The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

In Chapters 7-9, Wolfe details the leg of the bus trip that travels through the Deep South and finally makes it to New York. After Stark Naked is taken to the psychiatric ward in Houston, the Pranksters leave and have little to say about it, collectively seeming to think that the drugs were not at fault. In Chapter 7, Wolfe touches upon a small shift in attitudes on the bus. He points out that Jane Burton, known as “Generally Famished,” and Sandy Lehmann-Haupt, known as “Dis-mount,” both seem to be having some issues with the trip. When Dis-mount takes some unauthorized acid in Pensacola and begins a very paranoid trip, the bad vibrations get even worse when he is scolded by Kesey. In documenting Dis-mount’s bad trip, Wolfe also returns to his theme of Intersubjectivity, pointing out that his paranoia is fueled because he is certain that everyone knows what he had done.

The theme of intersubjectivity also arises in Chapter 8,when Kesey holds another briefing with the Pranksters in order to tell them to remain competent while doing their thing. Wolfe points out that during this briefing, “without anybody having to say anything, they all began to feel that the trip was becoming a […] mission, of some sort” (99-100). Chapters 8 and 9 also uniquely place Kesey and the Merry Pranksters in a historical light and allow for comparisons between themselves and other groups within the countercultural movements of the 1950s and 1960s. In Chapter 8, for example, when they finally reach New York and throw a party at the apartment where they are staying, Neal Cassady invites his old friends from the Beat Generation, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. Like Kesey, Kerouac and Ginsberg are celebrated authors but all that they have in common is their friendship with Cassady. Wolfe sees this as a symbolic meeting and Cassady himself as a symbolic bridge between the Beats of the 1950s and the hippies of the 1960s. He argues that “Kerouac was the old star. Kesey was the wild new comet from the West heading christ knew where” (102).

In Chapter 9, the Pranksters travel to Millbrook, New York to visit Timothy Leary, the former Harvard psychologist, and his group, the League for Spiritual Discovery. According to Wolfe, “the Pranksters thought of themselves and Leary’s group as two extraordinary arcane societies, and the only ones in the world, engaged in the most fantastic experiment in human consciousness ever devised” (104). They expected a warm welcome and a unique meeting to take place between Leary and Kesey, but instead are treated coldly, looked down upon, and Leary does not want to meet Kesey at all. Leary’s rejection of Kesey, along with the Millbrook group’s obvious dismissal of the Merry Pranksters as acidheads who are not serious about the experiences of psychedelic drugs, suggests that class differences existed even within the Counterculture movement.