The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (48 page)

But there is no place to vanish to. It is all clear in a flash—trapped in the rush hour for a start—and the panel truck can't outrun their sedan anyway. Opposite side pickoff!—

Hassler tries to squeeze between cars and lose them that way, like a basketball play, but it's no use. The cops keep floating abreast, grimacing and flapping, and drifting back and pulling even again

THERE !

Kesey motions to the shoulder of the expressway, by an embankment and Hassler cuts over there, skids to a stop

THRASH !

Kesey out the door and plunges over the guardrail and down the embankment, with the dust flying . . .

Hassler just sits there as the sedan skids to a stop in front of him, cutting him off.

Seems like twenty doors fly open, haircut faces and gray-Alumicron bodies popping out in every direction, leaping over the guardrail—

ALL IN SHINY BLACK SHOES

One orders Hassler out of the panel truck and Hassler gets out and sits down on the edge of the freeway. Very strange. The great swarm of cars with hard-candy tails keeps sailing past, hypnotically. Hassler gets into the lotus position, sitting cross-legged on the asphalt, looking straight ahead. Three sets of SHINY BLACK FBI SHOES

standing around him now.
They all have these shiny black shoes on.
Then one of them goes back to the sedan and comes back with a flare gun and stands over him with that.

Hassler wonders if he intends to shoot him with a flare. A very Day-Glo death.

Thread-soul, the causal body, ablation, Upanishads, Krishnamurti, the karmic vestiture of the soul, the nirvanic consciousness—it all runs together right here, like a tinned stew, and Hassler isn't even high. On the other side of the expressway, on the edge of the bay, great fat seagulls are wheeling in the air in a great weird O pattern, coasting down below the level of the highway, then struggling up, dripping garbage out of their gullets, but a nice pattern, all in all—

THE VISITACION DRAIN

It's the Visitacion Drain they've picked to work out their karma in ... ah, we're synched up this afternoon .. . and the gulls wax fat gulping garbage at the drain and grease a slippery fat O in the sky and it occurs to Hassler that today is his twenty-seventh birthday.

Skidding down the embankment chocking up dust like in a Western the blur of the Drain flats out beyond Kesey vaults over an erosion fence at the bottom of the embankment

RI-I-I-I-I-IP

a picket catches his pants in the crotch rips out the in-seams of both pants legs most neatly flapping on his legs like Low Rent cowboy chaps running and flapping through the Visitacion flats poor petered-out suckmuck marginal housing development last blasted edge of land you can build houses on before they just sink into the ooze and the compost poor Visitacion Drain kids playing ball in the last street before the ooze runs flapping through their ballgame stare at him

AND AT THE GHOST ON MY HEELS?

like the whole world turns into an endless kids' ballgame on the edge of the ooze thousands of Drain kids furling toward the horizon like an urchin funnel AND THAT ALUMICRON BLUR BEHIND ME?

shiny black shoes tusking up behind him stops stock still in the Visitacion Drain and GOTCHA!

in the cops and robbers game.

The Graduation

THEY HAVE KESEY ON THREE FELONIES: THE ORIGINAL Conviction in San Mateo County for possession of marijuana, which he never served time on; the arrest for possession in San Francisco, after which he fled to Mexico; and a Federal charge of unlawful flight to avoid prosecution. A felon and a fugitive ... who; yes; was going to rub the FBI's nose in it for good measure ... and all about dope, at that... and throw away the key ... For three days they shuttle Kesey back and forth between County and Federal courthouses and jails in Redwood City and San Francisco. It will take a miracle to even get him out on bail, an inspiration, a vision ::::: ummm, a vision

::::: we can work it out ::::: Kesey's lawyers, Pat Hallinan, Brian Rohan and Paul Robertson, have a vision. The next morning they're in the courtroom in Redwood City at a bail hearing. The new style of Courtroom Modern, this courtroom, all great lineless slabs of blonde wood, and lowslung like ...
the friendly banks
of the suburbs.

All very sunny under the fluorescent tubes. Kesey sits at the defense table wearing a blue workshirt. Robertson is on his feet telling the judge about a certain vision Mr.

Kesey has had, of "beyond acid," an inspiration, a miracle, a light he has seen, although never mind the details of the beach in Manzanillo, not... those lights... In any case ... Mr. Kesey has a very public-spirited plan ... He has returned voluntarily from exile in his safe harbor, to risk certain arrest and imprisonment, in order to call a mass meeting of all LSD takers, past, present and potential, for the purpose of telling them to move beyond this pestilent habit of taking LSD .. . Robertson's talking a streak. It's a grand speech. Kesey is sitting up straight at the table staring blue bolts at the judge.

But Robertson's words are like a fog. Kesey disappears in the soup, he reappears in a mist, undergoing metamorphosis before your very eyes. He's found religion, contrition, redemption, the error of his ways, and now he's going to tell The Youth his sad lesson ... Faye and the kids are in the audience. Also many of their old Perry Lane friends, Jim and Dorothea Fadiman, Ed McClanahan, Jim Woltman, and some others

... Several will stake their homes as bail security, $35,000 worth ... Repentance and redemption are sailing around the courtroom like cherubim. All us reporters are scribbling away ... Now Kesey is standing up facing the judge with his arms folded and the judge is giving him a lecture ... He may be a great literary lion and a romantic figure to some misguided youth but to this court he is a childish ass, an egotist who never grew up, a ... The judge is pouring it on, pouring it down his throat like cod-liver oil, but it's obvious it's just a buildup to saying he's going to grant bail anyway under the circumstances... Nevertheless Kesey is burning ... You can see him setting his jaw and getting ready to move his lips... God knows Hallinan and Robertson can see it. They're crouched beside him like bandits. The first peep out of him they're going to grab him around the throat...
Keep your mouth shut, damn it. Don't blow it
now. It's only cod-liver oil...
But the judge has finished and it's over. He's out on bail in San Mateo County.

The whole dam breaks after that. The FBI drops the Federal charge of unlawful flight to avoid prosecution. All of a sudden they don't seem very interested in the case, despite the salt in J. Edgar Hoover's wounds and the rest of it. Then back in San Francisco, and Kesey is standing in front of the judge in a faded sport shirt, work pants and boots. The judge has a terrific speech ready, saying this case has been blown up out of proportions in the press and it is only a common dope case as far as he is concerned, and Kesey is no dragon, just an ordinary jackass ... and Kesey is starting to say something and Hallinan and Rohan are crouched for the garrote, but again it's over and Kesey is out on bail in San Francisco, too. It's unbelievable. He's out after only five days.

In the San Francisco jail

Before he got out on bail

Kesey met a kid with magic fingernails.

"Take a lick," said the kid

And everybody did.

They all licked his nails and blew their lids.

Twenty-seven psyches

Going off like Nike

Missiles through the lye-scoured

Concrete skyways of the San Francisco jail.

The kid had LSD on his magic fingernails.

Now—

Kesey told this story

To the local news reporters

Who pressed around him in the courtroom,

After the hearing on his bail,

Just to prove how hopeless

Was the drive to stamp out dope

With things like cops and jails.

Try and stop a kid with magic fingernails !

The headlines said

LSD ORGY IN THE SAN FRANCISCO JAIL!

Ah...

Certain local heads cried Judas.

Finked on a stash, this Judas!

While he himself so shrewdly

Copped out of jail, on bail.

A finking fingernail stash betrayal!

If the truth be known—

These good hearts flapped in fibrillation.

They feared the rogue vibrations

From the freaking Acid Graduation

Kesey and the Pranksters planned;

Their freaking Day-Glo last round-up in Winterland.

Like, I mean,

You know,

Can't you
see it coming:

Ten thousand children of the flowers and grass and acid, speed and poppers, yellow jackets, amyl nitrate,

Ten thousand heads, freaks, beats, hippy-dippies, teeny-boppers descending from the crest of Haight Street

Tinkling, temple bells, rattling, donkey beads, reeking, grass, shuffling, elf boots, swarming prostrate

Before the returning Prophet in the bowels of Winterland.

All of psychedelphia moaning to the polyphonic droning of the Merry Prankster band!

It's too easy for this headline-blazing superhero

This amazing Cagliostro Elmer Gantry Day-Glo Nero—

ON THE TOP FLOOR OF THE RUSSIAN EMBASSY, IN AN Extremely crummy brown room ... It looks inflammable, or spontaneous-combustible, the next cough, maybe, and it's all up in here. Jack the Fluke sits up in bed, namely, a mattress on the floor, with his back against the wall. .. wearing nothing except his cabbie's cap and the grizzle on his face and the grizzle on his Camembert chest... a brown blanket pulled up to his waist... Take a look at that! if you want to know about Kesey. A large message tacked up on the wall on a sheet of drawing paper: DEAR KEN,

THE BOYS IN THE

TANK SAY HELLO.

THEY WANT TO KNOW

ABOUT THEIR MONEY. SHOULD

THEY ASK YOU OR THE

JUDGE OR WHO?

Sandra, the girl from Bucks County, sits in a clump at the foot of the mattress. She is a very pale, tender little teenage clump. A single morsel, gone at one gulp, sitting under the room's one article of furniture, a bridge lamp, no longer goofing off the radio, just sitting in a teenage clump and listening to Jack tell me about the letter:

"Oh man, there were a lot of good heads hassled and busted after Kesey told about that."

"You mean the cops—"

"The very ones. It was a bad scene. Like there's a lot of cats up here who are not enchanted with Ken Kesey. They sent him this letter."

Well, obviously they haven't, because there it is, up on the wall. But the thought is there ...

Creaks on the inflammable stairs, and into the room sidles a dark little guy in a Tshirt and jeans carrying a round plastic box of cheese spread and a knife in a scabbard—

"Jack!" he says in this weird whisper

—one of those long knives with a lot of fancy mother-of-pearl on the handle that you see in a Chinatown souvenir shop.

"It was a bad scene," Jack the Fluke tells me. He ignores the guy-

"Jack ... look at this," says the kid.

"That's nice, Frenchy," says Jack.

"Jack ... it's
beautiful,
" says Frenchy.

"Like there's a lot of cats up here," Jack says to me again—

"It's beautiful," says Frenchy. "Jack—you know where there's any morphine?"

"No," says Jack, then resumes: "Like there's a lot of cats up here—"

"It's a beautiful thing," says Frenchy.

"—who are not enchanted with Ken Kesey and they sent him this letter."

"Jack—"

And Frenchy hunkers down on the floor and opens the cheese spread and pulls the knife out of the scabbard and sinks the blade into it. Quite a blade! a foot long and engraved with Chinese demons. He wipes gobs of cheese spread onto his tongue with the blade. Sandra sits silent in a clump, grooving on the full life. Jack raps on about perfidy in high places . . .

I don't know what the reference to money is—"they want to know about their money." But the gist of it is clear enough. Kesey has sold out to keep from getting a five-year sentence or worse. Next he'll nail it down by calling all the kids to Winterland and telling them to stop taking LSD ... Freaking copout ...

It's quite a mess for Kesey, of course. If he had lectured back at the judges like a Superhero, that would have been the end of everything, probably, with him salted away for many years. On the other hand, if he just stares back Orientally as the current fantasy of "beyond acid" is put forth, he looks like a cop-out in Haight-Ashbury ...

All those good-loving heads... they've been having quite a time for themselves... a summer of euphoria, the millennium, in fact, LSD and hundreds of beautiful people already on the scene, and no more little games. They would just spread out like a wave over the world and end all the bull-shit, drown it in love and awareness, and nothing could stop them. I'll have to hand it to the heads. They really want to end the little games. Their hearts are pure. I never found more than one or two cynics or hustlers among them. But now that the moment is at hand, everyone is wondering ...

Hmmmmmmm ... who is going to lead the way and hold the light? Then just one little game starts, known as politics... Hmmmmm ... As I say, their hearts are pure!

Nevertheless, Chet Helms and the Family Dog have their thing, Bill Graham has his thing, the Grateful Dead have theirs, the Diggers have theirs, the Calliope Company have theirs, Bowen has his, even Gary Goldhill... It's a little like the socialist movement in New York after World War I—the Revolution is imminent, as all know and agree, and yet, Christ, everybody and his brother has a manifesto, the Lovestonites, the Dubinsky Socialists, the CPUSA (Bolshevik), the Wobblies, everybody has his own typewriters and mimeograph machines and they're all cranking away like mad and fuming over each other's mistranslations of the Message . . . Not that the heads in Haight-Ashbury are wrangling with each other yet, but what do they do about Kesey? Just sit back and let him and the Pranksters do their thing? Let them try to turn a lot of impressionable kids off LSD, the way the newspapers say he intends? Or let him suddenly make a big power play at Winterland and take over the whole movement? Politics, in a word ...