The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test Read Online Free Page B

meal!—he really does. He brushes after every meal despite the fact that they are living here in this garage, like gypsies, and there is no hot water, no toilet, no beds, except for a couple of mattresses in which the dirt, the dust, the damps, and the scuds are all one, melded, with the stuffing, and they stretch out on the scaffoldings, in the bus, in the back of a pickup truck, nostrils mildewing—
    "—but you know what? People are beginning to see through the warf of the games.
    Not just the heads and everybody, but all sorts of people. You take in California.
    There's always been this pyramid—"
    Here Hassler outlines a pyramid in the air with his hands and I watch, fascinated, as the plastic toothbrush case shiny shiny slides up one incline of the pyramid—
    "—they're transcending the bullshit," says Hassler, only his voice is earnest and clear and sweet like a high-school valedictorian's, as if he just said may next year's seniors remember our motto —"transcending the bullshit—"
    —a nice line of light there along the plastic, a straight rigid gleam from the past, from wherever Hassler came from. Now I'm doing it again, ah, that amiable itch, I just extracted a metaphor, a piece of transcendent bullshit, from this freaking toothbrush case—
    "—transcending the bullshit—"

    A TALL GUY COMES INTO THE WAREHOUSE WEARING SOME
    kind of blue and orange outfit like a mime harlequin's and with an orange Day-Glo mask painted on his face, so that he looks extraordinarily like The Spirit, if you remember that comic strip. This, I am told, is Ken Babbs, who used to be a helicopter pilot in Vietnam. I get to talking to him and I ask him what it was like in Vietnam and he says to me, very seriously:
    "You really want to know what it was like?"
    "Yeah."
    "Come over here. I'll show you."
    So he leads me back into the garage and he points to a cardboard box lying on the floor, just lying there amid all the general debris and madness.
    "It's all in there."
    "It's all in there?"
    "Right, right, right."
    I reach in there and lift out a typewritten manuscript, four or five hundred pages. I leaf through. It's a novel, about Vietnam. I look at Babbs. He gives me a smile of good fellowship with his Day-Glo mask glowing and crinkling up.
    "It's all in there?" I say. "Then I guess it takes a while to get it."
    "Yeah, yeah, right! right! right!" says Babbs, breaking into a laugh, as if I just said the funniest thing in the world. "Yeah! Yeah! Hah hah hah hah hah hah hah Right!
    Right!" with the mask glowing and bouncing around on his face. I lower the novel back into the box, and for days I would notice Babbs's novel about Vietnam lying out there on the floor, out in the middle of everything, as if waiting for a twister to whip it up and scatter it over San Francisco County, and Babbs would be somewhere around saying to some other bemused soul: "Yeah, yeah, right! right! right!"
    The Merry Pranksters were all rapidly assembling, waiting for Kesey. George Walker arrives. Walker has on no costume. He is just like some very clean-cut blond college kid wearing a T-shirt and corduroy pants, smiling and outgoing, just a good West Coast golden boy except for a few random notes like the Lotus racing car he has outside, painted with orange Day-Glo so that it lights up at dusk, skidding around the corners of the California suburbs in four-wheel drifts. And Paul Foster. Foster, I am told, is some kind of mad genius, a genius at computers, with all sorts of firms with names like Techniflex, Digitron, Solartex, Automaton, trying to hunt him down to lay money on him to do this or that for them . . . Whether he is a genius or not, I couldn't say. He certainly looks mad enough. He is hunched over in a corner, in a theater seat, an emaciated figure but with a vast accumulation of clothes. It looks like he has on about eight pairs of clown's pants, one on top of the other, each one filthier than the next one, all black, sooty, torn, mungey and