Free The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe

scene, the whole raggedy-manic Era, off to ...

    Versailles, his Low Rent Versailles, over the mountain and through the woods, in La Honda, Calif. Where—where—in the lime :::::: light :::::: and the neon dust—
    "... a considerable new message ... the blissful counter-stroke ..."

chapter
V

    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