The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (8 page)

"... a considerable new message ... the blissful counter-stroke ..."

The Rusky-Dusky

Neon Dust

A very Christmas card,

Kesey's new place near La Honda.

A log house, a mountain creek, a little wooden bridge

Fifteen miles from Palo Alto beyond

Cahill Ridge where Route 84

Cuts through a redwood forest gorge—

A redwood forest for a yard!

A very Christmas card.

And—

Strategic privacy.

Not a neighbor for a mile.

La Honda lived it Western style.

One work-a-daddy hive,

A housing tract,

But it was back behind the redwoods.

The work-a-daddy faces could

Not be seen from scenic old Route 84,

Just a couple Wilde Weste roadside places, Baw's General Store, The Hilltom Motel, in the Wilde Weste Touriste mode.

With brown wood signs sawed jagged at the ends,

But sawed neat, you know,

As if to suggest:

Wilde Weste Roughing It, motoring friends,

But Sanitized jake seats

Ammonia pucks in every urinal

We aim to keep your Wilde West Sani-pure—

Who won the West?

Antisepsis did, I guess.

La Honda's Wilde Weste lode

Seems to be owed to the gunslinging Younger Brothers.

They holed up in town

And dad-blame but they found a neighborly way

To pay for their stay.

They built a whole wooden store, these notorious mothers.

But them was the Younger Brothers,

Mere gunslingers.

Now this Kesey

And his Merry Humdingers down the road—

—in the ::::: lime ::::: light :::::

Early in 1964, just a small group on hand as yet. In the afternoon—Faye, the eternal beatific pioneer wife, in the house, at the stove, at the sewing machine, at the washing machine, with the children, Shannon and Zane, gathered around her skirts.

Out in a wooden shack near the creek Kesey has his desk and typewriter where he has just finished the revisions on Sometimes a Great Notion, now almost 300,000 words long. Kesey's friend from Oregon, George Walker, is here, a blond All-American-looking guy in his twenties, well-built, son of a wealthy housing developer. Walker has what is known as a sunny disposition and is always saying Too much! in the most enthusiastic way. And Sandy Lehmann-Haupt. Sandy is the younger brother of Carl Lehmann-Haupt, whom Kesey had known on Perry Lane. Sandy is a handsome kid, 22 years old, tall, lean—high-strung. Sandy had met Kesey three months before, November 14, 1963, through Carl, when Kesey had come to New York for the opening of the stage version of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Kirk Douglas played McMurphy. Sandy had dropped out of N.Y.U. and was working as a sound engineer. He was a genius with tapes, soundtracks, audio systems and so forth, but he was going through a bad time. It got to the point where one day he tried to enter himself in a psychiatric ward, only to be talked out of it by Carl, who took him off to see the opening of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. And there was Randle McMurphy ... Kesey ... and Carl asked Kesey to take Sandy out west with him, to La Honda, to get him out of the whole New York morass. And if there was any place for curing the New York thing, this was it, out back of Kesey's in the lime :::::: light :::::: bower :::::: up the path out back of the house, up the hill into the redwood forest, Sandy suddenly came upon a fabulous bower, like a great domed enclosure, like what people mean when they talk about a "cathedral in the pines," only the redwoods were even more majestic. The way the sun came down through the redwood leaves—trunks and leaves seemed to stretch up for hundreds of feet above your head. It was always sunny and cool at the same time, like a perfect fall day all year around. The sun came down through miles of leaves and got broken up like a pointillist painting, deep green and dapple shadows but brilliant light in a soaring deep green super-bower, a perpetual lime-green light, green-and-gold afternoon, stillness, perpendicular peace, wood-scented, with the cars going by on Route 84 just adding pneumatic sound effects, sheee-ooooooooo, like a gentle wind. All peace here; very reassuring!

A FEW TIMES SANDY AND KESEY AND WALKER WOULD WALK UP into the forest with axes and cut some wood for the house—but that wasn't really the name of it at Kesey's. Sandy could see that Kesey wasn't primarily an outdoorsman. He wasn't that crazy about unspoilt Nature. It was more like he had a vision of the forest as a fantastic stage setting ... in which every day would be a happening, an art form ...

He had hi-fi speakers up on the roof of the house, and suddenly out here in God's great green mountain ozone erupts a manic spade blowing on a plastic saxophone, namely, an Ornette Coleman record. It's a slightly weird path here that the three loggers take: nutty mobiles hanging from the low branches and a lot of wild paintings nailed up on the tree trunks. Then a huge tree with a hollow base, and inside it, glinting in the greeny dark, here is a tin horse with the tin bent so that the grotesque little animal is keeled over, kneeling, in bad shape.

The terrain Kesey was most interested in, in fact, was inside the house. The house was made of logs, but it was more like a lodge than a cabin. The main room had big French doors, for a picture-window effect, and exposed beams and a big stone fireplace at one end. Kesey had all sorts of recording apparatus around, tape recorders, motion-picture cameras and projectors, and Sandy helped add still more, some fairly sophisticated relay systems and the like. Often the Perry Lane people would drive over—although no one had moved to La Honda so far. Ed Mc-Clanahan, Bob Stone, Vic Lovell, Chloe Scott, Jane Burton, Roy Seburn. Occasionally Kesey's brother Chuck and his cousin Dale would come down from Oregon. They both resembled Kesey but were smaller. Chuck was a bright quiet man. Casual and down-home. Dale was powerfully built and more completely down-home than either. Kesey was trying to develop various forms of spontaneous expression. They would do something like ...

all lie on the floor and start rapping back and forth and Kesey puts a tape-recorder microphone up each sleeve and passes his hands through the air and over their heads, like a sorcerer making signs, and their voices cut in and out as the microphones sail over. Sometimes the results were pretty—

—well, freaking gibberish to normal human ears, most likely. Or, to the receptive standard intellectual who has heard about the 1913 Armory Show and Erik Satie and Edgard Varèse and John Cage it might sound ... sort of avant-garde, you know. But in fact, like everything else here, it grows out of... the experience, with LSD. The whole other world that LSD opened your mind to existed only in the moment itself—Now—

and any attempt to plan, compose, orchestrate, write a script, only locked you out of the moment, back in the world of conditioning and training where the brain was a reducing valve .. .

So they would try still wilder improvisations ... like the Human Tapes, huge rolls of butcher paper stretched out on the floor. They would take wax pencils, different colors, and scrawl out symbols for each other to improvise on: Sandy the pink drum strokes there, and he would make a sound like chee-oonh-chunh, chee-oonh-chunh, and so forth, and Kesey the guitar arrows there, broinga broinga brang brang, and Jane Burton the bursts of scat vocals there, and Bob Stone the Voice Over stories to the background of the Human Jazz—all of it recorded on the tape recorder—and then all soaring on—what?—acid, peyote, morning-glory seeds, which were very hell to choke down, billions of bilious seeds mulching out into sodden dandelions in your belly, bloated—but soaring!—or IT-290, or dexedrine, benzedrine, methedrine—

Speed!—or speed and grass—sometimes you could take a combination of speed and grass and prop that... LSD door open in the mind without going through the whole uncontrollable tumult of the LSD ... And Sandy takes LSD and the lime :::::: light :::::: and the magical bower turns into... neon dust... pointillist particles for sure, now.

Golden particles, brilliant forest-green particles, each one picking up the light, and all shimmering and flowing like an electronic mosaic, pure California neon dust. There is no way to describe how beautiful this discovery is, to actually see the atmosphere you have lived in for years for the first time and to feel that it is inside of you, too, flowing up from the heart, the torso, into the brain, an electric fountain ... And ... IT-290!—he and George Walker are up in the big tree in front of the house, straddling a limb, and he experiences .. . intersubjectivity—he knows precisely what Walker is thinking. It isn't necessary to say what the design is, just the part each will do.

"You paint the cobwebs," Sandy says, "and I'll paint the leaves behind them."

"Too much!" says George, because, of course, he knows—all of us sliding in and out of these combinations of mutual consciousness, intersubjectivity, going out to the backhouse, near the creek, with tape recorders and starting to rap—a form of free association conversation, like a jazz conversation, or even a monologue, with everyone, or whoever, catching hold of words, symbols, ideas, sounds, and winging them back and forth and beyond ... the walls of conventional logic ... One of us finds a bunch of wooden chessmen. They are carved figures, some kind of ancient men, every piece an old carved man, only somebody left them outside and they got wet and now they're warped, which sprung them open into their real selves. This one's genitals are hanging out despite he has robes on and carries a spear—

—Have you seen my daughter? Claims I embarrass her. Claims the whole world knows I have cunt on the brain. At my age—

—Yes, sir, we have the report. Your daughter's a horny little bitch, but I am the King and I have no choice but to cut your balls off—

—King, I'll throw you for them—

—Your balls?

-—Right! With those gold hubcaps you lug about there—

—Right! In fact, incredible. Each one of us has a chess figure in his hand and becomes that character and they are rapping off the personalities they see in these figures, and they start thinking the same things at once. I, too, saw these funny little curves under this figure's hand here, no larger than the head of a tiny tack, as... golden hubcaps... I was about to say it—

It is the strangest feeling of my life—intersubjectivity, as if our consciousnesses have opened up and flowed together and now one has only to look at a flicker of the other's mouth or eye or at the chessman he holds in his hand, wobbling—

—You wouldn't believe a girl with electric eel tits, would you, King?

—The ones that ionized King Arthur's sword under swamp water?

—The very ones. Dugs with a thousand tiny suction caps, a horny, duggy little girl, I'm afraid, 120 household volts of jail bait if I ever saw one—

—and how, in the wildest operations of chance, could a term like 120 household volts of jail bait arise in all our minds at once—

But the swamps, too—it is no longer all Garden of Eden and glorious discovery for the old Perry Lane crowd. In fact, there's a little grumbling here in the magic dell.

Kesey is starting to organize our trips. He hands out the drugs personally, one for you, and I one for you ... and just when you're starting to lie back and groove on your thing, he comes in—Hup!—Hup!—Everybody up! and organizes a tramp through the woods ...

After it's all over, some of them ask Kesey for some acid and IT-290 to take back to Palo Alto. No-o-o-o-o-o, says Kesey, and he cocks his head as if he wants to say this thing just right, because it's a delicate matter.—I think you should come here and take it...

Later, on the way back, someone says: We used to be equals. Now it's Kesey's trip.

We go to his place. We take his acid. We do what he wants.

But what does he want? Gradually, vaguely, it dawns that Kesey's fantasy has moved on again, beyond even theirs, old Perry Lane. In any case, nobody has the stomach for Kesey's master plan, that they should all move out onto his place, in tents and so forth, transplanting the Perry Lane thing to La Honda. They began to eye Kesey's place as a kind of hill-country Versailles, with Kesey as the Sun King, looking bigger all the time, with that great jaw in profile against the redwoods and the mountaintops. It never develops into an open breach, however, or even disenchantment. They just get uneasy. They get the feeling that Kesey was heading out on further, toward a fantasy they didn't know if they wanted to explore.

OTHER PEOPLE WERE BEGINNING TO SHOW UP AT KESEY'S, AND that was part of the trouble. Some of the Perry Lane crowd didn't know exactly what to make of Cassady. Here he is before us in Kesey's Versailles, coming on, coming on, with his shirt off and his arms jerking and his abdominal obliques jutting out at the sides like a weight lifter's . . . We are hip, we value the holy primitive. Only Kesey is intimating that one should learn from Cassady, he is talking to you. Which he was.

Cassady wanted intellectual communion. But the intellectuals just wanted him to be the holy primitive, the Denver kid, the natural in our midst. Sometimes Cassady would sense they weren't accepting him intellectually and go off into the corner, still on his manic monologue, muttering, "All right, I'll take my own trip, I'll go off on my own trip, this is my own trip, you understand ..."

Or Page Browning. The Cadaverous Cowboy had found his way over the mountain, too. Back on Perry Lane he had been just a Low Rent character popping in from time to time on his route. Only now Kesey is intimating that one can learn from Page Browning. Kesey finds something loyal, brave and creative, creative, under that cadaverous face and the Adam's apple and the black motorcycle jacket like a leftover from when he must've ridden with the Hell's Angels—and his thick Shellube pit voice. The primordial Shellube pits ... could that be it, a little class fear, after all, among the hip ... genteel... intellectuals? A little Ahor, as Arthur Koestler called it, the Ancient Horror, from boyhood—the genteel suburban kid rides his bicycle over to the gas station and there in the grease pit area where they lubricate the cars the hard rocks are hunkered down telling jokes about pussy, with an occasional clinical reference to bowel movements and crepitation. And oh christ don't you remember their forearms with the basilic veins wrapped around them like surgical tubes, gorged with the unattainable lower-class hard-rock power that any moment is going to look up and spot us... genteel little pudding kids. But Kesey loved this Low Rent stuff. He was ready to swing with it. In time he would even be swinging with the beasts from the veritable Ahor fathoms of the Shellube pits, the Hell's Angels themselves . . .