The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (33 page)

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 eyeballs. Paul Krassner 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. Krassner arrives and— shit!—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
goddamn 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 goddamn 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 nobody swinging a punch yet. It is a grand hassle, 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
Welthassle.

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 multitudes. 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 goddamn 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 fishing 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 hassling, 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 scraping 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 wineglasses 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 bummer—

—
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 quantity 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 associate 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 godsake 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 Municipal 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 Longshoremen'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 Saturday 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. Nobody 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 God 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 flashing 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 shirt and then white bandaging all over his face and skull and just a slit for his eyes, over which he wears dark glasses.