The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test Part 11

YOU.

Pa.s.s THE.

ACID TEST?.

Anybody who could take LSD for the first time and go through all that without freaking out.. . Leary and Alpert preached "set and setting." Everything in taking LSD, in having a fruitful, freakout-free LSD experience, depended on set and setting. You should take it in some serene and attractive setting, a house or apartment decorated with objects of the honest sort, Turkoman tapestries, Greek goatskin rugs, Cost Plus blue jugs, soft light-not j.a.panese paper globe light, however, but unta.s.selated Chinese textile shades-in short, an Uptown Bohemian country retreat of the $60,000-a-year sort, ideally, with Mozart's Requiem issuing with liturgical solemnity from the hi-fi. The "set" was the set of your mind. You should prepare for the experience by meditating upon the state of your being and deciding what you hope to discover or achieve on this voyage into the self. You should also have a guide who has taken LSD himself and is familiar with the various stages of the experience and whom you know and trust... and f.u.c.k that! That only clamped the constipation of the past, the eternal lags, on something that should happen Now. Let the setting be as unserene and lurid as the Prankster arts can make it and let your set be only what is on your. . . brain, man, and let your guide, your trusty hand-holding, head-swaddling guide, be a bunch of Day-Glo crazies who have as one of their mottoes: "Never trust a Prankster." The Acid Tests would be like the Angels' party plus all the ideas that had gone into the Dome fantasy. Everybody would take acid, any time they wanted, six hours before the Test began or the moment they got there, at whatever point in the trip they wanted to enter the new planet. In any event, they would be on a new planet.

The mysteries of the synch! Very strange ... the Acid Tests turned out, in fact, to be an art form foreseen in that strange book, Childhood's End, a form called "total identification": "The history of the cinema gave the clue to their actions. First, sound, then color, then stereoscopy, then Cinerama, had made the old moving pictures' more and more like reality itself. Where was the end of the story? Surely, the final stage would be reached when the audience forgot it was an audience, and became part of the action. To achieve this would involve stimulation of all the senses, and perhaps hypnosis as well... When the goal was attained, there would be an enormous enrichment of human experience. A man could become-for a while, at least,-any other person, and could take part in any conceivable adventure, real or imaginary.... And when the 'program' was over, he would have acquired a memory as vivid as any experience in his actual life-indeed, indistinguishable from reality itself."

Too freaking true!

THE FIRST ACID TEST ENDED UP MORE LIKE ONE OF THE OLD acid parties at La Honda, which is to say, a private affair, and mostly formless. It was meant to be public, but the Pranksters were not the world's greatest at the mechanics of things, like hiring a hall. The first one was going to be in Santa Cruz. But they couldn't hire a hall in time. They had to hold it out at Babbs's house, a place known as the Spread, just outside of Santa Cruz in a community known as Soquel. The Spread was like a rundown chicken farm. The wild vetch and dodder vines were gaining ground every minute, at least where the ground wasn't burnt off or beaten down into a clay muck. There were fat brown dogs and broken vehicles and rusted machines and rotting troughs and recapped tires and a little old farmhouse with linoleum floors and the kind of old greasy easy chairs that upholstery flies hover over in nappy clouds and move off about three-quarters of an inch when you wave your hand at them. But there were also wild Day-Glo creations on the walls and ceilings, by Babbs, and the place was private and tucked off by itself. In any case, they were stuck with the Spread.

About all the advertising they could do was confined to the day of the Test itself. Norman Hartweg had painted a sign on some cardboard and tacked it onto some boards Babbs had used as cue signs in the movie, and put it up in the Hip Pocket Bookstore. CAN YOU Pa.s.s THE ACID TEST? The Hip Pocket Bookstore was a paperback bookstore that Ha.s.sler and Peter Demma, one of the Prankster outer circle, were running in Santa Cruz. They left word in the store that afternoon that it was going to be at Babbs's. A few local bohos saw it and came out, but mainly it was the Pranksters and their friends who showed up at the Spread that night, including a lot of the Berkeley crowd that had been coming to La Honda. Plus Allen Ginsberg and his entourage.

It started off as a party, with some of the movie flashed on the walls, and lights, and tapes, and the Pranksters providing the music themselves, not to mention the LSD. The Pranksters' strange atonal Chinese music broadcast on all frequencies, a la John Cage. It was mostly just another La Honda party-but then around 3 A.M. a thing happened ... The non-involved people, the people just there for the beano, the people who hadn't seen the Management, like the Berkeley people, they had all left by 3 A.M. and the Test was down to some kind of core ... It ended up with Kesey on one side of Babbs's living room and Ginsberg on the other, with everybody else arranged around these two poles like on a magnet, all the Kesey people over toward him and all the Ginsberg people toward him-The super-West and the super-East-and the subject got to be Vietnam. Kesey gives his theory of whole mult.i.tudes of people joining hands in a clump and walking away from the war. Ginsberg said all these things, these wars, were the result of misunderstandings. n.o.body who was doing the fighting ever wanted to be doing it, and if everybody could only sit around in a friendly way and talk it out, they could get to the root of their misunderstanding and settle it-and then from the rear of the Kesey contingent came the voice of the only man in the room who had been within a thousand miles of the war, Babbs, saying, "Yes, it's all so very obvious. "

It's all so very obvious . . .

How magical that comment seemed at that moment! The magical eighth hour of acid-how clear it all now was-Ginsberg had said it, and Babbs, the warrior, had certified it, and it had all built to this, and suddenly everything was so . . . very . . .clear . . .

The Acid Test at the Spread was just a dry run, of course. It didn't really . .. reach out into the world ... But! soon ... the Rolling Stones, England's second hottest pop group, were coming to San Jose, 40 miles south of San Francisco, for a show in the Civic Auditorium on December 4. Kesey can see it all, having seen it before. He can see all the wound-up wired-up teeny freaks and a.s.sorted mult.i.tudes pouring out of the Cow Palace after the Beatles show that night, the fragmented pink-tentacled beast, pouring out still aquiver with ecstasy and jelly beans all c.o.c.ked and aimless with no flow to go off in ... It is so very obvious.

For three or four days the Pranksters searched for a hall in San Jose and couldn't come up with one-naturally-it really seemed natural and almost right that nothing should be definite until the last minute. All that was certain was that they would find one at the last minute. The Movie would create that much at least. And what if the mult.i.tudes didn't know where it was going to be until the last minute? Well, those who were meant to be there-those who were in the pudding-they would get there. You were either on the bus or off the bus, and that went for the whole world, even in San Jose, California. At the last minute Kesey talked a local boho figure known as Big Nig into letting them use his old hulk of a house.

Kesey had hooked up with a rock 'n' roll band, The Grateful Dead, led by Jerry Garcia, the same dead-end kid who used to live in the Chateau in Palo Alto with Page Browning and other seeming no-counts, lumpenbeatniks, and you had to throw them out when they came over and tried to crash the parties on Perry Lane. Garcia remembered-how they came down and used to get booted out "by Kesey and the wine drinkers." The wine drinkers-the middle-cla.s.s bohemians of Perry Lane. They both, Kesey and Garcia, had been heading into the pudding, from different directions, all that time, and now Garcia was a, yes, beautiful person, quiet, into the pudding, and a great guitar player. Garcia had first named his group The Warlocks, meaning sorcerers or wizards, and they had been eking by playing for the beer drinkers, at jazz joints and the like around Palo Alto. To the Warlocks, the beer drinker music, even when called jazz, was just square hip. They were on to that distinction, too. For Kesey-they could just play, do their thing.

The Dead had an organist called Pig Pen, who had a Hammond electric organ, and they move the electric organ into Big Nig's ancient house, plus all of the Grateful Dead's electrified guitars and ba.s.ses and the Pranksters' electrified guitars and ba.s.ses and flutes and horns and the light machines and the movie projectors and the tapes and mikes and hi-fis, all of which pile up in insane coils of wires and gleams of stainless steel and winking amplifier dials before Big Nig's unbelieving eyes. His house is old and has wiring that would hardly hold a toaster. The Pranksters are primed in full Prankster regalia. Paul Foster has on his Importancy Coat and now has a huge head of curly hair, a great curly mustache pulling back into great curly mutton chops roaring off his face. Page Browning is the king of face painters. He becomes a full-fledged Devil with a bright orange face and his eyes become the centers of two great silver stars painted over the orange and his hair is silver with silver dust and he paints his lips silver with silver lipstick. This very night the Pranksters all sit down with oil pastel crayons and colored pens and at a wild rate start printing handbills on 8-1/2 X 11 paper saying CAN YOU Pa.s.s THE ACID TEST? and giving Big Nig's address. As the jellybean-c.o.c.ked ma.s.ses start pouring out of the Rolling Stones concert at the Civic Auditorium, the Pranksters charge in among them. Orange & silver Devil, wild man in a coat of b.u.t.tons-Pranksters. Pranksters!-handing out the handbills with the challenge, like some sort of demons, warlocks verily, come to channel the wild pointless energy built up by the Rolling Stones inside.

They come piling into Big Nig's, and suddenly acid and the Worldcraze were everywhere, the electric organ vibrating through every belly in the place, kids dancing not roc dances, not the frug and the-what?-swim, mother, but dancing ecstasy, leaping, dervis.h.i.+ng, throwing their hands over their heads like Daddy Grace's own stroked-out inner courtiers-yes!-Roy Se-burn's lights was.h.i.+ng past every head, Ca.s.sady rapping, Paul Foster handing people weird little things out of his Eccentric Bag, old whistles, tin crickets, burnt keys, spectral plastic handles. Everybody's eyes turn on like lightbulbs, fuses blow, blackness-wowwww!-the things that shake and vibrate and funnel and freak out in this blackness-and then somebody slaps new fuses in and the old hulk of a house shudders back, the wiring writhing and fragmenting like molting snakes, the organs vibro-ma.s.sage the belly again, fuses blow, minds scream, heads explode, neighbors call the cops, 200,300,400 people from out there drawn into The Movie, into the edge of the pudding at least, a ma.s.s closer and higher than any ma.s.s in history, it seems most surely, and Kesey makes minute adjustment, small toggle switch here, lubricated with Vaseline No. 634-3 diluted with carbon tetrachloride, and they ripple, Major, ripple, but with meaning, 400 of the attuned mult.i.tude headed toward the pudding, the first ma.s.s acid experience, the dawn of the Psychedelic, the Flower Generation and all the rest of it, and Big Nig wants the rent.

"How you holding?"

How you holding- "I mean, like, you know," says Big Nig to Garcia. "I didn't charge Kesey nothing to use this place, like free?, you know? and the procedure now is that every cat here contributes, man, to help out with the rent." With the rent- "Yeah, I mean, like"-says Big Nig. Big Nig stares at Garcia with the deepest look of hip spade soul authority you can imagine, and nice and officious, too- Yeah, I mean, life-Garcia, for his part, however, doesn't know which bursts out first, the music or the orange laugh. Out the edges of his eyes he can see his own black hair framing his face-it is so long, to the shoulders, and springs out like a Sudanese soldier's-and then big Nig's big earnest black face right in front of him flapping and was.h.i.+ng comically out into the glistening acid-glee red sea of faces out beyond them both in the galactic red lakes on the walls- "Yeah, I mean, like, for the rent, man," says Big Nig, "you already blown six fuses."

Blown! Six fuses! Garcia sticks his hand into his electric guitar and the notes come out like a huge orange laugh all blown fuses electric spark leaps in colors upon the glistening sea of faces. It's a freaking laugh and a half. A new star is being born, like a light-bulb in a womb, and Big Nig wants the rent-a new star being born, a new planet forming, Ahura Mazda blazing in the world womb, here before our very eyes-and Big Nig, the poor pathetic spade, wants his rent.

A freaking odd thought, that one. A big funky spade looking pathetic and square. For twenty years in the hip life, Negroes never even looked square. They were the archetypical soul figures. But what is Soul, or Funky, or Cool, or Baby-in the new world of the ecstasy, the All-one .. . the kairos....

IF ONLY THERE WERE THE PERFECT PLACE, WHICH WOULD BE a place big enough for the mult.i.tudes and isolated enough to avoid the cops, with their curfews and eternal ha.s.sling. Shortly after that they found the perfect place, by acci- By accident, Mahavira?

The third Acid Test was scheduled for Stinson Beach, 15 miles north of San Francisco. Stinson Beach was already a gathering place for local heads. You could live all winter in little beach cottages there for next to nothing. There was a nice solid brick recreation hall on the beach, all very nice-but at the last minute that whole deal fell through, and they s.h.i.+fted to Muir Beach, a few miles south. The handbills were already out, all over the head sections of San Francisco, CAN YOU Pa.s.s THE ACID TEST, advertising Ca.s.sady & Ann Murphy Vaudeville and celebrities who might be there, which included anybody who happened to be in town, or might make it to town, the Fugs, Ginsberg, Roland Kirk. There were always some nice chiffon subjunctives and the future conditionals in the Prankster handbill rhetoric, but who was to deny who might be drawn into the Movie . ..

Anyway, at the last minute they headed for Muir Beach instead. The fact that many people wouldn't know about the change and would go to Stinson Beach and merely freeze in the darkness and never find the right place-somehow that didn't even seem distressing. It was part of some strange a.n.a.logical order of the universe. Norman Hartweg hooked down his LSD-it was in the acid gas capsules that night-and thought of Gurdjieff. Gurdjieff wouldn't announce a meeting until the last minute. We're gonna get together tonight. The people that got there, got there; and there was message in that alone. Which was, of course: you're either on the bus or off the bus.

Those who were on the bus, even if they weren't Pranksters, like Marshall Efron, the round Mercury of Hip California, or the h.e.l.l's Angels... all found it. The cops, however, never did. They were apparently thrown off by the Stinson Beach handbills.

Muir Beach had a big log-cabin-style lodge for dances, banquets, and the like. The lodge was stilted up out in a waste of frigid marsh gra.s.s. A big empty nighttime beach in winter. Some little log tourist cabins with blue doors on either side, all empty. The lodge had three big rooms and was about 100 feet long, all logs and rafters and exposed beams, a tight s.h.i.+p of dark wood and Roughing It. The Grateful Dead piled in with their equipment and the Pranksters with theirs, which now included a Hammond electric organ for Gretch and a great strobe light.

The strobe! The strobe, or stroboscope, was originally an instrument for studying motion, like the way a man's legs move when he is running. In a darkened chamber, for example, you aim a bright light, flas.h.i.+ng on and off, at the runner's legs as he runs. The light flashes on and off very rapidly, maybe three times as fast as a normal heartbeat. Every time the light flashes on, you see a new stage in the movement of the runner's legs. The successive images tend to freeze in your mind, because the light flashes off before the usual optical blur of the motion can hit you. The strobe has certain magical properties in the world of the acid heads. At certain speeds stroboscopic lights are so synched in with the pattern of brain waves that they can throw epileptics into a seizure. Heads discovered that strobes could project them into many of the sensations of an LSD experience without taking LSD. The strobe!

To people standing under the mighty strobe everything seemed to fragment. Ecstatic dancers-their hands flew off their arms, frozen in the air-their glistening faces came apart-a gleaming ellipse of teeth here, a pair of buffered highlit cheekbones there-all flacking and fragmenting into images as in an old flicker movie-a man in slices!-all of history pinned up on a b.u.t.terfly board; the experience, of course. The strobe, the projectors, the mikes, the tapes, the amplifiers, the variable lag Ampex-it was all set up in a coiling gleaming clump in the Lincoln Log lodge, the communal clump, Babbs working over the dials, talking into the microphones to test them. Heads beginning to pour in. Marshall Efron and Norman, Norman already fairly zonked ... Then in comes Kesey, through the main door- Everyone watches. His face is set, his head c.o.c.ked slightly. He is going to do something; everyone watches, because this seems terribly important. Drawn in right away by the charismatic vacuum cleaner, they are. Kesey heads for the control center, saying nothing to anyone, reaches into the galaxy of dials, makes ... a single minute adjustment... yes! one toggle switch, double-pole, single-throw, double-break, in the allegory of Control. . .

Babbs is there, bombed, but setting up the intricate glistening coils of the tapes and projectors and the rest of it. Each of the Pranksters, bombed, has some fairly exacting task to do. Norman is staring at the dials-and he can't even see the numbers, he is so bombed, the numbers are wriggling off like huge luminous parasites under a microscope-but--function under acid. Babbs says, "One reason we're doing this is to learn how to function on acid." Of course! Prepare for the Day-when mult.i.tudes, millions, civilizations are on acid, seeking satori, it is coming, the wave is spreading.

The heads are all sitting around on the floor, about 300 of them. Into the maelstrom! Yes. At Big Nig's in San Jose, a lot of the kids the Pranksters had corralled coming out of the Rolling Stones show did not take LSD that night, although there were enough heads at Big Nig's stoned on various things to create that sympathetic vibration known as the "contact high." But this is different. Practically everybody who has found the place, after the switch from Stinson Beach, is far enough into the thing to know what the "acid" in the Acid Test means. A high percentage took LSD about four hours ago, rode out the first rush and are ready ... now to groove ... The two projectors s.h.i.+ne forth with The Movie. The bus and the Pranksters start rolling over the walls of the lodge, Babbs and Kesey rapping on about it, the Bus lumping huge and vibrating and bouncing in great swells of heads and color-Norman, zonked, sitting on the floor, is half frightened, half ecstatic, although something in the back of his mind recognizes this as his Acid Test pattern, to sit back and watch, holding on through the rush, until 3 or 4 A.M., in the magic hours, and then dance-but so much of a rush this time! The Movie and Roy Seburn's light machine pitching the inter-galactic red science-fiction seas to all corners of the lodge, oil and water and food coloring pressed between plates of gla.s.s and projected in vast size so that the very ooze of cellular Creation seems to ectoplast into the ethers and then the Dead coming in with their immense submarine vibrato vibrating, garanging, from the Aleutian rocks to the baja griffin cliffs of the Gulf of California. The Dead's weird sound! agony-in-ecstasis! submarine somehow, turbid half the time, tremendously loud but like sitting under a waterfall, at the same time full of sort of ghoul-show vibrato sounds as if each string on their electric guitars is half a block long and tw.a.n.ging in a room full of natural gas, not to mention their great Hammond electric organ, which sounds like a movie house Wurlitzer, a diathermy machine, a Citizens' Band radio and an Auto-Grind garbage truck at 4 A.M., all coming over the same frequency ... Then suddenly another movie THE FROGMAN.

Babbs and Gretch and Hagen made it down in Santa Cruz, the story of Babbs the Frogman, arising from the Pacific in black neopreme Frogman suit from flippers to insect goggles, the pranking monster, falling in love with the Princess, Gretch, with floods of frames from elsewhere-the Bus Movie?-brittering in stroboscopically Frogman woos her and wins her and loses her to the Pacific Chohans in submarinal projection BABBS! GRETCH!.

Norman has never seen a movie while under acid before and it deepens, deepens, deepens in perspective, this movie, the most 3-D movie ever made, until they are standing right before him, their very neopreme fairy tails and the Pacific is so far in the distance and black out beyond the marshes around the Muir Beach lodge until Babbs and Gretch are now in the room in the flesh in two separate spots, here before me on the beach and over here in this very room in this very lodge on the beach, Babbs at the microphone and Gretch nearby at the new Hammond organ-such synch! that they should narrate and orchestrate their own lives like this, in variable lag, layer upon layer of variable lags HEEEEEEEEE into the whirlpool who should appear but Owsley. Owsley, done up in his $600 head costume, has emerged from his subterrain of espionage and paranoia to come to see the Prankster experiment for himself, and in the middle of the giddy contagion he takes LSD. They never saw him take it before. He takes the LSD and RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRROIL the whirlpool picks him up and spins him down into the stroboscope stereoptic prankster panopticon in full variable lag SUCH CREATURES.

h.e.l.l's Angels come reeling in, shrieking Day-Glo, then clumping together on the floor under the black light and then most gentle Buddha blissly pa.s.sing around among themselves various glittering Angel esoterica, chains, Iron Crosses, knives, b.u.t.tons, coins, keys, wrenches, spark plugs, grokking over these arcana winking in the Day-Glo. Orange & Silver devil gliding through the dancers grinning his Zea-lot grin in every face, and Kesey crouched amid the gleaming coils, at the Controls Kesey looks out upon the stroboscopic whirlpool-the dancers! flung and flinging! in ecstasis! gyrating! levitating! men in slices! in ping-pong b.a.l.l.s! in the creamy bare essence and it reaches a Synch he never saw before. Heads from all over the acid world out here and all whirling into the pudding. Now let a man see what Control is. Kesey mans the strobe and a twist of the mercury lever Up and they all speed up Now the whole whirlpool, so far into it, they are. Faster they dance, hands thrown up off their arms like confetti in the strobe flas.h.i.+ng, blissful faces falling apart and being exchanged, for I am you and you are me in Cosmo's Tasmanian deviltry. Turn it Down and they slow down-or We turn down-It-Cosmo-turns down, still in perfect synch, one brain, one energy, a single flow of intersubjectivity. It is possible this alchemy so dreamed of by all the heads. It is happening before them Control

CURIOUSLY, AFTER THE FIRST RUSH AT THE ACID TEST, THERE would be long intervals of the most exquisite boredom. Exquisite, because it was so unsuspected after the general frenzy. Nothing would happen, at least not in the usual sense. Those who were ... not on the bus... would come to the realization that there was no schedule. The Grateful Dead did not play in sets; no eight numbers to a set, then a twenty-five-minute break, and so on, four or five sets and then the close-out. The Dead might play one number for five minutes or thirty minutes. Who kept time? Who could keep time, with history cut up in slices. The Dead could get just as stoned as anyone else. The... non-attuned would look about and here would be all manner of heads, including those running the show, the Pranksters, stroked out against the walls like slices of Jello. Waiting; with n.o.body looking very likely to start it back up. Those who didn't care to wait would tend to drift off, stoned or otherwise, and the Test would settle down to the pudding. The Prankster band started the strange Chinese cacophony of its own, with Gretch wailing on the new electric organ. Norman got up and danced, it being that time. He even fooled about a bit with a little light projection thing of his own, although he didn't think it was good enough, but the magic hours were coming on like electric velvet. Kesey spoke softly over the microphone. They were into the still of the hurricane, the pudding.

AT DAWN - A FREAKING COLD LIGHT ON THE MARSH GRa.s.s AND the beach. A purple shadow all over the ocean like one huge stone-cold bruise. Suddenly the main door bursts open and it's Owsley.

Owsley is lurching and groping and screaming "Survival!"

It comes out like a steam whistle forced out of a constricted little opening "Survival!"

Owsley, the Acid King, in his $600 head outfit, groping through the blue bruise dawn with his eyes like disaster craters, hissing "Survival!"

The sight of Kesey apparently hits him with a surge of adrenaline, however, because he recovers his voice and starts in on Kesey: "Kesey!"

The gist of it is that Kesey can't do this again. This is the end. The Acid Tests are over. Kesey is a maniac and the Tests are maniacal and the roof is falling in. Taking LSD in a monster group like this gets too many forces going, too much amok energy, causing very freaky and destructive things to happen, and so on. It's his acid and he says this is the end. None of them can figure out precisely what he is saying. Just that he has flipped and Kesey did it.

Little by little, they piece it together. He has had quite a trip for himself on his own LSD, has Owsley. It seems that Owsley took the LSD, a good dose, apparently, and the strobe light and the incredible layers of variable lag began rocking and rippling him and it threw him into a time warp, or parallel time dimension. The heads were always talking about such things. They could cite some serious thinkers, scientists even, such as C. D. Broad and his theory of a second temporal dimension-"events which are separated by a temporal gap in one dimension may be adjoined without any gap in the other, just as two points in the earth's surface which differ in longitude may be identical in lat.i.tude"-or J. W. Dunne's theory of serialism, or infinite regress-or Maurice Maeterlinck. The heads were always talking about such things and Owsley was primed for it. Then he got high. Then he got caught in the whirlpool, spun out of his gourd by all the special effects of the Pranksters' variable lag devices-and the legend of the trip he took eventually was told as follows: Back he went into the eighteenth century, Count Cagliostro! no longer plain Giuseppe Balsamo of Palermo, the Oakland of the Mediterranean, but the good Count, alchemist, seer, magician, master of precognition, forecaster of lotteries, alchemical creator, from out of base elements of... this diamond, greatest and most dazzling in history-here, Cardinal Louis de Rohan-but!-persecuted as a thaumaturge-thrust into this spinning black donjon, the Bastille, seeping with lurid water and carbonated moss and twitching dismembered rats, anatomized in the flas.h.i.+ng light of the diamond they wouldn't believe, a rat shank here, a rat metacarpal there, rat teeth, rat eyes, rat tails leaping and frozen in the air like city lights-that noise-a mob in the streets-either salvation-or-the Bastille begins to disintegrate into absorbent felt cubes- -and so on. The world began fragmenting on him. It began coming totally to pieces, breaking up into component parts, and he wasn't even back in the twentieth century yet, he was trapped-where?-Paris in 1786? ... The whole world was coming to pieces molecule by molecule now and swimming like grease bubbles in a cup of coffee, disappearing into the inter-galactic ooze and ga.s.ses all around-including his own body. He lost his skin, his skeleton, his pulmonary veins-sneaking out into the ooze like eels, they are, reeking phosphorus, his neural ganglia-unraveling like hot worms and wiggling down the galactic drain, his whole substance dissolving into gaseous nothingness until finally he was down to one cell. One human cell: his; that was all that was left of the entire known world, and if he lost control of that one cell, there would be nothing left. The world would be, like, over. He has to rebuild himself and the entire world from that one cell with a gigantic act of will-too overwhelming. Where does a man start? With California Route 1 so he can get out of here in his car? or will it turn out to be merely the filthy Rue Ventru with the Bastille mobs waiting? or start with the car? the differential? how do they make the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds? or the beach? all those freaking grains of sand? the marsh gra.s.s? the tourist cabins? got to put every blue door back? or the ocean? or leave it dry? save making all those filthy blind bathosphere black animals down there ... or the sky? how far does it go? the Big Dipper? the Ursa Minor? the Delphinium? suppose it is really infinite concentric spheres of crystal making infinite gelatinous submarinal vibrations? the Dead? the Pranksters? Kesey, Kesey's out for good, Kesey and the bathosphere brutes-but with a superheroic effort he begins. But by the time he gets himself remade, it is too much. It is overwhelming. He makes his car. He makes the parking lot and the beginning of the road out. He'll make the rest of it as he goes along. Freak it! Split! Leave the rest of the known world to its own devices, out in the ga.s.ses. He jumped into the car and gunned off; and smashed it into a tree. A tree he hadn't even put back yet. But the crash somehow pops the whole world back. There it is; back from the fat-bubbling ooze. The car is smashed, but he has survived. Survived!

Survival!

and he plunges into the lodge to seek out the maniac Kesey. That somb.i.t.c.h has prolly popped back, too.

chapter.

XIX.

The Trips Festival

OWSLEY'S FREAKOUT! OWSLEY BECAME OBSESSED WITH IT himself. Whenever the subject was the LSD experience- which it was most of the time around Owsley-he would recount his experience at Muir Beach. It seemed to horrify and intrigue him at the same time-such morbid but wonderful details. Everyone listens ... can such things be? In any case, it sounded like Owsley thought Kesey was a demon and he was going to cut off their LSD supply.

Richard Alpert was also unhappy with the Acid Tests. Alpert, like Timothy Leary, had sacrificed his academic career as a psychologist for the sake of the psychedelic movement. It was hard enough to keep the straight mult.i.tudes from going hysterical over the subject of LSD even in the best of circ.u.mstances-let alone when it was used for manic screaming orgies in public places. Among the heads who leaned toward Leary and Alpert, it was hard to even freaking believe that the Pranksters were pulling a freaking prank like this. Any moment they were expecting them to explode into some sort of debacle, some sort of ma.s.s freakout, that the press could seize on and bury the psychedelic movement forever. The police watched them closely, but there was very little they could do about it, except for an occasional marijuana bust, since there was no law against LSD at the time. The Pranksters went on to hold Tests in Palo Alto, Portland, Oregon, two in San Francisco, four in and around Los Angeles-and three in Mexico-and no laws broken here, Lieutenant-only every law of G.o.d and man-In short, a G.o.dd.a.m.n outrage, and we're powerless- The Acid Tests were one of those outrages, one of those scandals, that create a new style or a new world view. Everyone clucks, fumes, grinds their teeth over the bad taste, the bad morals, the insolence, the vulgarity, the childishness, the lunacy, the cruelty, the irresponsibility, the fraudulence and, in fact, gets worked up into such a state of excitement, such an epitasis, such a slaver, they can't turn it loose. It becomes a perfect obsession. And now they'll show you how it should have been done.

The Acid Tests were the epoch of the psychedelic style and practically everything that has gone into it. I don't mean merely that the Pranksters did it first but, rather, that it all came straight out of the Acid Tests in a direct line leading to the Trips Festival of January 1966. That brought the whole thing full out in the open. "Mixed media" entertainment-this came straight out of the Acid Tests' combination of light and movie projections, strobes, tapes, rock 'n' roll, black light. "Acid rock"-the sound of the Beatles' Sergeant Pepper alb.u.m and the high-vibrato electronic sounds of the Jefferson Airplane, the Mothers of Invention and many other groups-the mothers of it all were the Grateful Dead at the Acid Tests. The Dead were the audio counterpart of Roy Seburn's light projections. Owsley was responsible for some of this, indirectly. Owsley had snapped back from his great Freakout and started pouring money into the Grateful Dead and, thereby, the Tests. Maybe he figured the Tests were the wave of the future, whether he had freaked out or not. Maybe he thought "acid rock" was the sound of the future and he would become a kind of Brian Epstein for the Grateful Dead. I don't know. In any case, he started buying the Dead equipment such as no rock 'n' roll band ever had before, the Beatles included, all manner of tuners, amplifiers, receivers, loudspeakers, microphones, cartridges, tapes, theater horns, booms, lights, turntables, instruments, mixers, muters, servile mesochroics, whatever was on the market. The sound went down so many microphones and hooked through so many mixers and variable lags and blew up in so many amplifiers and roiled around in so many speakers and fed back down so many microphones, it came on like a chemical refinery. There was something wholly new and deliriously weird in the Dead's sound, and practically everything new in rock 'n' roll, rock jazz I have heard it called, came out of it.

Even details like psychedelic poster art, the quasi-art nouveau swirls of lettering, design and vibrating colors, electro-pastels and spectral Day-Glo, came out of the Acid Tests. Later other impresarios and performers would recreate the Prankster styles with a sophistication the Pranksters never dreamed of. Art is not eternal, boys. The posters became works of art in the accepted cultural tradition. Others would even play the Dead's sound more successfully, commercially, anyway, than the Dead. Others would do the mixed-media thing until it was pure ambrosial candy for the brain with creamy filling every time. To which Kesey would say: "They know where it is, but they don't know what it is."

IT WAS ACTUALLY STEWART BRAND WHO THOUGHT UP THE great Trips Festival of January 1966. Brand and a San Francisco artist, Ramon Sender. Brand was 27 and an ex-biologist who had run across the Indian peyote cults in Arizona and New Mexico. Brand founded an organization called America Needs Indians. And then one day he took some LSD, right after an Explorer satellite went up to photograph the earth, and as the old synapses began rapping around inside his skull at 5,000 thoughts per second, he was struck with one of those questions that inflame men's brains: Why Haven't We Seen a Photograph of the Whole Earth Yet?-and he drove across America from Berkeley, California, to 116th Street, New York City, selling b.u.t.tons with that legend on them to Leftists, Rightists, Fundamentalists, Theosophists, malcontents, anyone with the health or stealth of paranoia or the put-on in their souls ...

He and his friend Sender got the idea of pulling together all the new forms of expression that were kicking around in the hip world at that moment and having a Super Acid Test out in the open. Hire a hall and call in the mult.i.tudes. They found an impresario for the thing, Bill Graham, a New Yorker who had a lot of cachet in the hip world of San Francisco as a member of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, which used to get busted for putting on political dumb shows in the park, that kind of thing. The Trips Festival was set for Friday, Sat.u.r.day, and Sunday nights, January 21-23, at the Longsh.o.r.emen's Hall in San Francisco. The Trips Festival was billed as a big celebration that was going to simulate an LSD experience, minus the LSD, using light effects and music, mainly. The big night, Sat.u.r.day night, was going to be called The Acid Test, featuring Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters.

Kesey and the Pranksters were primed for the Festival. Even Mountain Girl was on hand. She had wrestled the thing out in her mind and was back on the bus. The Pranksters had just held an Acid Test at the Fillmore Auditorium, a big ballroom in the middle of one of San Francisco's big Negro slums, the Fillmore district. It was a wild night. Hundreds of heads and bohos from all over the Bay area turned out, zonked to the eyeb.a.l.l.s. Paul Kra.s.sner was back in town, and he heard the word that was out on . .. The Scene. Everybody would be "dropping acid" about 5 or 6 P.M. to get ready for the Acid Test to begin that night at nine o'clock at the Fillmore Auditorium. Kra.s.sner arrives and- s.h.i.+t!-he sees: ... a ballroom surrealistically seething with a couple of thousand bodies stoned out of their everlovin bruces in crazy costumes and obscene makeup with a raucous rock 'n roll band and stroboscope lights and a thunder machine and balloons and heads and streamers and electronic equipment and the back of a guy's coat proclaiming Please don't believe in magic to a girl dancing with 4-inch eyelashes so that even the G.o.dd.a.m.n Pinkerton Guards were contact high.

Kesey asks him to take the microphone and contribute to a running commentary on the scene. "All I know," he announces into the din, "is that if I were a cop and I came in here, I wouldn't know where to begin."

Well, the cops came in, and they didn't know where to begin. They came in to close the Test down at 2 A.M. in keeping with a local ordinance and the whole thing was at its maddest height. Mountain Girl had hold of a microphone and was shrieking encouragement to the flailing dancers. Babbs was beaming spotlights at heads who were veering around bombed and asking them spectral questions over another microphone-Say there, what's your trouble-have you l-o-s-t y-o-u-r mi-i-i-i-i-i-i-nd! Page Browning was grinning Zea-lot. The cops started shouting for them to close down but couldn't make themselves heard and started pulling plugs out, microphone plugs, loudspeaker plugs, strobe plugs, amplifier plugs-but there were so many G.o.dd.a.m.n plugs, the most monumental snake pit of wires and plugs in history, and as fast as they would pull eight plugs out, Mountain Girl would put ten plugs back in, and finally Mountain Girl had a microphone up on the balcony somewhere and was screaming instructions to the dancers and the cops-louder music, more wine-and they couldn't find her. Finally they ordered the Pranksters to start clearing the place out, which they did, except for Babbs, who sat down in a chair and wouldn't budge. We said get busy, said the cops.

"I don't have to," said Babbs. "I'm the boss here. They're working for me. "

Yeah?-and one of the cops grabs Babbs by a luminous vest he has on, succeeding only in separating Babbs from the vest. Babbs grinning maniacally but suddenly looming most large and fierce.

"You're under arrest!"

"For what?"

"Resistin'."

"Resistin' what?"

"You gonna come quietly or do we have to take you?"

"Either way you want it," says Babbs, grinning in the most frightening manner now, like the next step is eight karate chops to the gizzards and giblets. Suddenly it is a Mexican standoff-with both sides glaring but n.o.body swinging a punch yet. It is a grand ha.s.sle, of course. At the last minute a couple of Kesey's lawyers arrive on the scene and cool everything down and talk the cops out of it and Babbs out of it and it all rumbles away in the valley as part of the Weltha.s.sle.

THE LAWYERS - YES. KESEY'S ORIGINAL MARIJUANA CHARGE, on the big arrest at La Honda, had been ricocheting around in the San Mateo County court system for nine months. Kesey's lawyers were attacking the warrant that enabled the various constables to make the raid. The case had started with a Grand Jury hearing, which is of course a secret procedure. The County claimed it had all sorts of evidence to the effect that Kesey and the Pranksters had been giving dope to minors. Kesey's lawyers were trying to get the whole case thrown out on the grounds that the original warrant for the raid was fraudulent. This didn't work, and Kesey now had the choice of facing trial and a lot of lurid testimony or waiving open trial and letting a judge decide the case on the basis of the transcript of the Grand Jury proceedings. It was finally arranged that Kesey would let the judge do it. He would most likely be getting a light sentence. Even after that he could still appeal the case on the grounds that the warrant had been trumped up. This whole thing with the judge was the equivalent, in a roundabout way, of pleading no contest. On January 17, 1966, four days before the Trips Festival, the judge duly found Kesey guilty and sentenced him to six months on a work farm and three years on probation. This was about what his lawyers expected. It wasn't so bad. The work farm was right near La Honda, ironically enough, and the prisoners did a lot of their work clearing out a stretch of forest back of Kesey's place. There was something very funny about that. Lime-light bowers for the straight mult.i.tudes. There was more irony. McMurphy, in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, started his adventures with a six-month stretch on a work farm. Kesey had been a McMurphy on the outside for four years. Now maybe he would be a McMurphy on the inside, for real. Maybe ... anyway it was far from the G.o.dd.a.m.n end of the world. Then an uncool thing happened.

THE NIGHT OF JANUARY 19, TWO NIGHTS BEFORE THE TRIPS Festival, Kesey, Mountain Girl, and some of the Pranksters went over to Stewart Brand's apartment, in North Beach, San Francisco, to make plans for the Trips Festival. Sometime after midnight Kesey and Mountain Girl went up on the roof on top of the building and spread out an old blue pad that had been in the back of somebody's station wagon on the gravel up there and stretched out on the pad, grooving on the peaceful debris of North Beach. It's nice and homey boho quaint, North Beach. Slums with a view. Out there the lights of the bay and the fis.h.i.+ng boats and the honky-tonks and more lights climbing up the hills of San Francisco and nearer, all the asphalt squares of the other rooftops, squares and levels and ladders-grooving on the design, which is nice and peaceful and a little arty-looking, but that is North Beach. Mountain Girl all dark brown hair and big brown eyes, coming on ornery and fun-loving-it occurs to Kesey-rather like the eyes of an Irish setter pup just turning from awkward carefree frolic to the task of devotion.

Mountain Girl is being enthusiastic about the Trips Festival. "With that big new speaker," she says, "we'll be able to wire that place so you can hear a flea fart!"

Awkward carefree frolic to the task of-Kesey is feeling old. Once a stud so gorged with muscle tone-his face feels lopsided with the strain, of... the eternal ha.s.sling, the lawyering, the legally sanctioned lying on all sides, politicking, sucking up, getting lectured at, cranking on the old lopsided diplomatic smile ...

"-hear a flea fart!" "Hasn't happened yet," says Kesey.

"With this many days to set it up? Always before we were in the hall that night and maybe set up before we finished in the morning."

And so forth and so on-Kesey and Mountain Girl lie on their stomachs with their chins in their hands, gazing down four stories to the alley below and occasionally sc.r.a.ping gravel off the rooftop and tossing it down ...

... yes... ummm ... at 1:53 A.M. the cops of the 19th Precinct got a call from a woman at 18 Margrave Place saying some drunken tormentors or something were throwing rocks at her window. Shortly after 2 A.M. a police car pulls into the alley. So Kesey and Mountain Girl groove on that. Yup, a police car right down below, police car come here. A red light on a hillside drive about 50 yards away blinks. A red light blinks and a police car tools in the alley. Ah, always the synch, friends. The cops are coming in this building. Wonder on earth what for. Do I learn anything? Or once again lie loaded and disbelieving as two cops climb five stories to drag me to the cooler.... Oh, the logic of the groove and the synch. Kesey and Mountain Girl see it all at once, now, so clearly. It is so very obvious that it fascinates. They see it all, grok it all-Scram, split, run, flee, hide, vanish, disintegrate-the red alert is so very clear, it blinks and blinks, red, nothing, red, nothing, red, nothing, red, nothing, and yet move? and miss it all? turning so slow in the interferrometric synch? It is like a weird time he was in Olympic wrestling eliminations, in 1960, in the San Francisco Olympic Club, first round against a hulking stud, and he took a couple of vitamins before the fray, revved up, revved up, not doped, oh mom&dad&buddy&sis&dear-but-square-ones, all Olympian athletes are doped, force-fed pill-heads, see them lead them, all gorged with glistening muscle veins and crewcut and led to the training table and by every plate a lineup of capsules like the winegla.s.ses at the gourmet dinner, capsules for iron, capsules for calcium, capsules to make you squeeze your colon and flex your heart, capsules of B12 mighty as pure amphetamine turn your blood vessels into black snakes, capsules to make you long and brute in the teeth, make you clean & jerk in the arms, mad ape in the neck, sharp in the tusk, panther in the solar plexus lineup of crewcut stud bulls concocted out of chemicals force-fed every day at every plate-revved up, revved up, revved up waiting for the referee to snap his hand up in mid-air to start the match, snap... and it is so very fascinating ... he is like a motor running at top speed with the clutch in ... it is intriguing, not intimidating, the way this great stud grabs him above the knee with his huge hand and starts pulling down-Kesey is two people, revved up here on the mat and revved up here in the ethers like an astral body, watching-interesting!-no man could be as strong as this guy here and execute a takedown by pulling downward on the knee-no danger, friends, just fascination-and so the guy won a trophy for the fastest pin of the tourney, while the motor revved in synch with a different b.u.mmer- -fascinating!-so- -out the scroffy arty rooftop door come two cops, Officers Fred Pardella and Thomas L. O'Donnell of the 19th Precinct, by designation- What happened next became the subject of two trials in San Francisco, later, many fugitive months later, both ending in hung juries, the second one 11 to 1 against Kesey. According to Officers Pardella and O'Donnell, they found the suspects Kesey and the Adams girl and a plastic bag containing a quant.i.ty of brownish vegetation. Whereupon Officer O'Donnell sought to collect the evidence, and Kesey wrestled him for it, throwing the bag onto an adjoining arty rectangle rooftop and very nearly Pardella along with it, whereupon Officer O'Donnell drew his gun and brought both Kesey and the girl into custody. The plastic bag, retrieved, contained 3.54 grams of marijuana.

THIS WAS A BEAUTIFUL MESS AND NO TWO WAYS ABOUT IT. A second offense for possession of marijuana carried an automatic five-year sentence with no possibility of parole. At the very least he stood to get the full three-year sentence in San Mateo County now, as one of the judge's conditions had been that he no longer a.s.sociate with the Pranksters. Mountain Girl was ready to take the whole rap herself. "We were just tying it off," she told the press. "He wasn't supposed to hang around with any of us wild, giddy people any more. This was the last time we were gonna see him." Well... she tried. Kesey's probation officer in San Mateo County advised him for G.o.dsake stay away from the Trips Festival or he was in for it, but the whole thing was miles beyond in-for-it, out towards old Edge City, in fact.

Kesey left Munic.i.p.al Court in San Francisco on January 20 with Mountain Girl and Stewart Brand and onto the whole bus full of Pranksters to roll through San Francisco advertising the Trips Festival. They got out at Union Square. Kesey wore a pair of white Levi's with the backsides emblazoned with HOT on the left side and COLD on the right and TIBET in the middle.- and a pair of sky-blue boots. They all played Ron Boisie's Thunder Machine for loon vibrations in Union Square in the fibrillateing heart of San Francisco.

If nothing else, Kesey's second arrest was great publicity for the Trips Festival. It was all over San Francisco newspapers. In the hip, intellectual, and even social worlds of San Francisco, the Trips Festival notion was spreading like a fever. The dread drug LSD. Acid heads. An LSD experience without the LSD, it was being billed as-moreover, people actually believed it. But mainly the idea of a new life style was making itself felt. Do you suppose this is the-new wave... ?

And you buy y'r ticket, f'r chrissake-an absurd thought to Norman Hartweg-and we've got a promoter-all absurd, but the thousands pour into the Longsh.o.r.emen's Hall for the Trips Festival, thousands even the first night, which was mostly Indian night, a weird thing put on by Brand's America Needs Indians, but now on Sat.u.r.day evening the huge crush hits for the Acid Test. Norman is absolutely zonked on acid-and look at the freaks running in here. Norman is not the only one. "An LSD experience without LSD"-that was a laugh. In fact, the heads are pouring in by the hundreds, bombed out of their gourds, hundreds of heads coming out into the absolute open for the first time. It is like the time the Pranksters went to the Beatles concert in full costume, looking so bizarre and so totally smashed that no one could believe they were. n.o.body would risk it in public like this. Well, the kids are just having an LSD experience without LSD, that's all, and this is what it looks like. A hulking crazed whirlpool. That's nice. Lights and movies sweeping around the hall; five movie projectors going and G.o.d knows how many light machines, interferrometrics, the intergalactic science-fiction seas all over the walls, loudspeakers studding the hall all the way around like flaming chandeliers, strobes exploding, black lights with Day-Glo objects under them and Day-Glo paint to play with, street lights at every entrance flas.h.i.+ng red and yellow, two bands, the Grateful Dead and Big Brother and the Holding Company and a troop of weird girls in leotards leaping around the edges blowing dog whistles-and the Pranksters. Paul Foster has wrapped black friction tape all around his shoes and up over his ankles and swaddled his legs and hips and torso in it up to his rib cage, where begins a white s.h.i.+rt and then white bandaging all over his face and skull and just a slit for his eyes, over which he wears dark gla.s.ses. He also wears a crutch and a sign saying, You're in the Pepsi Generation and I'm a pimply freak!" Rotor! Also heads from all over, in serapes and mandala beads and Indian headbands and Indian beads, the great era for all that, and one in a leather jerkin with "Under a.s.s Wizard Mojo Indian Fighter" stenciled on the back. Mojo! Oh the freaking strobes turning every brain stem into a cauliflower erupting into corrugated ping-pong b.a.l.l.s-can't stand it-and a girl rips off her s.h.i.+rt and dances bare-breasted with her great mihs breaking up into an endless stream of ruby-red erect nipples streaming out of the great milk-and-honey under the strobe lights. The dancing is ecstatic, a nice macaroni of braless b.r.e.a.s.t.s jiggling and cupcake bottoms wiggling and multiple arms writhing and leaping about. Thousands of straight intellectuals and culturati and square hippies, North Beach style, gawking and learning. Dr. Francis Rigney, Psychiatrist to the Beat Generation, looking on, and all the Big Daddies left over from the Beat period, Eric "Big Daddy" Nord and Tom "Big Daddy" Donahue, and the press, vibrating under Ron Boise's thunder machine. A great rout in progress, you understand.

And in the center of the hall-the Pranksters' tower of Control. It had come to that, and it was perfect. Babbs had supervised the building of a great scaffolding of pipes and platforms in the center of the hall. It rose and rose, this tower, as the Pranksters added equipment, all the mikes and amplifiers and spots and projectors and all the rest of it, the very architecture of Control, finally. Babbs at the controls, Hagen up there taking movies; the Movie goes on. Kesey, meanwhile, was up on an even higher plateau of control, up on a balcony in a silver s.p.a.ce suit complete with a big bubble s.p.a.ce helmet. He conceived of it first as a disguise, so he could be there without the various courts being raggy and outraged, but everyone recognized the s.p.a.ce Man immediately, of course, and he perched up above the maelstrom with a projection machine with which you could write messages on acetate and project them in mammoth size on the walls.

Zonker dancing in a spin of pure unadulterated bliss, higher than he had ever been in his life, which for Zonker was getting up there. Norman, smashed, but with a mission. Norman to circulate among the mult.i.tudes with movie camera. Only he has no power pack, so he has to plug the camera in a wall socket and go out with a great long cord. His eye pressed against the sighting lens and gradually the whole whirlpool coming into his one eye, unity, I, the vessel, receiving all, Atman and Brahman, letting it all flow in until-satori-the perfect state is reached and he realizes he is G.o.d. He has traveled miles through this writhing macaroni ecstasy ma.s.s and could the camera still possibly be plugged in?-or could that possibly matter? deus ex machina, with the world flowing into one eye. Becomes essential that he reach the Central Node, the Tower of Control, the great electric boom of the directional mike picking up the band sticking out from atop the scaffolding tower-and there it is-it is all there in this moment. Starts clambering up the scaffolding with the huge camera still over his shoulder and up to his eye, all funneling in, and the wire and plug snaking behind him, through the mult.i.tudes. And who might these irate forms be?-in truth, Babbs and Hagen, Babbs gesturing for Norman to get off the platform, he's in the way, there's no room, get the h.e.l.l off of here-a cosmic laugh, since obviously they don't know who he is, viz., G.o.d. Norman, the meek, the mild, the retiring, the sideliner, laughs a cosmic laugh at them and keeps on coming. At any moment, he fully realizes, he can make them disappear down ... his eye, just two curds in the world flow, Babbs and Hagen.

"Norman, if you don't get the h.e.l.l off of here, I'm going to throw you off! "-Babbs looking huge and untamable in the same stance he gave the San Francisco cops at the Fillmore, and Norman's mind split just slightly along the chiasma, like a San Andreas fault, one part some durable hard-core fear of getting thrown off and breaking his a.s.s, him, Norman, but the other, the Cosmic laugh of G.o.d at how useless Babbs's stance is now, vibrating slightly between G.o.d and not-G.o.d, but then the laugh comes in a wave, just the cosmic fact that he, Norman, now dares do this, defiance, the new I and there is not one thing, really, they can do about it-Babbs staring at this grinning, zonked figure with the huge camera clambering up the scaffolding. Babbs just throws his hands up, gives up, Norman ascends. G.o.d! in the very Tower of Control. Well, if I'm G.o.d, I can control this thing. Gazing down into the whirlpool. He gestures-and it comes to pa.s.s!-there is a ripple in the crowd there and again and there is a ripple in the crowd here-also so clear what is going to happen, he can predict it, a great eruption of ecstatic dancing in that clump, under the strobes, it will break out now, and it does, of course-a vibration along the crack, the fault, synchronicity spoken here, and we are at play, but they do it-start the music!-and it starts-satori, in the Central Node, as it was written-but I say unto you-and at that very moment, a huge message in red is written on the wall:

ANYBODY WHO KNOWS HE IS G.o.d GO UP ON STAGE.

Anybody?-The chiasmic halves vibrate, the G.o.d and the not-G.o.d, and then he realizes: Kesey wrote that. Kesey up on the balcony in his s.p.a.ce suit wrote that with his projection machine and flashed it on the wall, in that very moment. What to do, Archangel of mine, Norman stares unbelieving-unbelieving in what?-up on stage climbs a spade with a wild head of natural spade hair with a headband wrapped around the hairline so the hair puffs up like a great gray dandelion, a huge s.h.i.+rt swimming under the lights, and it is g.a.y.l.o.r.d, one of the few spades in the whole thing, gleaming the glistening grin of acid zonk and going into a lovely G.o.dly little dance, this g.a.y.l.o.r.d G.o.d ... What the h.e.l.l. Norman gestures toward the crowd, and it does not ripple. Not here and not there. He predicts that clump will rise up in ecstatic levitation, and it does not rise up. In fact, it just sinks to the floor like it was spat there, sad moon eyes glomming up in the acid stare. Sayonara, G.o.d. And yet... And yet...

THREE NIGHTS THE HUGE WILD CARNIVAL WENT ON. IT WAS A big thing on every level. For one thing, the Trips Festival grossed $12,500 in three days, with almost no overhead, and a new nightclub and dance-hall genre was born. Two weeks later Bill Graham was in business at the Fillmore auditorium with a Trips Festival going every weekend and packing them in. For the acid heads themselves, the Trips Festival was like the first national convention of an underground movement that had existed on a hush-hush cell-by-cell basis. The heads were amazed at how big their own ranks had become-and euphoric over the fact that they could come out in the open, high as baboons, and the sky, and the law, wouldn't fall down on them. The press went along with the notion that this had been an LSD experience without the LSD. n.o.body in the hip world of San Francisco had any such delusion, and the Haight-Ashbury era began that weekend.

The Trips Festival changed many things. But as soon as the whirlpool died down, Kesey was right back where he started, so far as the grinning lopsided frowning world of the San Mateo and San Francisco County courts were concerned. The bastids were digging in for prisoner's base. They had already dug him out of the place in La Honda. Part of the fiat of Judge de Matteis was that Kesey get out of La Honda and sell his place to somebody who had nothing to do with him or his works and stay out of San Mateo County except to see his probation officer or travel through on the Harbor Freeway or over the territorial boundaries of San Mateo County by airplane and remove himself and all his influences from said County. So Kesey and Faye and the kids moved into the Spread, Babbs's place, in Santa Cruz. Winding his way down there on January 23-there was a warrant waiting for his arrest on the grounds of violating probation.

Well, that's their Movie, Tonto, and we all know how that one ends. Three years in the San Mateo donjon, plus the five or eight or twenty they come up with in San Francisco to teach a lesson while the iron and the spittle are hot to all the Trips Festival dope fiends. Kesey called an immediate briefing, and remember that little abjuration a couple months ago about prepare for Mexico... ?