The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (24 page)

And then Kesey and a few of the Pranksters and a lot of the Angels, including Sonny Barger of the Oakland Chapter, the maximum leader of all the Angels, were sitting around in the backhouse passing around joints and rapping. The subject was

"people who are bullshit."

There are certain people who are bullshit and you can always recognize them, Kesey was saying, and the Angels were nodding yeah, that certainly is right.

"Now you take—," said Kesey, mentioning one of the Angels who was not present.

"He's a bullshit person."

A bullshit person
—and man—

"Listen, Kesey," says Barger, 100 percent Hell's Angel, "—is an Angel, and nobody—
nobody
—calls an Angel a bullshit person."

—the freaking gauntlet is down. It's like forever and every eye in the place pins on Kesey's face and you can hear the blood squirt in your veins. But Kesey doesn't even blink and his voice doesn't even change one halftone, just the old Oregon drawl:

"But I
know
him, Sonny. If I didn't
know
him, I wouldn't call him a bullshit person."

Yeah
—
we-e-e-elll
—everybody, Angels and Pranksters— well—Kesey
knows
him—there is nothing to do but grok over this statement, and everybody sits there, still, trying to grok over it, and after a second, the moment where heads get broken and fire gets pissed is over—
We-e-ell, ye-ah
—

Two or three days later it occurs to some of the Pranksters that they
still
don't know what the hell Kesey meant when he said that. He
knows
the guy. It doesn't make any sense. It's a concept with no bottom to it—but so what! At the moment he said it, it was the one perfect thing he could have said. Kesey was so totally into the moment, he could come up with it, he could break up that old historic push me, shove you, yeah-sez-who sequence and in an instant the moment, that badass moment, was over.

THE PRANKSTERS GOT PRETTY CLOSE TO SEVERAL OF THE Angels as individuals. Particularly Gut and Freewheeling Frank and Terry the Tramp. Every now and then somebody would take one or another of the Angels up into the tree house and give them a real initiation into psychedelics. They had a huge supply of DMT. As somebody once put it, LSD is a long strange journey; DMT is like being shot out of a cannon. There in the tree house, amid the winking googaws, they would give the Angels DMT, and Mountain Girl saw some of them, like Freewheeling Frank, after they came down. They would walk around in no particular direction, listing slightly, the eyes bugged wide open, glazed.

"They were as naked as an Angel is ever gonna git," she told Kesey.

A Miracle in

Seven Days

Oh, the vi-bra-tions...

Oh, the Unitarians ...

Apostate seminarians.. .

Grok the groovy

Pranksters and Hell's Angels...

Whose Angels?
—

Why the consternation?

Arise ye antediluvians,

Groove on

The Pranksters and Hell's Angels ...

Noah's destination

Is where it's at:

Now showing at the Mount Ararat,

Apis the Bull in
Après le déluge,

Groovy movie with a thousand castoffs:

Whose Angels?
—

Hell's
Angels...

Dear Lord, prepare to blast off

Into the Angel blue.

Oh, the vi-bra-tions ...

Among those who began to wonder about the mysteries of La Honda Were some Unitarian ministers known as the Young Turks;

Bob Kimball, Dick Weston and Paul Sawyer said freak our cerebral cloisters and Emerge! See how the alleged grass-smoking Kesey's magic works.

The Young Turks saw Unitarians becoming ghostly seminarians, Desiccated Kantians cut off from Early Christianity.

Oh, a century ago we were the vangard, routing the redneck blackguards Of Fundamentalism—and today?—the Youth yawn at our inanity.

Oh, the vi-bra-tions...

Oh, the Unitarians...

Apostate seminarians...

Grok the groovy

Pranksters and Hell's Angels...

Whose Angels?—

Sawyer found our Day-Glo heroes on the beach at Pescadero One sunny afternoon with Allen Ginsberg in his finest bearded form.

The scene was charged with energy, yet there was a weird serenity Even when the Hell's Angels pulled in,
ran\
but most righteously warm.

Now, Sawyer had his teenage daughter along and she feared something might...
go
wrong.

When Kesey said,
On the bus!
she said, "Daddy, I... don't want to go."

So his daughter stayed behind, but Sawyer was determined to find The secret of this vibrant communion: Angel Black & Prankster Day-Glo.

Oh, the vi-bra-tions. ..

Oh, the Unitarians...

Apostate seminarians ...

Grok the groovy

Pranksters and Hell's Angels ...

Whose Angels?
—

Onto the bus!
and it was so fine, with Angels hooking down great jugs of wine And grooving on the sunlit ocean like euphoric Nature freaks, Passing joints and Haw!—Haw!—Hawing! but coursing through their raucous bawling—

A precognitive Early Churchly Gnostic note:
Ecstatic Peace!

Kesey knows precisely what he's about! No motorcycle beatnik rout But a trip more vital than all the Kantian prattle in the world.

He has reached the unreachable! Taught and
learned from
the unteachable!

The Young Turks owed it to the Church to give the Prankster trip a whirl.

Oh, the vi-bra-tions...

Oh, the Unitarians ...

Apostate seminarians...

Grok the groovy

Pranksters and Hell's Angels...

Whose Angels?
—

Why the consternation?

Arise ye antediluvians,

Groove on

The Pranksters and Hell's Angels ...

Noah's destination

Is where it's at:

Now showing at the Mount Ararat,

Apis the Bull in
Après le déluge,

Groovy movie with a thousand castoffs:

Whose Angels?
—

Hell's
Angels ...

Dear Lord, prepare to blast off

Into the Angel blue.

Oh, the vi-bra-tions...

So Kesey was invited to come take part in the annual California Unitarian Church conference at Asilomar, beautiful state park by the sea in Monterey. The theme this year was: "Shaking the Foundations."

The fact that Kesey had lately been arrested on a narcotics charge couldn't have mattered less to the Unitarians assembled on the greeny glades of Asilomar by the sea, not even the older ones. The Unitarians had a long tradition of liberalism in such matters and, in fact, were in the vanguard of the civil-rights movement in California.

There was a good deal of civil disobedience and scrapes with the police in that fight; yes, sir. But
this ...

...
this
...
The Unitarians were assembled there in Intellectual Sport Shirt multitudes—intellectuals Roughing-it, you understand, in short-sleeved sport shirts and casual Stretcheez trousers with roomy bottoms and waists up about the rib cage, drawing, casually, on pipes. And here came Kesey. But not alone, it so happened. He arrived on the bus, in a blur of Day-Glo swirls, with Pranksters in costume flapping out of every portal. Among the middle-aged Unitarians, ministers and laymen, tamping down their pipes for a nice relaxed Sport Shirt week, there was consternation written on practically every face as they watched the bizarre vehicle pitching and rolling into the camp grounds. Things were ... up tight from the moment they got there.

I guess this is kind of rubbing their noses in it,
thought Kesey.
The Unitarians are
people who stand up for the right to dissent and nonconformity and a lot of other
good things, and we're rubbing their noses in it
—
a bunch of dope fiends, a couple of
ex-convicts, one homosexual, men and women living on a bus .. .

But the Unitarian ... Youth, the teenagers weren't up tight at all. They flocked around the bus as soon as it got there. Which only wound their parents up tighter, of course. By nightfall the Unitarian Church in California was divided into two camps: on the bus and off the bus.

Kesey's very first appearance on the rostrum got three-fourths of the Sport Shirts so up tight, the conference was ready to fly apart. The main programs were held in a rustic summer-theater-type building on the camp grounds. Kesey appeared at the rostrum in a glowing Yin-Yang jacket. It was an iridescent jacket with a huge Yin-Yang symbol painted on the back in red, white, and blue.

"We're going to be here seven days," said Kesey, "so we're going to try to work a miracle in seven days—"

—and not by talking about it, bub, but by doing it, all of us together, and not by me talking
at
you, either, but by all of us doing our thing out front and wailing with it.

Many of the women at the conference began to look, rapt, at this rugged, virile man of action who now manned the pulpit. The Sports Shirts did not fail to take note of that rapt gleam on their chops, either.

Paul Sawyer, in the front row, was aware of the tension building up; but so far, all to the good. "Shake the Foundations" was the name of the conference, and so let it be.

Sawyer was sitting next to Mountain Girl. What an amazing creature!—sitting next to him here in a vast purple robe. By a remarkable coincidence—coincidence?—she had been brought up as a Unitarian herself and had been a member of the real hope of the church, the LRY, the Liberal Religious Youth. And now—but had she really strayed far from what the LRY
ought
to be? It was debatable ...

Onstage, Kesey, not talking in any formal way, more like
performing,
working magic—telling of the kind of symbols we use and the games we're in, and how you can't really know what an emotion is until you've experienced both sides of it, whereupon he seizes the big American flag up on the stage and
steps on it,
grinds it into the floor—

—huge gasp from the crowd, many of whom are teenagers—

Sawyer is already into the thing, and he sees what Kesey is trying to do—don't just describe an emotion, but arouse it, make them experience it, by manipulating the symbol of the emotion, and sometimes we have to come into awareness through the back door. Sawyer hears
sobs,
wheels around in his seat, sees a group of teenagers behind him, from Salt Lake City, looks into their faces, reads the horror that fills them—
The Flag!
—then feels the manic energy from the crazed thing that has been packed into these children even at this age like a time warp vibration from the Salem witch hysteria, the primordial cry of
Die, Infidel
—and yet he can't leave them with that. So he rises up and faces the crowd and says,

—Now wait a minute. That flag is a symbol we attach our emotions to, but it isn't the emotion itself and it isn't the thing we really care about. Sometimes we don't even realize what we really care about, because we get so distracted by the symbols. I remember when I was at school, we used to sing
America the Beautiful
and somebody would walk down the aisle carrying the flag. I always wanted to be the one who carried the flag down the aisle but I never was. Now, what was I really feeling? Patri-otism? Or was it—

But he doesn't get to finish. A voice cries: "Do it!"

—what?

"Do it!" It's Mountain Girl, beaming at him from her folds of purple, quite delighted with the turn of events.

Before he knows it, he is leading them all in the singing of
America the Beautiful,
and
O beau-ti-ful for spa-cious skies
rings out in the hall—as he holds the flag staunchly in his hands and marches up the aisle and then down the aisle, signifying—

what? Ne'mind! But exactly! Don't explain it.
Do it!

LIKE MOST CONFERENCES, THIS ONE HAD A CAREFULLY

prepared and printed schedule of meals, talks, seminars, group activities. The Pranksters made a good quick hash of that. They had no schedule and intimated nobody else should, either. The Sport Shirts would have a big seminar planned to capture the imagination of the Youth—something on the order of Student Rebellion in an Age of Mediocrity: Challenge and Responsibility—only at the appointed hour the Youth, the student rebels in an age of mediocrity, would be down by the beach, down around the damnable bus, where the Pranksters had their own program, and no schedule, friends and neighbors, everything happens at the hour of
Now
and all can join in the game of Power:::::

Somebody wins the Power and orders a game of football to be played on the beach, only with the Hermit as the football. Presently a whole group, Pranksters, ministers, conferees, are picking up the giggling Hermit and handing him off like a quarterback would and scrambling for him like a loose football, and so on. But soon the grief of it—
allegory!
—begins to sink in, this making of a human being a counter in the power game, always the weakest... Ahhh! One of the young ministers, one of the Young Turks, now has the power, and he orders that all go into the surf of the Pacific and wash one another's feet. Ritual of humility, allegory of life, but not a word of explanation need be spoken, and they all just sit down in the surf and wash one another's feet, and the Hermit's most meticulously, and the Pranksters really groove with this. They think this is great. And the kids now look at the Young Turk whose inspiration it was in a new light. He has made it. The Pranksters approve of him!

The Young Turks spent more and more time with the Pranksters, late into the night, while the music played on the bus, and the Pranksters brought huge strands of kelp out of the ocean and flailed it about and beat the sides of the bus with it, like a huge drum, and played the Power game and took the Now Trip and played the non-games of life, and kept rapping away, but more than rapping,
being,
being
alive
—the Young Turks were truly on the bus. From the lack of sleep and the pace and weird shaking of the foundations, they began to feel the
mysto
thing most profoundly.