Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD (24 page)

When Cassady joined Kesey’s group, his legendary reputation preceded him. Some of the Pranksters were awed by him, others did not fully accept him at first. Ginsberg wondered if the Pranksters truly appreciated his brilliance, or were taking advantage of him in some sense. He was Neal Cassady, the “holy primitive”; the atmosphere on the bus encouraged him to
perform
, to show these younger men and women what real craziness was. His presence lent a certain edge-quality to the general pranking. Indeed, one wonders what extrasensory space he must have inhabited to pull off some of his incredible antics.

On their way to New York the Pranksters passed through the Blue Ridge Mountains. On the steepest downhill road, with Kesey perched atop the bus and everyone stoned on LSD, Cassady decided to careen all the way down hill without touching the brakes while the Stars and Stripes streamed in the wind. Nobody told him he shouldn’t have taken the risk, because nobody on the bus told anybody not to do anything—especially not for the reason that it was “crazy.” Lunacy was not an absolute for the Pranksters; they had moved beyond the world of the Big Nurse and voluntarily embarked upon a trip that was insane by conventional standards. When Cassady took the whole crew with him towards either death or his own version of satori, he was simply going “furthur.” This prank was Cassady’s way of saying that it was easy to claim, “We’re all one,” but another thing entirely to act as if everyone’s life were his to risk.
Through such gratuitous acts Cassady became a kind of teacher for the group. He was the Zen lunatic whose gestures embodied the bohemian commitment to spontaneity and authenticity. Kesey described Cassady’s spiritual path as “the yoga of a man driven to the cliff edge by the grassfire of an entire nation’s burning material madness. Rather than be consumed by this he jumped, choosing to sort things out in the fast-flying but smogfree moments of a life with no retreat.”

Cassady represented for the Pranksters an ideal of thought and action fusing into a vibrant whole, into pure up-front being. They assumed that whatever was inside a person would come out during the trip (LSD had a way of making this happen); everyone agreed this did not mean that whatever spewed forth would always be beautiful and lovey-dovey. Weird behavior was commonplace on the bus, and awards were given out regularly for “Most Disgusting Trip.” The idea really was to go “furthur,” to explore the unknown, to feel no limit as to what might be discovered and expressed on acid. It was in this sense that a mission was taking shape among the Pranksters. It had nothing to do with the salvation of the world; it was more a feeling, a “synching” together that created an atmosphere of “creeping religiosity.” As a group they searched for a unified consciousness that would outstrip once and for all the pseudo-reality they had left behind.

The Pranksters were in high spirits when they finally hit New York City. Cassady secured an apartment for a powwow between Kesey’s group and his old friends Ginsberg and Kerouac. Would the original white hipsters accept these psychedelic neobohemians as kindred spirits? The environment was typical for the Pranksters, with tapes echoing and lights flashing off mirrors. An American flag covered the sofa. Kerouac felt out of place amidst the madness. He and Kesey didn’t have much to say to each other. Kerouac walked over to the sofa, carefully folded the flag, and asked the Pranksters if they were Communists. He left early with Cassady and returned to his home in Massachusetts, where he lived with his mother. As Tom Wolfe described the meeting, “It was like hail and farewell. Kerouac was the old star. Kesey was the wild new comet from the West heading christ knew where.”

If there was anybody who could dig where the Pranksters were coming from, they figured it had to be Leary’s group. After traveling a few thousand miles, they were not going to pass up the chance to
visit Millbrook, the only other psychedelic commune they knew of. The Pranksters expected a heartwarming reception, but upon their arrival they were not exactly embraced. Things were friendly but somehow cool. Everyone was waiting for the momentous meeting between Kesey and Leary. However, Leary would not meet with the Pranksters. He was supposedly on a very serious three-day trip upstairs in the mansion and could not be disturbed. Kesey was bewildered by this turn of events, but as the Pranksters grew more familiar with the Millbrook scene, they began to understand why they made everyone so uptight. The Millbrook group was essentially made up of behavioral scientists who kept records of their mental states, wrote papers, and put out a journal. Leary and his people were going the scholarly route, giving lectures and such; they had nothing to gain by associating with a bunch of grinning, filthy bums wearing buckskins and face paint. The distance between the East Coast intellectuals and Kesey’s clan was cavernous. As Michael Hollingshead recalled the encounter, “They thought we were square and we thought they were crazy.”

The general atmosphere of quietude—the special meditation rooms, the statues of the Buddha, the emphasis on
The Tibetan Book of the Dead
—was unbearably stuffy to the Pranksters, who dubbed the whole thing “the Crypt Trip.” In this scene there was no room for electronics, no guitars or videotapes, no American flags, and well, no freakiness. Kesey was not at all interested in structuring the set and setting of an LSD trip so that a spiritual experience would result. Why did acid require picturesque countryside or a fancy apartment with objets d’art to groove on and Bach’s Suite in B Minor playing on the stereo? A psychedelic adventure on the bus needed no preconceived spiritual overtones; it could be experienced in the context of a family scene, a musical jam, or a plain old party. The Pranksters thought it was fine just going with the flow, taking acid in the midst of whatever was happening, no matter how disorienting or unusual the situation.

It was, after all, a question of style, East Coast versus West Coast. The Merry Pranksters were born in California, starting out as a party of outlandish proportions that evolved into a stoned encounter group on wheels. Kesey, having first turned on to LSD in a government drug testing program, saw the whole phenomenon of grassroots tripping as “the revolt of the guinea pigs.” Now that he had taken LSD out of the laboratory and away from the white smocks, any notion
of a medically sanitized or controlled psychedelic experience was abhorrent to him. Programming the LSD trip with Tibetan vibes struck him as a romantic retreat, a turning back, submitting to another culture’s ideas rather than getting into the uniqueness of the American trip.

Kesey the psychedelic populist was attempting to broaden the very nature of the tripping experience by incorporating as many different scenes and viewpoints as possible. “When you’ve got something like we’ve got,” he explained, “you can’t just sit on it and possess it, you’ve got to move off of it and give it to other people. It only works if you bring other people into it.” Toward this end the Pranksters staged a series of public initiations, the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Tests of the mid-1960s, which turned on hundreds of people at a single session. The acid tests were weird carnivals with videotapes, flashing strobes, live improvised rock and roll by the Grateful Dead, lots of bizarre costumes, and dancing.

The ultimate example of Kesey’s attempt to get everybody into the Prankster movie was when he turned on the hoariest outlaw group of them all, the Hell’s Angels. Kesey had met the Angels in the summer of 1965 through Hunter Thompson, the notorious Doctor of Gonzo, who was then writing a book about the motorcycle gang. Whatever the reason (perhaps the bit of redneck in Kesey), he smoked a joint with some of the Angels and they hit it off right away. “We’re in the same business,” Kesey told them. “You break people’s bones, I break people’s heads.” He invited his new friends to La Honda for a party. The Pranksters laid in unlimited quantities of beer and strung a huge banner across the lawn welcoming the Hell’s Angels. The bash would be a reunion of sorts; the old Perry Lane people were there, along with Allen Ginsberg, Richard Alpert, and a lot of San Francisco and Berkeley intellectuals. The Pranksters got ready for the Angels the way they got ready for anything—by dropping acid. The local townsfolk prepared themselves by huddling nervously behind locked doors, while the police turned out to greet the visitors with ten squad cars and live ammunition.

Kesey had really done it this time. A bunch of spaced-out bohemians getting high was one thing, but a violent motorcycle gang was something else again. Even among the Pranksters there was some uncertainty about their guests. The trepidation thermometer must have been sky-high as the Angels roared into La Honda with skulls, crossbones, and swastikas embellishing their denim jackets.
But once the Angels dug into the beer, the tension eased considerably. The Pranksters were probably the first outsiders actually to accept the Angels. To Kesey’s group they were fellow outlaws with just as little tolerance for hypocrisy or compromise. An atmosphere of peaceful coexistence was established, and then acid was doled out as a party favor.

Contrary to certain dire expectations of brutal carnage wreaked by drug-twisted criminals, the LSD made the bikers rather docile. They all walked around in a daze, mingling with the radicals, pacifists, and intellectuals. There was Allen Ginsberg, the epitome of much they despised, a gay New York poet chanting Hare Krishna and dancing with his finger cymbals, and the Angels were actually digging him. It was quite a spectacle. The befuddled policemen stayed outside the grounds with their red flashers blinking through the trees. With so many of the Angels bombed out of their minds, the cops deemed it wise to keep their distance.

The party went on for two days—a monument to what the Pranksters had set out to accomplish on the ‘64 bus trip. They had broken through the worst hang-up intellectuals have—the “real life” hangup. After this first bash the Angels hung around Kesey’s for the next six weeks, attending numerous Prankster parties. Their presence added a certain voltage that was unforgettable for those in attendance. Hunter Thompson wrote that if he could repeat any of his early acid trips, it would be one of the Hell’s Angels parties in La Honda. “It was a very electric atmosphere. If the Angels lent a feeling of menace, they also made it more interesting. . . and far more alive than anything likely to come out of a controlled experiment or a politely brittle gathering of well-educated truth-seekers looking for wisdom in a capsule. Dropping acid with the Angels was an adventure; they were too ignorant to know what to expect, and too wild to care.”

Acid and the New Left

Kesey’s scene was all the rage in the Bay Area. Among others, it attracted a number of people who were involved with the Free Speech Movement (FSM) that arose on the Berkeley campus of the University of California in the fall of 1964. This was a period of unbridled optimism and enthusiasm among student activists. The Cold War had finally thawed, and many were eager to flex their political muscle
for a variety of issues: civil rights, disarmament, university reform, and so forth. Nothing less than a wholesale transformation of society was thought to be in the offing. The cities would be renovated, the institutions remade, the downtrodden uplifted, and justice would ultimately prevail. It was a moment saturated with possibility, and those who joined the protest struggle were confident, in the words of Lautréamont, that “the storms of youth precede brilliant days.”

The FSM was a groundbreaking event as students asserted their right to organize politically on campus in the face of attempts by the university administration to ban such activity. At a mass rally in front of Sproul Hall attended by thousands, Mario Savio, a curly-haired twenty-one-year-old FSM spokesperson, delivered a stirring address in which he denounced the university as a factory for processing students—its raw material—into standardized personnel. “There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes one so sick at heart that you can’t take part, you can’t even tacitly take part, and you have to put your body upon the gears and the wheels, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to stop it. You’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, the people who own it, that unless you’re free the machine will be prevented from working.”

On cue the demonstrators marched into the administrative offices and occupied four floors of Sproul Hall. During the next thirty hours, they established a “liberated” zone with areas designated for political discussion, entertainment, study hall, kitchen, infirmary, legal aid, alternative classes, and steering committee meetings; the roof was reserved for couples who wanted to sleep together and people who wanted to smoke pot. In effect, they created an embryonic version of the future society, the “beloved community,” which they hoped to bring about through social activism.

The young radicals were fashioning the beginnings of a unique political gestalt that encompassed a dual-pronged radical project. They believed that challenging entrenched authority entailed a concerted attempt to alter the institutions and policy-making apparatus that had been usurped by a self-serving power elite; at the same time, they sought to lead lives that embodied the social changes they desired. For sixties activists, the quest for social justice was in many ways a direct extension of the search for personal authenticity. They were as much concerned with questions of psychic liberation
as with economic and political issues. Their demand for a high-energy, freewheeling, erotic culture was a keystone of their antiauthoritarian crusade.

The FSM and other emerging New Left organizations attracted not only those who were steeped in campus politics but also a sizable contingent of social “dropouts” who hung out on the periphery of the academic scene. Although these people rarely attended classes, in a sense they constituted the heart and soul of the new lifestyle emerging in and around various college towns all across America. Hunter Thompson described the nonstudent left in
The Nation
in 1965:

Social radicals tend to be “arty.” Their gigs are poetry and folk music, rather than politics, although many are fervently committed to the civil rights movement. Their political bent is Left, but their real interests are writing, painting, good sex, good sounds, and free marijuana. The realities of politics put them off, although they don’t mind lending their talents to a demonstration here and there, or even getting arrested for a good cause. They have quit one system and they don’t want to be organized into another; they feel they have more important things to do.