The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (7 page)
Read The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test Online
Authors: Tom Wolfe
Tags: #United States, #Social Science, #General, #Popular Culture, #History, #20th Century
HE HADN'T EVEN MEANT TO WRITE THIS BOOK. HE HAD BEEN working on another one, called Zoo about North Beach. Lovell had suggested why didn't he get a job as night attendant on the
psychiatric ward at Menlo Park. He could make some money, and since there wasn't much doing on the ward at night, he could work on
Zoo
. But Kesey got absorbed in the life on the psychiatric ward. The whole systemâif they set out to invent the perfect Anti-cure for what ailed the men on this ward, they couldn't have done it better. Keep them cowed and docile. Play on the weakness that drove them nuts in the first place. Stupefy the bastards with tranquilizers and if they still get out of line haul them up to the “shock shop” and punish them. Beautifulâ
psychiatric ward at Menlo Park. He could make some money, and since there wasn't much doing on the ward at night, he could work on
Zoo
. But Kesey got absorbed in the life on the psychiatric ward. The whole systemâif they set out to invent the perfect Anti-cure for what ailed the men on this ward, they couldn't have done it better. Keep them cowed and docile. Play on the weakness that drove them nuts in the first place. Stupefy the bastards with tranquilizers and if they still get out of line haul them up to the “shock shop” and punish them. Beautifulâ
Sometimes he would go to work high on acid. He could
see into their faces.
Sometimes he wrote, and sometimes he drew pictures of the patients, and as the lines of the ball-point greasy creased into the paper the lines of their faces, he couldâthe
interiors
of these men came into the lines, the ball-point crevasses, it was the most incredible feeling, the anguish and the pain came right out front and flowed in the crevasses in their faces, and in the ball-point crevasses, the sameâ
one!
âcrevasses now, black starling nostrils, black starling eyes, blind black starling geek cry on every face: “Me! Me! Me! Me! I amâMe!”âhe could see clear into them. Andâhow could you tell anybody about this? they'll say you're a nut yourselfâbut afterwards, not high on anything, he could
still see into people.
see into their faces.
Sometimes he wrote, and sometimes he drew pictures of the patients, and as the lines of the ball-point greasy creased into the paper the lines of their faces, he couldâthe
interiors
of these men came into the lines, the ball-point crevasses, it was the most incredible feeling, the anguish and the pain came right out front and flowed in the crevasses in their faces, and in the ball-point crevasses, the sameâ
one!
âcrevasses now, black starling nostrils, black starling eyes, blind black starling geek cry on every face: “Me! Me! Me! Me! I amâMe!”âhe could see clear into them. Andâhow could you tell anybody about this? they'll say you're a nut yourselfâbut afterwards, not high on anything, he could
still see into people.
The novel,
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest,
was about a roustabout named Randle McMurphy. He is a big healthy animal, but he decides to fake insanity in order to get out of a short jail stretch he is serving on a work farm and into what he figures will be the soft life of a state mental hospital. He comes onto the ward with his tight reddish-blond curls tumbling out from under his cap, cracking jokes and trying to get some action going among these deadasses in the loony bin. They can't resist the guy. They suddenly want to
do
things. The tyrant who runs the place, Big Nurse, hates him for weakening ⦠Control, and the System. By and by, many of the men resent him for forcing them to struggle to act like men again. Finally, Big Nurse is driven to play her trump card and finish off McMurphy by having him lobotomized.
But this crucifixion inspires an Indian patient, a schizoid called Chief Broom, to rise up and break out of the hospital and go sane: namely, run like hell for open country.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest,
was about a roustabout named Randle McMurphy. He is a big healthy animal, but he decides to fake insanity in order to get out of a short jail stretch he is serving on a work farm and into what he figures will be the soft life of a state mental hospital. He comes onto the ward with his tight reddish-blond curls tumbling out from under his cap, cracking jokes and trying to get some action going among these deadasses in the loony bin. They can't resist the guy. They suddenly want to
do
things. The tyrant who runs the place, Big Nurse, hates him for weakening ⦠Control, and the System. By and by, many of the men resent him for forcing them to struggle to act like men again. Finally, Big Nurse is driven to play her trump card and finish off McMurphy by having him lobotomized.
But this crucifixion inspires an Indian patient, a schizoid called Chief Broom, to rise up and break out of the hospital and go sane: namely, run like hell for open country.
Chief Broom. The very one. From the point of view of craft, Chief Broom was his great inspiration. If he had told the story through McMurphy's eyes, he would have had to end up with the big bruiser delivering a lot of homilies about his down-home theory of mental therapy. Instead, he told the story through the Indian. This way he could present a schizophrenic state the way the schizophrenic himself, Chief Broom, feels it and at the same time report the McMurphy Method more subtly.
Morris Orchids! He wrote several passages of the book under peyote and LSD. He even had someone give him a shock treatment, clandestinely, so he could write a passage in which Chief Broom comes back from “the shock shop.” Eating Laredo budsâhe would write like mad under the drugs. After he came out of it, he could see that a lot of it was junk. But certain passagesâlike Chief Broom in his schizophrenic fogsâit was true
vision,
a little of what you could see if you opened the doors of perception, friends â¦
vision,
a little of what you could see if you opened the doors of perception, friends â¦
RIGHT AFTER HE FINISHED
ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST
, Kesey sublet his cottage on Perry Lane and he and Faye went back up to Oregon. This was in June, 1961. He spent the summer working in his brother Chuck's creamery in Springfield to accumulate some money. Then he and Faye moved into a little house in Florence, Oregon, about 50 miles west of Springfield, near the ocean, in logging country. Kesey started gathering material for his second novel,
Sometimes a Great Notion
, which was about a logging family. He took to riding early in the morning and at night in the “crummies.” These were pickup trucks that served as buses taking the loggers to and from the camps. At night he would hang around the bars where the loggers went. He was Low Rent enough himself to talk to them. After about four
months of that, they headed back to Perry Lane, where he was going to do the writing.
ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST
, Kesey sublet his cottage on Perry Lane and he and Faye went back up to Oregon. This was in June, 1961. He spent the summer working in his brother Chuck's creamery in Springfield to accumulate some money. Then he and Faye moved into a little house in Florence, Oregon, about 50 miles west of Springfield, near the ocean, in logging country. Kesey started gathering material for his second novel,
Sometimes a Great Notion
, which was about a logging family. He took to riding early in the morning and at night in the “crummies.” These were pickup trucks that served as buses taking the loggers to and from the camps. At night he would hang around the bars where the loggers went. He was Low Rent enough himself to talk to them. After about four
months of that, they headed back to Perry Lane, where he was going to do the writing.
ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST
WAS PUBLISHED IN FEBRUARY, 1962, and it made his literary reputation immediately:
WAS PUBLISHED IN FEBRUARY, 1962, and it made his literary reputation immediately:
“A smashing achievement”â
Mark Schorer
Mark Schorer
“A great new American novelist”â
Jack Kerouac
Jack Kerouac
“Powerful poetic realism”â
Life
Life
“An amazing first novel”â
Boston Traveler
Boston Traveler
“This is a first novel of special worth”âNew York
Herald
Tribune
Herald
Tribune
“His storytelling is so effective, his style so impetuous, his grasp of characters so certain, that the reader is swept along ⦠His is a large, robust talent, and he has written a large, robust book”â
Saturday Review
Saturday Review
AND ON THE LANEâALL THIS WAS A CONFIRMATION OF everything they and Kesey had been doing. For one thing there was the old Drug Paranoiaâthe fear that this wild uncharted drug thing they were into would gradually â¦
rot your brain.
Well, here was the answer. Chief Broom!
rot your brain.
Well, here was the answer. Chief Broom!
And McMurphy ⦠but of course. The current fantasy ⦠he was a McMurphy figure who was trying to get them to move off their own snug-harbor dead center, out of the plump little game of being ersatz daring and ersatz alive, the middle-class intellectual's game, and move out to ⦠Edge City ⦠where it was scary, but people were whole people. And if drugs were what unlocked the doors and enabled you to do this thing and realize all this that was in you, then so let it be â¦
Not even on Perry Lane did people really seem to catch the thrust of the new book he was working on,
Sometimes a Great Notion
. It was about the head of a logging clan, Hank Stamper,
who defies a labor union and thereby the whole community he lives in by continuing his logging operation through a strike. It was an unusual book. It was a novel in which the strikers are the villains and the strikebreaker is the hero. The style was experimental and sometimes difficult. And the main source of “mythic” reference was not Sophocles or even Sir James Frazer but ⦠yes, Captain Marvel. The union leaders, the strikers, and the townspeople were the tarantulas, all joyfully taking their vow: “We shall wreak vengeance and abuse on all whose equals we are not ⦠and âwill to equality' shall henceforth be the name for virtue; and against all that has power we want to raise our clamor!” Hank Stamper was, quite intentionally, Captain Marvel. Once known as â¦
Ãbermensch
. The current fantasy â¦
Sometimes a Great Notion
. It was about the head of a logging clan, Hank Stamper,
who defies a labor union and thereby the whole community he lives in by continuing his logging operation through a strike. It was an unusual book. It was a novel in which the strikers are the villains and the strikebreaker is the hero. The style was experimental and sometimes difficult. And the main source of “mythic” reference was not Sophocles or even Sir James Frazer but ⦠yes, Captain Marvel. The union leaders, the strikers, and the townspeople were the tarantulas, all joyfully taking their vow: “We shall wreak vengeance and abuse on all whose equals we are not ⦠and âwill to equality' shall henceforth be the name for virtue; and against all that has power we want to raise our clamor!” Hank Stamper was, quite intentionally, Captain Marvel. Once known as â¦
Ãbermensch
. The current fantasy â¦
⦠on Perry Lane. Nighttime, the night he and Faye and the kids came back to Perry Lane from Oregon, and they pull up to the old cottage and there is a funny figure in the front yard, smiling and rolling his shoulders this way and that and jerking his hands out to this side and the other side as if there's a different drummer somewhere, different drummer, you understand, corked out of his gourd, in fact ⦠and, well, Hi, Ken, yes, uh, well, you weren't
around,
exactly, you understand, doubledy-clutch, doubledy-clutch, and they told me you wouldn't mind, generosity knoweth noâahemâyes, I had a '47 Pontiac myself once, held the road like a prehistoric bird, you understand ⦠and, yes, Neal Cassady had turned up in the old cottage, like he had just run out of the pages of
On the Road
, and ⦠what's next, Chief? Ah ⦠many Day-Glo freaking curlicuesâ
around,
exactly, you understand, doubledy-clutch, doubledy-clutch, and they told me you wouldn't mind, generosity knoweth noâahemâyes, I had a '47 Pontiac myself once, held the road like a prehistoric bird, you understand ⦠and, yes, Neal Cassady had turned up in the old cottage, like he had just run out of the pages of
On the Road
, and ⦠what's next, Chief? Ah ⦠many Day-Glo freaking curlicuesâ
All sorts of people began gathering around Perry Lane. Quite an â¦
underground
sensation it was, in Hip California. Kesey, Cassady, Larry McMurtry; two young writers, Ed McClanahan and Bob Stone; Chloe Scott the dancer, Roy Seburn the artist, Carl Lehmann-Haupt, Vic Lovell ⦠and Richard Alpert himself ⦠all sorts of people were in and out of there all the time, because they had heard about it, like the local beatsâthat term was still usedâa bunch of kids from a pad called the Chateau, a wild-haired
kid named Jerry Garcia and the Cadaverous Cowboy, Page Browning. Everybody was attracted by the strange high times they had heard about ⦠the Lane's fabled Venison Chili, a Kesey dish made of venison stew laced with LSD, which you could consume and then go sprawl on the mattress in the fork of the great oak in the middle of the Lane at night and play pinball with the light show in the sky ⦠Perry Lane.
underground
sensation it was, in Hip California. Kesey, Cassady, Larry McMurtry; two young writers, Ed McClanahan and Bob Stone; Chloe Scott the dancer, Roy Seburn the artist, Carl Lehmann-Haupt, Vic Lovell ⦠and Richard Alpert himself ⦠all sorts of people were in and out of there all the time, because they had heard about it, like the local beatsâthat term was still usedâa bunch of kids from a pad called the Chateau, a wild-haired
kid named Jerry Garcia and the Cadaverous Cowboy, Page Browning. Everybody was attracted by the strange high times they had heard about ⦠the Lane's fabled Venison Chili, a Kesey dish made of venison stew laced with LSD, which you could consume and then go sprawl on the mattress in the fork of the great oak in the middle of the Lane at night and play pinball with the light show in the sky ⦠Perry Lane.
And many puzzled souls looking in ⦠At first they were captivated. The Lane was too good to be true. It was Walden Pond, only without any Thoreau misanthropes around. Instead, a community of intelligent, very open, out-front peopleâout front was a term everybody was usingâout-front people who cared deeply for one another, and
shared
⦠in incredible ways, even, and were embarked on some kind of â¦
well
, adventure in living. Christ, you could see them trying to put their finger on it and ⦠then ⦠gradually figuring out there was something here they weren't
in on
⦠Like the girl that afternoon in somebody's cottage when Alpert came by. This was a year after he started working with Timothy Leary. She had met Alpert a couple of years before and he had been 100 percent the serious young clinical psychologistâlegions of rats and cats in cages with their brain-stems, corpora callosa and optic chiasmas sliced, spliced, diced, iced in the name of the Scientific Method. Now Alpert was sitting on the floor in Perry Lane in the old boho Lotus hunkerdown and exegeting very seriously about a baby crawling blindly about the room. Blindly? What do you mean, blindly? That baby is a very sentient creature ⦠That baby sees the world with a completeness that you and I will never know again. His doors of perception have not yet been closed. He still experiences the moment he lives in. The inevitable bullshit hasn't constipated his cerebral cortex yet. He still sees the world as it really is, while we sit here, left with only a dim historical version of it manufactured for us by words and official bullshit, and so forth and so on, and Alpert soars in Ouspenskyian loop-the-loops for baby while, as far as this girl can make out, baby just bobbles, dribbles, lists and
rocks across the floor ⦠But she was learning ⦠that the world is sheerly divided into those who have had
the experience
and those who have notâthose who have been through that door andâ
shared
⦠in incredible ways, even, and were embarked on some kind of â¦
well
, adventure in living. Christ, you could see them trying to put their finger on it and ⦠then ⦠gradually figuring out there was something here they weren't
in on
⦠Like the girl that afternoon in somebody's cottage when Alpert came by. This was a year after he started working with Timothy Leary. She had met Alpert a couple of years before and he had been 100 percent the serious young clinical psychologistâlegions of rats and cats in cages with their brain-stems, corpora callosa and optic chiasmas sliced, spliced, diced, iced in the name of the Scientific Method. Now Alpert was sitting on the floor in Perry Lane in the old boho Lotus hunkerdown and exegeting very seriously about a baby crawling blindly about the room. Blindly? What do you mean, blindly? That baby is a very sentient creature ⦠That baby sees the world with a completeness that you and I will never know again. His doors of perception have not yet been closed. He still experiences the moment he lives in. The inevitable bullshit hasn't constipated his cerebral cortex yet. He still sees the world as it really is, while we sit here, left with only a dim historical version of it manufactured for us by words and official bullshit, and so forth and so on, and Alpert soars in Ouspenskyian loop-the-loops for baby while, as far as this girl can make out, baby just bobbles, dribbles, lists and
rocks across the floor ⦠But she was learning ⦠that the world is sheerly divided into those who have had
the experience
and those who have notâthose who have been through that door andâ
It was a strange feeling for all these good souls to suddenly realize that right here on woody thatchy little Perry Lane, amid the honeysuckle and dragonflies and boughs and leaves and a thousand little places where the sun peeped through, while straight plodding souls from out of the Stanford eucalyptus tunnel plodded by straight down the fairways on the golf course across the wayâthis amazing experiment in consciousness was going on, out on a frontier neither they nor anybody else ever heard of before.
PALO ALTO, CALIF., JULY 21, 1963âAND THEN ONE DAY THE end of an era, as the papers like to put it. A developer bought most of Perry Lane and was going to tear down the cottages and put up modern houses and the bulldozers were coming.
The papers turned up to write about the last night on Perry Lane, noble old Perry Lane, and had the old cliché at the ready, End of an Era, expecting to find some deep-thinking latter-day Thorstein Veblen intellectuals on hand with sonorous bitter statements about this machine civilization devouring its own past.
Instead, there were some kind of
nuts
out here. They were up in a tree lying on a mattress, all high as coons, and they kept offering everybody, all the reporters and photographers, some kind of venison chili, but there was something about the whole
set
upâ
nuts
out here. They were up in a tree lying on a mattress, all high as coons, and they kept offering everybody, all the reporters and photographers, some kind of venison chili, but there was something about the whole
set
upâ
and when it came time for the sentimental bitter statement, well, instead, this big guy Kesey dragged a piano out of his house and they all set about axing the hell out of it and burning it up, calling it “the oldest living thing on Perry Lane,” only they were giggling and yahooing about it,
high as coons, in some weird way, all of them, hard-grabbing off the stars, and it was hard as hell to make the End of an Era story come out right in the papers, with nothing but this kind of freaking Olsen & Johnson material to work with,
but they managed to go back with the story they came with, End of an Era, the cliché intact, if they could only blot out the cries in their ears of
Ve-ni-son Chi-li
â
Ve-ni-son Chi-li
â
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