Free The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe Page A

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