the
All â¦
the All-one â¦
What's probation!
âwith this millennium at hand, and it is, because there's no earthly stopping this thing. It's like a boulder rolling down a hillâyou can watch it and talk about it and scream and say Shit! but you can't stop it. It's just a question of where it's going to go. Right now there are two ways it can go in Haight-Ashbury. One is the Buddhist direction, the Leary thing. There are good heads like Michael Bowen and Gary Goldhill who want to start the League for Spiritual Discovery here and pull the whole movement together into one church and give it a focus and even legal respectability. And they have given up much for this dream. Goldhill is a beautiful head! He is an Englishman who was writing this experimental
stuff for TV in England and the BBC sent him to the U.S. to apply for a big grant, a Guggenheim or something, and he took a vacation in Mexico and ran into some American heads in San Miguel de Allende who said, Man, you got to come back here when the rainy seasons start and take some magic mushrooms, and damned if they didn't send him a telegram in Guadalajara or whereverâRAINS CAME MUSHROOMS UPâand he returned out of curiosity and took the mushrooms, just as Leary had, and discovered the Management and gave up all, all the TV BBC game and dedicated himself to The Life ⦠And Bowen has an apartment with India-print spreads lining the walls and couches on the floor and hand-made Indian teapots and cups and three small crystals suspended from the ceiling by almost invisible threads and picking up lights like jewels in the air, a place devoid of all the shit and gadgetry of the modern American plastic life, for, as Leary has said, a home should be a place of purity that the Gautama Buddha himself could walk into from 485 B.C. and feel at home. For some day grass must grow again in the streets, in pastoral purity, for life is shit, a duress of bad karmas, endless fight against catastrophe, which is to be warded off finally only by utter purification of the soul, utter passivity in which one becomes
nothing â¦
but a vessel of the
All â¦
the All-one â¦
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