The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (6 page)
Read The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test Online
Authors: Tom Wolfe
Tags: #United States, #Social Science, #General, #Popular Culture, #History, #20th Century
⦠AND BEGAN TRAVELING AND THINKING AT THE SPEED OF light as ⦠The Flash ⦠the current fantasy. Yes. The Kesey diamond-in-the-rough fantasy did not last very long. The most interesting person on Perry Lane as far as he was concerned was not any of the novelists or other literary intellectuals, but a young graduate student in psychology named Vic Lovell. Lovell was
like a young Viennese analyst, or at least a California graduate-school version of one. He was slender with wild dark hair and very cool intellectually and wound-up at the same time. He introduced Kesey to Freudian psychology. Kesey had never run into a system of thought like this before. Lovell could point out in the most persuasive way how mundane character traits and minor hassles around Perry Lane fit into the richest, most complex metaphor of life ever devised, namely, Freud's ⦠. And a little experimental gas ⦠Yes. Lovell told him about some experiments the Veterans Hospital in Menlo Park was running with “psychomimetic” drugs, drugs that brought on temporary states resembling psychoses. They were paying volunteers $75 a day. Kesey volunteered. It was all nicely calcimined and clinical. They would put him on a bed in a white room and give him a series of capsules without saying what they were. One would be nothing, a placebo. One would be Ditran, which always brought on a terrible experience. Kesey could always tell that one coming on, because the hairs on the blanket he was under would suddenly look like a field of hideously diseased thorns and he would put his finger down his throat and retch. But one of themâthe first thing he knew about it was a squirrel dropped an acorn from a tree outside, only it was tremendously loud and sounded like it was not outside but right in the room with him and not actually a sound, either, but a great suffusing presence, visual, almost tactile, a great impacting of â¦
blue
⦠all around him and suddenly he was in a realm of consciousness he had never dreamed of before and it was not a dream or a delirium but part of his awareness. He looks at the ceiling. It begins moving. Panicâand yet there is no panic. The ceiling is movingânot in a crazed swirl but along its own planes its own planes of light and shadow and surface not nearly so nice and smooth as plasterer Super Plaster Man intended with infallible carpenter level bubble sliding in dim honey Karo syrup tube not so foolproof as you thought, hub, little lumps and ridges up there, bub, and lines, lines like spines on crests of waves of white desert movie sand
each one with MGM shadow longshot of the ominous A-rab coming up over the next crest for only the sinister Saracen can see the road and you didn't know how many subplots you left up there, Plaster Man, trying to smooth it
all
out,
all
of it, with your bubble in a honey tube carpenter's level, to make us all down here look up and see nothing but ceiling, because we all know ceiling, because it has a
name
, ceiling, therefore it is nothing but a ceilingâno room for A-rabs up there in Level Land, eh, Plaster Man. Suddenly he is like a ping-pong ball in a flood of sensory stimuli, heart beating, blood coursing, breath suspiring, teeth grating, hand moving over the percale sheet over those thousands of minute warfy woofings like a brush fire, sun glow and the highlight on a stainless-steel rod, quite a little movie you have going on in that highlight there, Hondo, Technicolors, pick each one out like fishing for neon gumballs with a steam shovel in the Funtime Arcade, a ping-pong ball in a flood of sensory stimuli, all quite ordinary, but â¦
revealing
themselves for the first time and happening â¦
Now â¦
as if for the first time he has entered a moment in his life and known exactly what is happening to his senses now, at this moment, and with each new discovery it is as if he has entered into all of it himself, is
one
with it, the movie white desert of the ceiling becomes something rich, personal, his, beautiful beyond description, like an orgasm behind the eyeballs, and his A-rabsâA-rabs behind the eyelids, eyelid movies, room for them and a lot more in the five billion thoughts per second stroboscope synapsesâhis A-rab heroes, fine Daily Double horsehair mustaches wrapped about the Orbicularis Oris of their mouthsâ
like a young Viennese analyst, or at least a California graduate-school version of one. He was slender with wild dark hair and very cool intellectually and wound-up at the same time. He introduced Kesey to Freudian psychology. Kesey had never run into a system of thought like this before. Lovell could point out in the most persuasive way how mundane character traits and minor hassles around Perry Lane fit into the richest, most complex metaphor of life ever devised, namely, Freud's ⦠. And a little experimental gas ⦠Yes. Lovell told him about some experiments the Veterans Hospital in Menlo Park was running with “psychomimetic” drugs, drugs that brought on temporary states resembling psychoses. They were paying volunteers $75 a day. Kesey volunteered. It was all nicely calcimined and clinical. They would put him on a bed in a white room and give him a series of capsules without saying what they were. One would be nothing, a placebo. One would be Ditran, which always brought on a terrible experience. Kesey could always tell that one coming on, because the hairs on the blanket he was under would suddenly look like a field of hideously diseased thorns and he would put his finger down his throat and retch. But one of themâthe first thing he knew about it was a squirrel dropped an acorn from a tree outside, only it was tremendously loud and sounded like it was not outside but right in the room with him and not actually a sound, either, but a great suffusing presence, visual, almost tactile, a great impacting of â¦
blue
⦠all around him and suddenly he was in a realm of consciousness he had never dreamed of before and it was not a dream or a delirium but part of his awareness. He looks at the ceiling. It begins moving. Panicâand yet there is no panic. The ceiling is movingânot in a crazed swirl but along its own planes its own planes of light and shadow and surface not nearly so nice and smooth as plasterer Super Plaster Man intended with infallible carpenter level bubble sliding in dim honey Karo syrup tube not so foolproof as you thought, hub, little lumps and ridges up there, bub, and lines, lines like spines on crests of waves of white desert movie sand
each one with MGM shadow longshot of the ominous A-rab coming up over the next crest for only the sinister Saracen can see the road and you didn't know how many subplots you left up there, Plaster Man, trying to smooth it
all
out,
all
of it, with your bubble in a honey tube carpenter's level, to make us all down here look up and see nothing but ceiling, because we all know ceiling, because it has a
name
, ceiling, therefore it is nothing but a ceilingâno room for A-rabs up there in Level Land, eh, Plaster Man. Suddenly he is like a ping-pong ball in a flood of sensory stimuli, heart beating, blood coursing, breath suspiring, teeth grating, hand moving over the percale sheet over those thousands of minute warfy woofings like a brush fire, sun glow and the highlight on a stainless-steel rod, quite a little movie you have going on in that highlight there, Hondo, Technicolors, pick each one out like fishing for neon gumballs with a steam shovel in the Funtime Arcade, a ping-pong ball in a flood of sensory stimuli, all quite ordinary, but â¦
revealing
themselves for the first time and happening â¦
Now â¦
as if for the first time he has entered a moment in his life and known exactly what is happening to his senses now, at this moment, and with each new discovery it is as if he has entered into all of it himself, is
one
with it, the movie white desert of the ceiling becomes something rich, personal, his, beautiful beyond description, like an orgasm behind the eyeballs, and his A-rabsâA-rabs behind the eyelids, eyelid movies, room for them and a lot more in the five billion thoughts per second stroboscope synapsesâhis A-rab heroes, fine Daily Double horsehair mustaches wrapped about the Orbicularis Oris of their mouthsâ
Face! The doctor comes back in and, marvelous, poor tight cone ass, doc, Kesey can now see
into him
. For the first time he notices that the doctor's lower left lip is trembling, but he more than
sees
the tremor, he understands it, he canâalmost seen!âsee each muscle fiber decussate, pulling the poor jelly of his lip to the left and the fibers one by one leading back into infrared caverns of the body, through transistor-radio innards of
nerve tangles, each one on Red Alert, the poor ninny's inner hooks desperately trying to make the little writhing bastards
keep still in there
, I am Doctor, this is a human specimen before meâthe poor ninny has his own desert movie going on inside, only each horsehair A-rab is a threatâif only his lip, his face, would stay level, level like the honey bubble of the Official Plaster Man assured him it wouldâ
into him
. For the first time he notices that the doctor's lower left lip is trembling, but he more than
sees
the tremor, he understands it, he canâalmost seen!âsee each muscle fiber decussate, pulling the poor jelly of his lip to the left and the fibers one by one leading back into infrared caverns of the body, through transistor-radio innards of
nerve tangles, each one on Red Alert, the poor ninny's inner hooks desperately trying to make the little writhing bastards
keep still in there
, I am Doctor, this is a human specimen before meâthe poor ninny has his own desert movie going on inside, only each horsehair A-rab is a threatâif only his lip, his face, would stay level, level like the honey bubble of the Official Plaster Man assured him it wouldâ
Miraculous! He could truly
see into people
for the first timeâ
see into people
for the first timeâ
And yes, that little capsule sliding blissly down the gullet was LSD.
VERY SOON IT WAS ALREADY TIME TO PUSH ON BEYOND ANOTHER fantasy, the fantasy of the Menlo Park clinicians. The clinicians' fantasy was that the volunteers were laboratory animals that had to be dealt with objectively, quantitatively. It was well known that people who volunteered for drug experiments tended to be unstable anyway. So the doctors would come in in white smocks, with the clipboards, taking blood pressures and heart rates and urine specimens and having them try to solve simple problems in logic and mathematics, such as adding up columns of figures, and having them judge time and distances, although they did have them talk into tape recorders, too. But the doctors were
so out of it
. They never took LSD themselves and they had absolutely no comprehension, and it couldn't be put into words anyway.
so out of it
. They never took LSD themselves and they had absolutely no comprehension, and it couldn't be put into words anyway.
Sometimes you wanted to paint it huge
âLovell is under LSD in the clinic and he starts drawing a huge Buddha on the wall. It somehow encompasses the wholeâWhite Smock comes in and doesn't even look at it, he just starts asking the old questions on the clipboard, so Lovell suddenly butts in:
âLovell is under LSD in the clinic and he starts drawing a huge Buddha on the wall. It somehow encompasses the wholeâWhite Smock comes in and doesn't even look at it, he just starts asking the old questions on the clipboard, so Lovell suddenly butts in:
“What do you think of my Buddha?”
White Smock looks at it a moment and says, “It looks very feminine. Now let's see how rapidly you can add up this column of figures here ⦔
Very feminine
. Deliver us from the clichés that have locked up even these so-called experimenters' brains like the accordion fences in the fur-store windowâand Kesey was having the same problem with his boys. One of them was a young guy with a lie-down crewcut and the straightest face, the straightest, blandest, most lineless awfulest Plaster Man honey bubble levelest face ever made, and he would come in and open his eyes wide once as if to make sure this muscular hulk on the bed were still
rational
and then get this smug tone in his voice which poured out into the room like absorbent cotton choked in chalk dust from beaten erasers Springfield High School.
. Deliver us from the clichés that have locked up even these so-called experimenters' brains like the accordion fences in the fur-store windowâand Kesey was having the same problem with his boys. One of them was a young guy with a lie-down crewcut and the straightest face, the straightest, blandest, most lineless awfulest Plaster Man honey bubble levelest face ever made, and he would come in and open his eyes wide once as if to make sure this muscular hulk on the bed were still
rational
and then get this smug tone in his voice which poured out into the room like absorbent cotton choked in chalk dust from beaten erasers Springfield High School.
“Now when I say âGo,' you tell me when you think a minute is up by saying, âNow.' Have you got that?”
Yeah, he had that. Kesey was soaring on LSD and his sense of time was
wasted,
and thousands of thoughts per second were rapping around between synapses, fractions of a second, so what the hell is a minuteâbut then one thought stuck in there, held ⦠ma
-li-
cious,
de
-li-cious. He remembered that his pulse had been running 75 beats a minute every time they took it, so when Dr. Fog says âGo,' Kesey slyly slides his slithering finger onto his pulse and counts up to 75 and says:
wasted,
and thousands of thoughts per second were rapping around between synapses, fractions of a second, so what the hell is a minuteâbut then one thought stuck in there, held ⦠ma
-li-
cious,
de
-li-cious. He remembered that his pulse had been running 75 beats a minute every time they took it, so when Dr. Fog says âGo,' Kesey slyly slides his slithering finger onto his pulse and counts up to 75 and says:
“Now!”
Dr. Smog looks at his stop watch. “Amazing!” he says, and walks out of the room.
You said it, bub, but like a lot of other people, you don't even know.
LSD; HOW CANâNOW THAT THOSE BIG FAT LETTERS ARE BABBLING out on coated stock from every newsstand ⦠But this was late 1959, early 1960, a full two years before Mom & Dad & Buddy & Sis heard of the dread letters and clucked because Drs. Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert were french-frying the brains of Harvard boys with it. It was even before Dr. Humphry Osmond had invented the term “psych
o
delic,” which
was later amended to “psychedelic” to get rid of the nuthouse connotation of “psycho” ⦠LSD! It was quite a little secret to have stumbled onto, a hulking supersecret, in factâthe triumph of the guinea pigs! In a short time he and Lovell had tried the whole range of the drugs, LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, peyote, IT 290 the superamphetamine, Ditran the bummer, morning-glory seeds. They were onto a discovery that the Menlo Park clinicians themselves neverâmighty fine irony here: the White Smocks were supposedly using
them
. Instead the White Smocks had handed them the very key itself.
And you don't even know, bub
â¦
with these drugs your perception is altered enough that you find yourself looking out of completely strange eyeholes. All of us have a great deal of our minds locked shut. We're shut off from our own world. Aand these drugs seem to be the key to open these locked doors.
How many?âmaybe two dozen people in the world were on to this incredible secret! One was Aldous Huxley, who had taken mescaline and written about it in
The Doors of Perception.
He compared the brain to a “reducing valve.” In ordinary perception, the senses send an overwhelming flood of information to the brain, which the brain then filters down to a trickle it can manage for the purpose of survival in a highly competitive world. Man has become so rational, so utilitarian, that the trickle becomes most pale and thin. It is efficient, for mere survival, but it screens out the most wondrous part of man's potential experience without his even knowing it.
We're shut off from our own world
. Primitive man once experienced the rich and sparkling flood of the senses fully. Children experience it for a few monthsâuntil “normal” training, conditioning, close the doors on this other world, usually for good. Somehow, Huxley had said, the drugs opened these ancient doors. And through them modern man may at last go, and rediscover his divine birthrightâ
o
delic,” which
was later amended to “psychedelic” to get rid of the nuthouse connotation of “psycho” ⦠LSD! It was quite a little secret to have stumbled onto, a hulking supersecret, in factâthe triumph of the guinea pigs! In a short time he and Lovell had tried the whole range of the drugs, LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, peyote, IT 290 the superamphetamine, Ditran the bummer, morning-glory seeds. They were onto a discovery that the Menlo Park clinicians themselves neverâmighty fine irony here: the White Smocks were supposedly using
them
. Instead the White Smocks had handed them the very key itself.
And you don't even know, bub
â¦
with these drugs your perception is altered enough that you find yourself looking out of completely strange eyeholes. All of us have a great deal of our minds locked shut. We're shut off from our own world. Aand these drugs seem to be the key to open these locked doors.
How many?âmaybe two dozen people in the world were on to this incredible secret! One was Aldous Huxley, who had taken mescaline and written about it in
The Doors of Perception.
He compared the brain to a “reducing valve.” In ordinary perception, the senses send an overwhelming flood of information to the brain, which the brain then filters down to a trickle it can manage for the purpose of survival in a highly competitive world. Man has become so rational, so utilitarian, that the trickle becomes most pale and thin. It is efficient, for mere survival, but it screens out the most wondrous part of man's potential experience without his even knowing it.
We're shut off from our own world
. Primitive man once experienced the rich and sparkling flood of the senses fully. Children experience it for a few monthsâuntil “normal” training, conditioning, close the doors on this other world, usually for good. Somehow, Huxley had said, the drugs opened these ancient doors. And through them modern man may at last go, and rediscover his divine birthrightâ
But these are
words
, man!
And you couldn't put it into words
. The White Smocks liked to put it into words, like
hallucination
and
dissociative phenomena.
They could understand the visual
skyrockets. Give them a good case of an ashtray turning into a Venus flytrap or eyelid movies of crystal cathedrals, and they could groove on that,
Kluver
,
op cit., p. 43n.
That was swell.
But don't you see?â
the visual stuff was just the décor with LSD. In fact, you might go through the whole experience without any true hallucination. The whole thing was â¦
the experience
⦠this certain indescribable
feeling
⦠Indescribable, because words can only jog the memory, and if there is no memory of ⦠The
experience
of the barrier between the subjective and the objective, the personal and the impersonal, the
I
and the
not-I
disappearing ⦠that
feeling!
⦠Or can you remember when you were a child watching someone put a pencil to a sheet of paper for the first time, to draw a picture ⦠and the line begins to growâinto a nose! and it is not just a pattern of graphite line on a sheet of paper but the very miracle of creation itself and your own dreams flowed into that magical ⦠growing ⦠line, and it was not a picture but a
miracle
⦠an
experience
⦠and now that you're soaring on LSD that
feeling
is coming on againâonly now the creation is of the entire universeâ
words
, man!
And you couldn't put it into words
. The White Smocks liked to put it into words, like
hallucination
and
dissociative phenomena.
They could understand the visual
skyrockets. Give them a good case of an ashtray turning into a Venus flytrap or eyelid movies of crystal cathedrals, and they could groove on that,
Kluver
,
op cit., p. 43n.
That was swell.
But don't you see?â
the visual stuff was just the décor with LSD. In fact, you might go through the whole experience without any true hallucination. The whole thing was â¦
the experience
⦠this certain indescribable
feeling
⦠Indescribable, because words can only jog the memory, and if there is no memory of ⦠The
experience
of the barrier between the subjective and the objective, the personal and the impersonal, the
I
and the
not-I
disappearing ⦠that
feeling!
⦠Or can you remember when you were a child watching someone put a pencil to a sheet of paper for the first time, to draw a picture ⦠and the line begins to growâinto a nose! and it is not just a pattern of graphite line on a sheet of paper but the very miracle of creation itself and your own dreams flowed into that magical ⦠growing ⦠line, and it was not a picture but a
miracle
⦠an
experience
⦠and now that you're soaring on LSD that
feeling
is coming on againâonly now the creation is of the entire universeâ
MEANWHILE, OVER ON PERRY LANE, THIS WASN'T PRECISELY the old Searching Hick they all knew and loved. Suddenly Keseyâwell, he was soft-spoken, all right, but he came on with a lot of vital energy. Gradually the whole Perry Lane thing was gravitating around Kesey. Volunteer Kesey gave himself over to science over at the Menlo Park Vets hospitalâand somehow drugs were getting up and walking out of there and over to Perry Lane, LSD, mescaline, IT-290, mostly. Being hip on Perry Lane now had an element nobody had ever dreamed about before, wild-flying, mind-blowing drugs. Some of the old Perry Lane luminaries'
cool
was tested and they were found wanting. Robin White and Gwen Davis were against the new drug thing. That was all right, because Kesey had had about enough of them, and
the power was with Kesey. Perry Lane took on a kind of double personality, which is to say, Kesey's. Half the time it would be just like some kind of college fraternity row, with everybody out on a nice autumn Saturday afternoon on the grass in the dapple shadows of the trees and honeysuckle tendrils playing touch football or basketball. An hour later, however, Kesey and his circle would be hooking down something that in the entire world only they and a few avant-garde neuropharmacological researchers even knew about, drugs of the future, of the neuropharmacologists' centrifuge utopia, the coming age of â¦
cool
was tested and they were found wanting. Robin White and Gwen Davis were against the new drug thing. That was all right, because Kesey had had about enough of them, and
the power was with Kesey. Perry Lane took on a kind of double personality, which is to say, Kesey's. Half the time it would be just like some kind of college fraternity row, with everybody out on a nice autumn Saturday afternoon on the grass in the dapple shadows of the trees and honeysuckle tendrils playing touch football or basketball. An hour later, however, Kesey and his circle would be hooking down something that in the entire world only they and a few avant-garde neuropharmacological researchers even knew about, drugs of the future, of the neuropharmacologists' centrifuge utopia, the coming age of â¦
Well shee-ut. An' I don't reckon we give much of a damn any more about the art of living in France, either, boys, every frog ought to have a little paunch, like Henry Miller said, and go to bed every night in pajamas with collars and piping on themâjust take a letter for me and mail it down to old Morris at Morris Orchids, Laredo, Texas, boys, tell him about enough peyote cactus to mulch all the mouldering widows' graves in poor placid Palo Alto. Yes. They found out they could send off to a place called Morris Orchids in Laredo and get peyote, and one of the new games of Perry Laneâgoodbye Robin, goodbye Gwenâgot to be seeing who was going down to the Railway Express at the railroad station and pick up the shipment, since possession of peyote, although not of LSD, was already illegal in California. There would be these huge goddamned boxes of the stuff, 1,000 buds and roots $70; buds onlyâslightly higher. If they caught you, you were
caught,
because there was no excuse possible. There was no other earthly reason to have these goddamned fetid plants except to get high as a coon. And they would all set about cutting them into strips and putting them out to dry, it took days, and then grinding them up into powder and packing them in gelatin capsules or boiling it down to a gum and putting it in the capsules or just making a horrible goddamned broth that was so foul, so unbelievably vile, you had to chill it numb to try to kill the taste and fast for a day so you wouldn't
have anything on your stomach, just to keep eight ounces of it down. But thenâ
soar
. Perry Lane, Perry Lane.
caught,
because there was no excuse possible. There was no other earthly reason to have these goddamned fetid plants except to get high as a coon. And they would all set about cutting them into strips and putting them out to dry, it took days, and then grinding them up into powder and packing them in gelatin capsules or boiling it down to a gum and putting it in the capsules or just making a horrible goddamned broth that was so foul, so unbelievably vile, you had to chill it numb to try to kill the taste and fast for a day so you wouldn't
have anything on your stomach, just to keep eight ounces of it down. But thenâ
soar
. Perry Lane, Perry Lane.
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