As the book opens, the narrator (Tom Wolfe) is riding through the streets of 1960s San Francisco in the back of an old pickup truck with members of the Merry Pranksters, a group of hippies. The members of the gang, Cool Breeze, Lois Jennings, Stewart Brand, and Black Maria, are dressed strangely, wearing items such as Indian beads, a gnome hat, and "jesuschrist strung-out hair," and they are all heading to The Warehouse: the headquarters of the Merry Pranksters. They are all awaiting the return of Ken Kesey, their leader, who has been running from the law in Mexico after getting busted for drugs, and who is now in a San Francisco jail awaiting bail.

Kesey, Wolfe tells us, used to be a talented young author, expected to become one of the greats of his generation for works such as One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Sometimes a Great Notion before he became involved in the drug culture of San Francisco. Now Wolfe, a reporter, has been sent from New York to write a story entitled "Young Novelist Real-Life Fugitive" on the capture of Kesey after he sneaks back into the country.

Wolfe recounts his visit to Kesey in the San Francisco jail after his capture. The scene, he says, "was more like the stage door at the Music Box Theatre...full of cheerful anticipation." The guards let Wolfe go back and visit Kesey for ten minutes so that he can interview him through the thick plate glass of the holding cell. Kesey, a tall, handsome man who looks like Paul Newman, tells Wolfe that he wants to take the psychedelic movement, a movement characterized by free love and the heavy use of LSD and other drugs, beyond the drug culture. He says that he wants to implement the "Acid Test," though he doesn't go into detail regarding what exactly that is, except that it has something to do with "all the senses opened wide, words, music, lights, sounds, touch-lightning."

After his meeting with Kesey, Wolfe recounts his brief time in San Francisco before meeting up with the Merry Pranksters. The old San Francisco of the Beat Generation, the North Beach, the City Lights bookstore, and the jazz clubs made famous by Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs now consists of mostly topless bars and dilapidated houses. The hippie culture, centered in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco, has now taken over. This is where the "heads" - the members of this hippie subculture - are located. The heads are nervous about Kesey's return and his vow to take the culture beyond drugs. They are skeptical of the Merry Pranksters and their intentions, and have even begun to organize a "Stop Kesey" movement.

Wolfe and the Merry Pranksters arrive at The Warehouse, a converted parking garage. It is a chaotic scene. There are several people walking around the gloomy space in what appear to be American flags. Wolfe encounters the Hermit and Mountain Girl, two hippies, and he sees a man throwing a hammer up and down while dancing to some kind of music in his head. They appear to be painting a sign onto an old converted school bus that reads "ACID TEST GRADUATION." They are all wearing overalls made out of American flags. Bob Dylan music blares through a hidden stereo.

Someone points out to Wolfe that the man throwing the hammer in the air is Neil Cassady, the real life "Dean Moriarty" from Jack Kerouac's novel On the Road. Wolfe paints a picture of Cassady (now far older) much like Kerouac's: he is a talker, an incessant "monologuist" who doesn't really care if anyone is listening or not. He always ends his sentences with the expression "you understand."

This is the scene in The Warehouse for two or three days, while Wolfe stays with the Pranksters and waits for Kesey to be released from jail. However, he refuses to trade in his coat and tie for some "color," as one Prankster, Doris Delay, asks him to do. He sleeps on the mattresses on the floor and hangs around the Pranksters, watching Neil Cassady and the Flag People while "spectral tapes played, babies cried, mihs got flipped out, bus glowed..." Wolfe is especially overwhelmed by the bathroom situation at The Warehouse. There is no indoor plumbing, so the Pranksters are forced to either relieve themselves outside near a fence, climb up into the old abandoned hotel above The Warehouse, or, as most of them do, walk down the street to the Shell station. It's an embarrassing and odd situation for Wolfe, who carries the bathroom key like a "bladder totem" while the normal people of the world fill up their cars with gas and go about their lives.

Wolfe outlines the strange feeling of the whole place: for these hippies, everything has a purpose and a meaning. Even when Neil Cassady drops his hammer, Wolfe is assured it is for a "purpose." Hippies begin to talk to him about the "game" that is being played in everybody's life, and how everything is a conspiracy to get "into your life." He meets a hippie who constantly carries a toothbrush with him and a former Vietnam helicopter pilot who has written a novel about the experience and keeps it in a cardboard box. One hippie is a computer genius, while another is a member of the Hell's Angels motorcycle gang. Wolfe has a hard time wrapping his mind around these people and their lifestyle, and is feeling decidedly overwhelmed by it all when Ken Kesey arrives.

Analysis

In the first two chapters of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, the reader is plunged into the chaotic world of 1960s hippie counter-culture in San Francisco, CA. The book is the real-life narrative of Wolfe as he meets and follows around the Merry Pranksters and their leader, Ken Kesey, the novelist who has been arrested for drug possession by the FBI.

Wolfe first makes the distinction between the Merry Pranksters and the outside world they are a counter to by, in a very Wolfean style, comparing and contrasting their clothes. Many of Wolfe's other works, including A Man in Full, Bonfire of the Vanities, and I Am Charlotte Simmons use the world of fashion and physiognomy to distinguish the myriad of classes and races that Wolfe describes in his narratives. The first distinction between the classes of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is made by looking at the shoes of the Merry Pranksters. Wolfe says that the Pranksters wear boots and distrust any kind of low-cut shoe - especially the black, shiny, low-cut shoes worn by FBI agents, the authorities that have just arrested their leader. This small distinction in fashion gives the reader an initial contrast between the world of the Pranksters and the mistrust they hold for the conventional world around them.

This mistrust is later elaborated on in conversations that Wolfe has with various Pranksters in the chapter entitled "The Bladder Totem." In that chapter, Wolfe has a conversation with a hippie named Hassler who sees the conventional world as simply a series of "games." Though Hassler doesn't elaborate what these games are, the reader can again see the deep mistrust of the outside world that the Pranksters and other hippie communes like them hold.

We are also introduced to Ken Kesey, the main character of the book and the man whom Wolfe made the trip to San Francisco to find. Kesey is emblematic of the hippie culture and is seen to be a descendant of the counter-cultural figures of the previous generation, men like Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, and Neil Cassady (who lives in The Warehouse and is one of the Merry Pranksters): literary figures of great talent who subverted the nationalistic and corporate mentalities of the 1940s and '50s and established the Beat Generation based on African-American culture.

But as Wolfe describes San Francisco of the late 1960s, much of that earlier Beat Generation has faded into something new and different. The North Beach area - the area that was once the home base for the Beat Generation - has now become a seedy area of strip bars and nightlife. The counter-cultural energy has shifted to the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood and taken on a decidedly different tone than that of the Beats. This new hippie culture, as Wolfe describes it, is focused around drug culture, specifically the mind-altering substance LSD. In chapter one, Wolfe attends a hippie festival near the Golden Gate Bridge celebrating the day that California made LSD an illegal substance. While the Beats also were known for their abuse of drugs like Benzedrine to enhance their experience of life, LSD is a different kind of substance. This subtle difference has caused an entirely new movement to arise in San Francisco, and has drawn these "men, women, boys, girls, most from middle-class upbringings" to abandon their previous way of life for a chaotic lifestyle that Wolfe sees as bordering on the obscene.

Kesey returns from jail, but there is no fanfare at The Warehouse: everybody simply keeps doing whatever they were doing before he arrived. He makes some small adjustment to the stereo, and "now everything is under control and the fine tuning begins." Wolfe sees Kesey greet his wife and children (whom he didn't even know existed), as well as Mountain Girl's young baby. Then he starts talking about what it was like being in jail.

Kesey is decidedly nonchalant about the whole experience. He talks about how he learned the cops' language and their numbering system for specific crimes, and carried on conversations with them because that was what they liked to do. This is the cops' game, according to Kesey. It is meant to make you sympathize with their point of view - that everyone is just playing cops-and-robbers, and that it's nothing personal. He relates the story of how he saw a child fall out of a window and hit the ground, but instead of helping care for the child or alerting a policeman to call an ambulance, Kesey simply walked away because he was afraid he might be recognized and caught. Wolfe suddenly realizes that he himself is sympathizing with Kesey's story, feeling that "that's what the cops-and-robbers game does to you."

Two guys come to visit Kesey, one a newspaper reporter for the Haight-Ashbury newspaper The Oracle. Before the reporter begins the interview, he tries to convince Kesey to refrain from his new message that encourages people to stop taking LSD. The reporter tells Kesey that thousands of new people are beginning to take the drug and "open[ing] doors in their minds." According to the reporter, what is needed is not a new path, but rather a movement to institutionalize these groups into a religion so that drugs like marijuana and LSD can be used as sacraments and protected under the Constitution.

Kesey, however, rejects this line of thinking. He says that it is all well and good for some to help people open these doors in their minds, but that he is a kind of prophet for the movement, trailblazing the next phase. He tells the reporter about an experience that he had in Mexico: after taking LSD and reading the I Ching, he stepped out into a lightning storm and felt that the electricity had formed a suit around him. This was a new state of being, he says, that he feels he must pronounce to people. Wolfe realizes that what is happening in this abandoned warehouse is similar to ancient religious movements and the revelations handed down to the ancient prophets.

Wolfe then begins to recount Kesey's story and how he ended up becoming the leader of the Merry Pranksters. Kesey receives a scholarship to study creative writing at Stanford University and moves into a small artists' commune near the university called Perry Lane. His father was a prosperous farmer in Oregon, and Kesey was an All-American athlete at the University of Oregon before coming to Stanford. In the commune he and his wife become involved in the intellectual scene on the campus, discussing literature and psychology with the group of students who live there.

One student, Vic Lovell, gets Kesey interested in psychology and Freud. He and Kesey decide to volunteer at a local mental health hospital testing drug trials. The drugs they are taking are forms of LSD. The tests are being conducted to try and help war veterans overcome their mental disabilities, and Kesey becomes aware of the mind-altering states created by the drugs. The group at Perry Lane begins to revolve around Kesey and the drugs that he orders from Texas farms. They find new ways to ingest the drug: powders, pills, and even soup.

Kesey takes a job working nights at the mental hospital and begins to write his novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. The novel is about a convict who pretends to be crazy in order to enter a mental hospital and avoid manual labor. The main character, Randle McMurphy, instead instigates the lunatics in the asylum to take action against the "System" and the "Control" of the hospital: a metaphor for the kind of activities that Kesey and the Perry Lane group are participating in. The novel gets rave reviews in the national press and quickly becomes a bestseller, thus validating the group's drug experiments.

After moving back to Oregon to complete his second novel, Sometimes a Great Notion, about an Oregon logging worker who bucks the system of logging unions, Kesey moves back to Perry Lane, where he meets Neil Cassady and begins to attract some of the leading figures of what would soon become the West Coast hippie movement: Larry McMurtry, Richard Alpert, and Jerry Garcia, among others. The group continues to experiment with drugs, and soon moves into a house that Kesey buys in La Honda, California.

Analysis

These two chapters begin to illuminate the figure of Ken Kesey: who he was, and his plans for the future. During a brief encounter with a local reporter, Kesey elaborates on his plan for the Acid Test, the movement he told the San Francisco police that he was instigating to move people away from drugs. But as he talks to the reporter, we begin to learn that the plan is no mere anti-drug speech. Instead, Kesey's idea for "Acid Graduation," as he calls it, involves moving people beyond drug use into the next phase of enlightenment and illumination. The reporter tries to convince Kesey that this is a bad idea and that people need to keep taking acid, but Kesey wants to keep himself in the mode of a prophet, announcing the next great wave of awakening that will overtake the community. Although the specifics of this Acid Graduation are still vague, Wolfe begins to see that Kesey's mind works on a very different level than the rest of the world.

This altered level of consciousness is illuminated by Wolfe in the next chapter, "What Do You Think of My Buddha?" Wolfe begins to recount Kesey's history from his days as an Oregon farm boy to his role as the leader of a new experimental commune based on drug use and intellectualism. This chapter is unique in the book (up to this point, at least), as Wolfe begins to immerse the reader into Kesey's consciousness, attempting through words to let the reader see the frenzied and chaotic nature of the LSD-addled state that the Merry Pranksters live in. Wolfe's prose is choppy, his sentences often ending and beginning with no apparent rhyme or reason behind their structure.

In one important passage, Wolfe attempts to simulate Kesey's experience of being on LSD. He describes a heightened awareness of everything that is happening, and the realization that multiple levels of reality exist all at once in the ceiling above him. The narration is disorienting and confusing, but for the person under the influence of drugs, a new state of being has opened up. The members of Perry Lane begin to read and discuss some of the works on these mind-altering substances, including Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception, which argues that newborn children perceive the world in a heightened state until the conformities of society begin to restrict them. LSD and other such drugs, Huxley says, re-open that world of heightened sensitivity to reality.

In this chapter we begin to see Kesey's plans played out in the larger narrative of his life. Wolfe identifies Kesey as the figurehead of a new American mythology, and Kesey himself identifies this new mythology not in terms of gods or monsters, as the ancient civilizations did, but with comic book superheroes. These, he says, are the true American myths, and the suburbanized America that Kesey grew up in is the American fantasyland. Kesey shows himself to be a true descendant of the Beat Generation: he rejects the narrative of the American dream, the idea of the middle class and prosperity, in order to create a new kind of American myth that combats such notions of conformity. Kesey at first believes that such a goal can be accomplished through art, but even art seems to have its limits - especially when the senior members of the Perry Lane commune push against his drug use. Instead, Kesey overtakes them as the leaders of the commune and begins a new experiment for a new kind of life built on mind-altering drugs.

Through some lines of semi-ironic poetry, Wolfe describes the setting of Kesey's house in the woods of La Honda, California. It is a typical rural Western town, just down the road from Palo Alto. Some of the landmarks of the place, like the Hilltop Motel, offer traveling tourists a homey touch of the Wild West - yet it is a West that has been sanitized. But this is not how Kesey is, Wolfe says. In La Honda, they've never seen anything like him before.

Wolfe recounts the days, early in 1964, when Kesey, along with his family, his friend George Walker, and a young guy, Sandy Lehmann-Haupt, whom Kesey rescued from insanity in New York, all lived in the house in La Honda. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is enjoying great commercial success, having been adapted into a Broadway play staring Michael Douglas. Kesey is finishing up his new novel, Sometimes a Great Notion, and Wolfe paints the California woods where Kesey's house is as an idyllic place.

Kesey and his friends are living the romantic notion of life in the woods, and feel entirely one with nature. What Kesey is really interested in, however, is not nature, but rather the experiments he is beginning to organize inside his house, experiments regarding the worlds that LSD can open up within a person. His friends from Perry Lane begin to come up to La Honda to participate in the experiments, and they all take LSD while walking through the woods or creating visual art projects and avant-garde sound recordings with equipment in Kesey's living room.

During a walk in the woods, the group stumbles upon some old carved wooden chess pieces that were left outside and are now warped and disfigured. The group begins to "rap" with the pieces, creating an improvisational conversation between themselves and the pieces. Their conversation is filled with a mixture of sexual confusion and gibberish, words strung together in a way that makes little sense to anyone not on LSD. Wolfe describes it as the realization of "intersubjectivity, as if our consciousnesses have opened up and flowed together and now one has only to look at a flicker of the other's mouth or eye or at the chessman he holds in his hand..."

Though the group is breaking new ground through their drug-induced experimentations, some members of the former Perry Lane group grow uneasy. During one experiment, one of the group comments that "we used to be equals. Now it's Kesey's trip. We go to his place. We take his acid. We do what he wants." Kesey is now the self-proclaimed leader of the group, and his plans include trying to get everyone to move to his place in La Honda. His log cabin has become a kind of hippie "Versailles," and Kesey is preparing to venture further into self-experimentation.

The group at Kesey's begins to grow. Neil Cassady, Page Browning, Mike Hagen, Kenneth Babbs, and others who will ultimately make up the group known as the Merry Pranksters gather, all continuing their LSD experiments. The residents of La Honda are beginning to get nervous about the group, and start asking questions about why they are here and what they are doing. The group responds by asking how the townspeople can know when their minds haven't been opened up with LSD.

Wolfe recounts the story of a night when Bob Stone, a member of Kesey's creative writing class at Stanford, was called from La Honda by Babbs. Babbs insists that Stone come to Kesey's house to "get something going," but Stone resists. Eventually he relents, and when he arrives at Kesey's he finds the group dancing and beating drums, with crazy lights flashing, singing a song of "The Intrepid Traveler" and his "band of Merry Pranksters."

In the spring of '64 Kesey and the Pranksters buy an old schoolbus that has been converted with beds and a sink for a trip they are planning to visit New York's World Fair in July. The Pranksters go to work on the bus, painting it and putting intricate wiring and sound systems into it so that they can experience all of the sounds "outside the bus, inside the bus, or inside your own freaking larynx" and "rap" off those sounds.

On their first trip into Northern California on the bus the entire group gets stoned on LSD and begins to experience a burning forest around them. It is not clear whether they are seeing a real forest fire, or are simply hallucinating. What is real, however, is the state patrol officer that pulls the bus over for erratic driving. Cassady, who is driving, begins a long, confusing speech on the nature of the bus while the rest of the Pranksters, wearing neon masks, roll around in the grass on the side of the road. The officer is utterly confused and asks the group whether they are part of the carnival, to which they respond in the affirmative. The officer lets the group go with only a warning, thus fueling their belief that they truly are invincible.

After the bus breaks down in San Jose, the group begins to make plans for their big trip East, and stops in San Juan Capistrano at Babbs' house. Kesey decides that on this trip, "everybody is going to be what they are, and whatever they are, there's not going to be anything to apologize about." After making this decision, they are off on their crazy trip, flying East down the highway. Cassady tells stories about the cars that pass them by.

The group stops in Arizona to take (and film) their first acid trip. Kesey, Babbs, and Paula Sundstein all take acid while other members of the Pranksters film the trip. Paula dives into a lake and comes up with mud and grass in her hair, and all of the Pranksters go wild. The filming continues on the road, and the group pulls into Phoenix. It's 1964 and Barry Goldwater is running for President, so the group attaches signs to the bus that say "A Vote for Barry is a Vote for Fun" and ride up and down the streets of Phoenix, annoying the citizens, but sparking interest nonetheless. Each member of the group gets his or her own nickname, and the trip continues.

The entire group is becoming quite sleep-deprived because of the bouncing of the bus and the cocktail of drugs they take to keep them awake. They pull into a gas station to fill up, but the gas station attendant doesn't want all of the Pranksters using the station's restroom. Kesey and the attendant have a verbal spar while the Pranksters file into the bathroom. One of the Pranksters, the Beauty Witch, has taken to going "stark naked," and when the group arrives in Houston, Texas at Larry McMurtry's house, she jumps out of the bus naked and embraces McMurtry's son, thinking he is her lost son. This is when the group realizes that this woman "had completed her trip. She had done with the flow. She had gone stark raving mad."

Analysis

Kesey's house in the woods at La Honda recalls earlier notions of counter-cultural activity dating all the way back to Thoreau and his experiment at Walden Pond. Kesey's experiment in La Honda is an affront to both the tourist mentality of the Wild West and the growing suburban culture of 20th-century America.

Wolfe paints life in La Honda as idyllic and rural, but the tranquility of nature is disrupted by the mind-bending drug experimentation that Kesey is performing in the woods with his group of friends. The '60s counter-cultural movement was a rebellion against the post-war culture of conformity that dominated America in the 1940s and '50s. Kesey advocates not only rebelling against this culture, but also altering the state of mind of the one that perceives the culture.

The buying of the bus marks an important moment for the Pranksters, as illustrated by the confrontation between the Pranksters and a California State Highway Patrol officer. When the officer pulls the bus over to inspect it, he is confronted with the abnormality of the Pranksters, who are all tripping on LSD. Their mind-altered state is virtually unrecognizable to this symbol of authority and law. Just as the citizens of La Honda don't quite know what to make of the Pranksters, the officer isn't sure what he is dealing with, eventually writing the group off as circus entertainers and letting them go on their way. For the Pranksters, this is a victory over the dominion of established society and a validation of their sense of invincibility. In a way this is a victory for them, because during this time American culture didn't quite know what to make of groups like Kesey's, preferring to ignore them. Until now, counter-cultural figures like the Beats had stayed mostly underground and out of sight. But Kesey's bus symbolizes the counter-culture's emergence into broader society, forcing those known as "citizens" to confront difference and resistance in society. A humorous and emblematic scene is when the Pranksters mockingly support Barry Goldwater, a notoriously conservative candidate for the Presidency. Unlike the Beats, Kesey's forbearers, the Pranksters openly mock and sneer at the conservative conformist society that treats them as "others."

Another important theme of the book emerges here: the propensity of the Pranksters to meticulously film and document their experiences. There is slight dissension within the Pranksters when Kesey divides them into those who film and those who are filmed, but even those who film seem to get an ecstatic experience from watching Kesey, Babbs, and Paula trip on LSD. This object/subject distinction plays a part in Kesey's journey and alludes to the larger object/subject distinction of the Pranksters as objects being watched by the culture at large. Even Wolfe as a writer plays a role in this distinction, attempting to break through this divide with prose that tries to get inside the heads of the Pranksters. Nevertheless, Wolfe is still very aware of the distance between him, the objective writer, and the Pranksters, as symbolized by the Beauty Witch, who actually loses her mind by the time the group reaches Texas.

The bus leaves Texas and begins to drive through the Deep South. The heat is unbearable, and once again insomnia mixed with the ill effects of a multitude of drugs begins to affect the Pranksters. In Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, the Pranksters are confronted with the normalcy of the "citizens" as well as continued police interest, though the Pranksters have gotten very good at talking their way out of (legal) trouble.

The group visits New Orleans and then takes a trip to Lake Pontchartrain, where they take a small amount of acid and go swimming on a segregated beach that is reserved for African-Americans. They are not warmly received at first, but start blaring music from the bus and soon "thousands of Negroes are dancing around the bus, doing rock dances and the dirty boogie..." before the police show up to break up the party.

The group eventually finds its way to Pensacola, Florida for a rest. Sandy, feeling strung out, decides that he must take a trip and so drinks some of the "unauthorized acid" from a bottle of orange juice in the fridge. The acid is "unauthorized" because Kesey has been saving it for the trip home. Sandy, however, takes too much of the acid and begins a bad trip. Wolfe describes the fits of terror and anguish that Sandy feels as he experiences the negative side effects of LSD. He sees his body morphing into the body of his parents, people changing ages, and a football and Kesey's arm blending together when he tries to spray paint them with Day-Glo. Kesey knows that Sandy took the bad acid and reprimands him for it, further displaying Kesey's control over the group and their recreational drugs.

The Pranksters continue their drive across the South, making stops in Georgia to get stoned on acid, and then into the Rocky Mountains. Kesey decides that he wants everyone on the bus to be "deadly competent," and the most competent of all turns out to be Neil Cassady. Cassady is always moving forward, and sets the tempo for the rest of the bus. In the mountains, everyone takes acid and Cassady decides that he wants to drive the bus down a steep mountainside without using brakes - a feat that Kesey takes in while riding on top of the bus.

The gang gets to New York and finds out that even the "hip" New York crowd isn't ready for what Kesey and the Pranksters bring to town. They drive through the city, "tootling" with people and playing them "like they were music," and Wolfe recounts that "even New York had to stop and stare." A friend of Kesey's from Perry Lane gets the group an apartment on Madison Avenue for the summer, and the gang starts a months-long party. Kesey's new book, Sometimes a Great Notion, is released to mixed reviews. The group throws a big party at their apartment, and even Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, the former leaders of the Beat Generation, come, although they don't have much to do with Kesey.

Analysis

In the last chapter "Stark Naked" lost her mind, and so the gang left her in Texas. The Pranksters exhibit both confusion and admiration about such behavior. They realize that the point of their whole journey is to reach the place where society and the rest of the world can be left behind. Their acid trips take them beyond the normalcy of the world, yet when they are confronted with the reality of someone who actually leaves the normalcy of the world for the realm of insanity, they are reluctant to keep her with them. They choose instead to abandon her and continue on their own way.

Their encounter with a group of African-Americans at Lake Pontchartrain, outside of New Orleans, highlights just how far out of society the Pranksters are, and how different they have become from those who preceded them. The Pranksters don't realize that the beach they have chosen to go swimming at is a segregated beach, reserved only for blacks. The black people, however, realize immediately that their space has been infringed upon and threaten the Pranksters with violence. Oblivious to any racial tension, the Pranksters blast music from their bus and start a big beach party with the African-Americans.

The Pranksters' predecessors, the Beat Generation, viewed African-American culture quite differently. For the Beats, African-American culture - jazz, scat, slang, and poverty - was the stuff of real life. Much of what the Beats experimented with was how to retreat from a white, middle-class lifestyle of privilege to find a truer reality. The Pranksters, however, seem to have lost this sense of cultural distinction. Their idea is not to descend down the "ranks" of culture to find a more "real" way of living, but rather to transcend this life entirely. Their encounter with the group of African-Americans in the racially tense South speaks both to their indifference towards other cultures and to their reliance on the privileges they associate with white culture. Whenever the Pranksters begin to get into trouble, the police come to rescue them. Instead of being against and under the law, like the Beats, the Pranksters oppose the law on the surface, but still rely on its protection.

The differences between the Pranksters and the Beats become even more apparent when the group reaches New York City. The Pranksters throw a party at their Madison Avenue apartment (another indicator of the privilege and status that the Pranksters enjoy) and two of the Beat pioneers, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac come. Kerouac and Ginsberg, however, don't seem to want to have much to do with Kesey and the Pranksters, and there is tension between the two groups. The life that the Beat poets are after is not the same life that the Pranksters seek. The Pranksters hope to reach beyond traditional society while still relying on it for certain necessities (such as protection and money), while the Beats eschew all attachments to the "normal" world.

Kesey is even beginning to advocate a move beyond the literary stylings that have characterized the counter-cultural movement up to this point. While prose and poetry encompassed much of the Beat movement, a new reality of song and rock-and-roll will define the Pranksters.

After their stay in New York City, the Pranksters head to upstate New York to the compound of Timothy Leary and his disciples. Leary is a fellow advocate of acid use, a former Harvard professor who was kicked out of the school. Leary and his disciples eventually landed in Millbrook, New York, at a private estate where they are conducting their own experiments with LSD and Eastern religion.

The Pranksters expect to be greeted warmly by Leary's group as brothers and sisters who are also on a journey of discovery, but instead Leary's group is "cold" towards them. They begrudgingly invite the Pranksters to stay and take them on a tour of their compound, but Babbs, put off by the cold welcome they received, takes over the tour and begins mocking Leary's group and their insistence on merging their acid trips with Buddhism. He makes fun of their meditation rooms, calling them the "crypt trips," and the Learyites are not amused. The Pranksters, put off by Leary's group's refusal to have fun with them - and Leary's refusal to even meet with the Pranksters while he is on "a very serious experiment, a three day trip" on acid - decide to leave New York.

The group begins their journey back home, and all take turns driving, this time taking a Northern route across the U.S. to get back to California. Sandy, who took a new form of acid called DMT when he was in New York, becomes increasingly paranoid. He is not able to come down from his trip, an experience that he equates with getting on and off the bus. The group goes into Canada for the "Calgary Stampede," and one of the Pranksters comes back to the bus with a young girl whom the group names "Anonymous." The Canadian Royal Mounties come to the bus looking for the girl (she was a runaway), but she looks so strange that she blends right in with the group and the Mounties don't know who she is.

In Boise, Idaho, the Pranksters "cut through" a funeral, and a little boy starts to run after the funny-looking bus. They speed up and slow down, teasing the boy for eight blocks, never letting him quite catch up, until they finally gain speed and roar out of town. The Pranksters see this is an "allegory of life...[and] of the multitudes who very shortly will want to get on the bus...themselves."

Back in La Honda, Sandy can't quite shake the delusions that have been plaguing him since New York. For Sandy, "the bus had stopped but he hadn't." He grows steadily more paranoid and begins to believe that the rest of the Pranksters are planning to trick him. He keeps a suspicious eye on the rest of the group, never quite joining them for activities, and Kesey grows angry and worried. The group plans a big game in which they each have to accomplish "tasks" for each other. Sometimes the tasks are big, like dividing up everybody's things into communal property, and sometimes they are small, like starting a fire in the yard. Sandy, paranoid that the tasks are part of a prank, refuses to complete his assignment. Kesey takes a special interest in him then, and all the Pranksters make an effort to give Sandy more positive attention to help him emerge from his problematic state. Sandy, however, views everything they do as a malicious act.

The group takes a trip to a resort called the Esalen Institute, where Kesey is slated to teach a seminar. The Esalen Institute, run by a man named Fritz Perls, is "a place where educated middle-class adults came in the summer to try to get out of The Rut and wiggle their fannies a bit." At the resort, the Pranksters try again to give Sandy positive attention and get him to live in the "Now." One night, the group tries to take him on a procession, a "ceremony of love," to the seashore, but as the group is winding down the steep cliffs towards the beach, Sandy begins to think that the group is ganging up on him. He takes off, running away down the coast, and starts knocking on the doors of the expensive vacation houses in Big Sur until the police pick him up and take him to jail. Sandy's brother, Chris, flies in from New York to bail him out, and Chris takes Sandy back to New York to get him the help that he needs.

Analysis

The Pranksters' trip to New York to visit Timothy Leary doesn't go as planned. It is clear that the hippie movement is progressing along several divergent pathways. Leary's group is focused on molding their LSD trips around established religious experiences, while Kesey's group is far more freewheeling and fun-loving.

In later interviews, Wolfe said that one of the reasons he wanted to write about the Pranksters was that he felt their group had the makings of a new religious phenomenon: a dynamic leader and "rituals" based around transcendent experiences. However, it is clear from the group's cross-country trip that their erratic behavior is oftentimes as much of a hindrance to their transcendent experiences as it is a help. Leary's group takes their drug experiences much more seriously, modeling them around established religious traditions. For Kesey, the LSD experience is a much more democratic affair, bringing people together and helping them to transcend the world around them. Kesey critiques the Learyites by placing them in a long tradition of "New York intellectuals" whose only goal is to find "another country, a fatherland of the mind, where it is all better and more philosophic and purer, gadget-free, and simpler and pedigreed: France or England." The Pranksters see the Learyites as replacing France and England with the Far East, and as replacing intellectualism with Eastern religion and LSD. Kesey believes that those were never the true paths to transcendence. Their trip East is a kind of metaphor: the goal of the Beat Generation was always to move West, into the great American frontier. The Pranksters are the result of this movement, and now they are heading back East - a different breed of counter-culture altogether.

Kesey and the Pranksters are not wholly separated from the academic world. Kesey has always been tied to his back-country roots, and the Pranksters are an amalgamation of low- and middle-class individuals, some educated and some not. The hippie movement, which was historically based in college towns like Berkeley and Cambridge, also frequently found roots in a middle-class, middle-American "type" exemplified by the Pranksters.

Sandy's illness also highlights the dangers inherent in the Pranksters' lifestyle. Their movement East is fraught with little sleep and enormous amounts of drugs. They keep themselves doped up on speed and marijuana, trying to keep themselves simultaneously active and mellow. Sandy is the next Prankster to begin to lose his mind. He compares his trip to being unable to step off of a bus. His insomnia takes over and he becomes very paranoid, unable to communicate or interact with the rest of the Pranksters. Eventually, he runs away, only to be taken into the care of the police and his brother from New York. Again, it is the established authorities of society, represented by the police and the psychiatrists, that act as support nets for Pranksters who fall far enough into insanity that they lose their ability to function.

Wolfe begins by explaining why he found the Pranksters so interesting. He compares their activities to the scholarly interpretations that characterize the beginning of religious movements. He says that after spending time with the Pranksters, he felt there was something "religious in the air, in the very atmosphere of the Prankster life, and yet one couldn't put one's finger on it." Wolfe realizes it is the "experience" that is shared between all the Pranksters that makes it feel this way. None of the great religions began with a philosophical framework, but instead began with "an overwhelming new experience." Wolfe relies on the work of Joachim Wach and Max Weber to help find a definition for the kind of community that the Pranksters are creating. He begins by outlining some of these theories, which sound strikingly similar to those endorsed by Kesey and his Pranksters: the founder has visions and dreams; he interprets manifestations of the divine; there is something "elemental" about him; "he appears as a renewer of lost contracts with the hidden powers of life"; and "he does not usually come from the aristocracy, the learned or refined." These groups begin to "develop their own symbols, terminology, lifestyles, and, gradually, simple cultic practices, rites, often involving music and art, all of which grow out of their new experience and seemed weird or incomprehensible to those who have never had it." All of these signs seem to point to the beginnings of a new religion within the Prankster ranks.

When the narration of the story resumes, a new character joins the Pranksters: Mountain Girl. She was previously a middle-class, educated, bourgeois student from New York, but she left that life for a bohemian existence in California. She talks with a hard, "low-rent" accent and is "one big loud charge of vitality." She immediately fits in with the rest of the Pranksters. Another member also joins: a high-school kid named "The Hermit." He is an outcast who ran away from home and had taken to living in the woods when he stumbled upon Kesey and the Pranksters. Bradley Hodgeman, a former college tennis star, also joins the group. Hodgeman becomes Cassady's disciple, and can't help but act "weird."

According to Wolfe, the Pranksters spent most of the fall, winter, and spring of 1964-65 editing their film, the 45 hours of footage they recorded while on their cross-country trek. Kesey hopes to distribute the film nationally, and is largely bankrolling its production, as well as the living expenses of the entire Prankster group, through his royalties off One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

The Pranksters keep trying new experiments with LSD, such as painting all of the trees in the forest in Day-Glo colors and dubbing spaced-out noises over shows on television, always trying to find that "new experience." Kesey begins urging the other Pranksters to find their own "movie": a metaphor for what their life really is. Mountain Girl's movie is called "Big Girl"; the Hermit's is "Everybody's Bad Trip." Page's movie is "Zea-lot," and Kesey's movie is simply called "Randle McMurphy." Each of these titles and the accompanying story lines is supposed to say something deep and meaningful about the person who has the movie. Eventually it should be revealed as a message that that person should extend to all people.

The townspeople in La Honda are beginning to get fed up with Kesey and the Pranksters, and the Pranksters themselves have begun to think that they are immune from the restrictions and rules of the normal world - even the police. The San Mateo County Sheriff's Office and federal narcotics officials, led by an officer named William Wong, began surveillance on the Pranksters. The Pranksters act like it's all a big game of cops and robbers, and so they toy with the police and play along.

When the cops finally do a raid on the house, the Pranksters, having been tipped off, have cleared out all of the drugs. The cops arrest Kesey after he hits one of them in the face, as well as the other Pranksters, but only the charges against Kesey hold up in court. The bigger event is that the national press begins to notice Kesey and the Pranksters, portraying them as beatniks in "the model of Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs." The press is fascinated by Kesey, and so instead of holding the Pranksters in check, the cops' raid actually increases their prominence and status within the growing counter-cultural movement.

Wolfe then recounts the story of Norman Hartweg, a seventeen-year-old journalist and playwright from Los Angeles who joins the Pranksters. Norman, like the others, is fascinated by Kesey and the Pranksters, and slowly tries to integrate himself into the group. But the process is a slow one, and Norman has to adjust to the expectations and initiations of the group. They disparage him for being "lazy" and for not contributing to the group experience. They don't let him edit the film - a symbol of status within the group - and new members begin to join, like Paul Foster and Pancho, who quickly gain greater status because they are more "out of reality" than Norman. Norman keeps trying to discover what it takes to be a part of the group, and finally finds out when he reads a book on Kesey's shelf: Arthur Clarke's Childhood's End, a science fiction book about the end of the world and a group of people who experience it. The moral of the book, according to Wolfe, is that finding the "Overmind" is a matter of becoming "zonked out of (your) ever-loving gourd...and heading out toward...Edge City."

Analysis

In this section, Wolfe expounds further on why he believes the Pranksters are the start of a new religion. Using the theories of scholars such as Weber and Wach, he draws comparisons between the beginnings of the great religions of the world and the Pranksters. He places Kesey in the line of the great messianic figures in world history...and indeed, the comparisons are striking. Kesey has increasingly begun to speak in maxims, parables, and small bits of wisdom, often not making any logical sense but instead leaving it up to his "disciples" to figure things out.

Wolfe believes this movement to be more like a religious experience because it is based on "experience" rather than a philosophical base. Experience, he says, is what all of the great religions have been based on. Scholars have debated for centuries on what the nature of that experience was: perhaps divine revelation, or perhaps psychological manipulation, and Wolfe suggests that the Pranksters' use of LSD to create this experience is no different than when Zoroaster saw his visions under the hallucinogenic influence of steaming pools in the Far East.

Wolfe also takes time here to expound on the type of person drawn to this hippie, counter-cultural lifestyle. He calls them "beautiful people": young, middle-class, often educated individuals, generally gathered in San Francisco, New York, and L.A., who are rebelling against the straight-laced "company man" mentality of the post-World War II generation. These young people are like the beatniks of the late 1950s, but with the major difference that this group of young people is using LSD to alter their experience of reality - a crucial component of this strain of the counter-culture. Wolfe suggests that it is the influence of drugs that is causing the uneasiness "all over America." It is the drugs that cause uneven and altered states of mind, as the reader has seen with characters like Sandy. This worries these middle-class families, for they fear that their sons and daughters might journey into a state of altered reality from which they will never return.

Wolfe also characterizes these groups of young people as large sessions of "group therapy." The goal is to bring everything out for everyone else: emotions, feelings, ideas, and anything else one can think of. Norman, the young writer from L.A., is chastised for reading a book and smoking a cigarette because both activities are individual activities that benefit no one but the person who engages in them. The Pranksters believe that all experiences should be shared with everyone else in order to create a communal experience of altered reality. This is the world that so attracts Norman, but that he simultaneously finds so hard to engage with. People with loner personalities have a much harder time fitting into the group.

Individuality is both encouraged and suppressed within the group. Kesey likens each person's personality to the movies that they create, but even these movies have to be created for a communal purpose. No one is allowed to simply live in isolation; they must all share themselves with everyone else. Through the use of LSD, Kesey and the Pranksters hope this kind of communal sharing of experiences will create true intersubjectivity, in which each person will live within the mind of each other, and the group consciousness will be raised to a new, more enlightened level.

In the summer of 1965, the Pranksters decide to invite the Hell's Angels, a notorious gang, to join them for a party in La Honda. Wolfe explains how Kesey met one of the leaders of the Angels through Hunter Thompson, a writer and journalist who was doing a story on the Pranksters for a national magazine. Kesey immediately hits it off with the Angels, and they all plan for a big party at Kesey's place. The Angles come roaring into La Honda on their motorcycles and are greeted by a huge sign welcoming them. According to Wolfe, the Pranksters and the Angels have a lot in common because they are all outlaws, and "the Angels had done it like the Pranksters, by choice. They had become outlaws first - to explore...and then got busted for it."

The Pranksters have their entire setup going: speakers and stereos are blasting from the trees, everything is painted in Day-Glo, and all of the Pranksters are decked out in costumes. When the Angels arrive, they have no idea what to expect, and are prepared for a fight. But when the Pranksters give the Angels LSD, they begin to have "the most wondrous experience." Sandy begins making up songs for the Angels and singing them loudly through the giant stereo that is set up, songs that go "Oh, but it's great to be an Angel, / And be dirty all the time!" It's a song that normally would offend the Angels to the point of fighting, but the craziness of it all - including Allen Ginsburg dancing and chanting the Hare Krishna - stupefies the Angels, and they simply take it all in and go with the flow. The cops stand at a distance and watch the party unfold, but except for public nudity, the Pranksters aren't breaking any laws they can see, so they can't arrest anyone. The figure the best policy is simply containment.

The Pranksters aren't afraid of or intimidated by the Angels - a fact that the Angels don't know what to make of. The Pranksters aren't condescending or angry with the Angels, and simply treat them like they would any other Prankster. Most of the Angels find this disarming, and it gets to the point where the Angels are more like Pranksters and the Pranksters are more like Angels.

Inside the party, things are becoming more debauched. Everyone has taken massive amounts of drugs and consumed massive amounts of alcohol, and a gang rape ensues on a woman from out of town. However, even she has consumed so many narcotic substances that she invites and encourages the behavior. The party lasts for two days, and the cops never break it up. Even after the party ends, the Angels continue to hang around La Honda and take part in Kesey's experiments with LSD. Kesey and the Angels establish a deep mutual respect. The rest of the "intellectual-hip circles in the San Francisco-Berkeley area" begin to treat the Pranksters with more respect, as well. As Wolfe explains it, one of the main "hang ups" with these intellectuals is finding "real life" and emulating the people who have "real life" - people like migrant farm workers and the impoverished. For these intellectuals, the Angels represent the realest of "real life," a gang of outlaws who live on the fringes of society. Now that the Angels have arrived, La Honda becomes something like "an intellectual tourist attraction."

As unlikely as it seems, a group of young Unitarian ministers become very interested in Kesey and what the Pranksters are doing, and they invite the Pranksters to come and take part in the annual California Unitarian Church conference. Even the Unitarians, members of a religious denomination known for its liberalism, are divided by the Pranksters' presence. Kesey realizes that the Pranksters are "rubbing their faces" in the right to dissent and non-conformity, but they keep doing their thing nevertheless.

The Unitarian youths catch on to the Pranksters' ways immediately, even though the adults at the conference do not. Though the conference has a schedule to stick to, Kesey and the Pranksters decide to simply live in the "Now" and to try and lead people into that reality. The young people are completely into this idea, participating in a foot-washing ceremony and games on the beach. The adults, however, are put off by Kesey's style and suspect that they are all taking drugs. Kesey gives a somewhat offensive speech during which he steps on the American flag, but one of the ministers that invited him, Paul Sawyer, realizes what Kesey is trying to do. He is not just trying to describe emotions, but rather to "arouse it, make them experience it, by manipulating the symbol of the emotion, and sometimes we have to come into awareness through the back door." Sawyer sees that Kesey has put them into the middle of an experience, and he feels that a religious movement could be built on this concept.

The conference officials, however, become fed up with Kesey's takeover and want Sawyer to ask the Pranksters to leave. The rudeness of the Pranksters is infuriating and is causing a schism in the conference, they say. Sawyer holds his ground, however, and says that if Kesey leaves, then the young people will leave. The conference leaders eventually relent and allow Kesey to stay, but warn that they think he's trying to "manipulate this conference."

And, according to Wolfe, that is exactly what Kesey was trying to do. He had become fascinated with the concept of control, and how he could manipulate people and situations to the advantage of himself and the Pranksters. He was consciously turning the young members of the church against the adult leaders of the conference, and now he realizes that he is extending his control beyond La Honda and into the outside world. On the last day of the conference, the youths put on a skit for the whole group, and they choose to imitate all the Pranksters. Paul Sawyer, when he sees Kesey, believes that he is seeing a prophet. According to Sawyer, Kesey "had not taught or preached. Rather, he had created...an experience, an awareness that flashed deeper than cerebration. Somehow he was in the tradition of the great prophets." Kesey, however, is reluctant to take on the mantle of a prophet. He tells the Pranksters that they aren't on "a Christ trip" and that the whole religion thing has been done for two thousand years and has only ended in war. Instead, the Pranksters must move beyond La Honda, into the wider world. The conference demonstrates this to Kesey. Kesey begins to feel overwhelmed with his newfound power, and one night, while on a bad trip, he wanders into the woods, and then onto a highway, believing that he can manipulate time, space, and objects - even the cars hurtling at him.

Analysis

The Hell's Angels were one of the most notorious gangs of the 1960s and '70s, responsible for several infamous murders and countless incidents of violence. Their arrival in La Honda signals that the Pranksters are not just another intellectual hipster group experimenting in the woods of California, but are perhaps the beginning of a new outlaw cultural force.

The Pranksters themselves refuse to be categorized into any group. Instead, their "trip" is all about existing entirely in the "now" and being completely themselves in each moment. In this way, they have become individuals with no past and no future. Little is known about who each Prankster was prior to his or her arrival in La Honda. Increasingly, what is important is not who someone was or who they are going to be, but rather what their identity is within the Prankster group. The Pranksters invite everyone into their group - intellectuals and Hell's Angels alike - and mandate that they all become like them, living completely in the now.

This also increasingly means a lapsed state of morals. Wolfe treats the gang rape of a partygoer with shocking indifference. In fact, he says that the woman who was raped invited the Angels to assault her. Notions of right and wrong are tied up in the past, in history. The Pranksters' project is to disassociate themselves from any history, and especially a moral history. Under the influence of LSD, anything goes. As a detached observer, Wolfe withholds judgment on whether he sees the Pranksters' or the Angels' behavior as right or wrong, and instead stays in "reporter mode," yet even through his prose, the reader can get a sense of a casual attitude towards actions that would ordinarily be seen as morally reprehensible.

The Pranksters' experience at the Unitarian Church conference reveals that Kesey and the Pranksters are also being courted by the religious side of culture. The group of youth ministers see in Kesey a new prophetic voice, a person whose work has all the feel of a religious movement but who refuses to abide by the constraints of religion. For these youth ministers, this is the kind of religion they hope to see in the Unitarian Church, and Kesey becomes a model for them as well as a prophet. Kesey, however, is only manipulating religion to take his experiment to a wider audience. The Unitarian conference helps him to finally become conscious of the power that he can have over people and situations - something that Wolfe recognized immediately in Kesey but that Kesey himself was either unaware of or reluctant to take hold of. His takeover of the conference shows him that not only can he take control of these kinds of situations, but also that people are eager to hand over control to him. As the chapter closes, Kesey begins to envision what the use of that kind of power in the wider world could mean.

The Pranksters get word that the Beatles are coming to play a show in San Francisco, and build a huge sign that says "THE MERRY PRANKSTERS WELCOME THE BEATLES." The Pranksters figure that since they put up a sign welcoming the Hell's Angels, and the Angels came, so too will the Beatles. Kesey believes that if they all "imagine" them in The Movie, then the Beatles will magically appear in it. Kesey is exerting his "hubris" on the world, and making things happen as he believes they should happen.

On September 2, the day of the show, all the Pranksters put on their Prankster costumes and pile into the bus to head to the show. An acid dealer has gotten Kesey thirty tickets to the sold-out show, and so the entire group is ready to go. They put "Help!," one of the Beatles' most famous songs, on the bus stereo system, and begin the drive. On the way there, as everyone is getting high on acid, they all begin to experience a transcendental experience. As Wolfe describes it: "no one even has to look at another because they not only know that everyone else is seeing it at once, they feel, they feel it flowing through one brain, Atman and Brahman, all one on the bus and all one with the writhing mass sun reflector ripple sun bomb prisms." Wolfe describes this feeling of complete intersubjectivity and transcendence as "CLOUD," when they could "draw the whole universe into...the movie."

As they arrive at the concert venue, The Cow Palace, an old converted cattle herding and slaughtering facility, their trip begins to go bad. Mountain Girl thinks that the venue looks like a concentration camp, and the crowds are so huge that the Pranksters feel lost in the mass of people. There are numerous opening acts, and the crowd begins to get impatient for the Beatles to arrive. When they finally do, the noise of the screaming crowd is so loud that it is like a "vibrating poison madness and filling the universe with the teeny agony torn out of them." Kesey realizes that the Beatles have complete "Control" over this crowd just as he did with the Unitarians.

When the concert ends the Pranksters almost get trampled by the mass of people trying to leave. Kesey sees all of these people as a "cancer" and is determined to get out. Zonker, one of the Pranksters, begins telling the crowd that the Beatles are coming to La Honda, and a buzz starts. A few of the Pranksters get lost, and Kesey has to go back into the crowd to find them. It was all a "bad vibration."

On the way home they try to find the CLOUD again, but everyone is too down. They don't care about the Beatles anymore, and just want to get home. When they arrive, however, there are more than four hundred people there, all waiting for the Beatles and for the party. Kesey is infuriated and storms into the house, leaving the Pranksters to try and herd everyone off the grounds. One person, however, stands out. His name is Owsley, and he happens to be the biggest acid dealer on the West Coast. In fact, he is internationally known for the quality of his drugs. Wolfe gives a little of his background: he was the son of a Kentucky senator, and bounced around from school to school until he finally ended up in Berkeley. He began an acid production factory out of his house, but it soon got busted and he moved to Los Angeles. He was naturally gifted at science, and made some of the best acid around. By 1967 his acid was internationally known, and was in fact the same acid that the Beatles first took. Owsley started a band with some friends called "The Grateful Dead," and started the phenomenon of "acid rock" that would also influence the Beatles. Wolfe ends the chapter by ironically noting that in 1967 the Beatles got the idea to dress up in fabulous clothes, get on a bus "zonked out of their gourds" on acid, and to film it. It would become known as the "Magical Mystery Tour," but of course, it was the Pranksters' idea first.

The Pranksters are not completely cut off from the wider world. As Wolfe explains, the Pranksters pay attention to and "groove" on the growing political and social tension of the 1960s. They watch the great blackout in New York City on TV, enthralled by the idea that a great "surge" can simply wipe everything out. They understand the whole thing as the "Cosmos," and the "surge" is what the "Cosmos" send through the wires to create the "consternation in the cancer capital!"

In Berkeley, a group known as the Vietnam Day Committee organizes a huge rally against the war and invites Kesey to be a keynote speaker. The plan is for the rally to gather fifteen thousand young people from across the West and end in a great march on Oakland. The organizers hope that it will end in a violent struggle between them and the National Guard. Their plan is to have twenty to thirty speakers come and get the crowd angry, and then to march. Kesey is supposed to be one of those speakers, but instead Kesey plans a great Prank.

The Pranksters paint the bus blood-red and dress up in army costumes. They bring all sorts of musical instruments and noisemakers with them, and head off for Berkeley. They are supposed to meet up with the Hell's Angels in Palo Alto, but the Angels don't show. They are planning on a grand, noisy entrance, but instead they simply pull into the Berkeley campus and join the crowd.

Kesey is the next-to-last speaker, and the crowd is pretty excited when he gets up to speak. However, instead of continuing the anti-war rhetoric, he tells the crowd that they are simply playing "the game." Kesey tells them that "they've been having wars for ten thousand years and you're not going to stop it this way." Then he pulls out a harmonica and starts to play and sing "Home On the Range." The rest of the Pranksters jump up on the stage and start playing their instruments, and the crowd grows confused. Instead of pulling Kesey off the stage, the organizers can only watch him go on, and when he finally finishes the rally has died down.

The organizers continue to try to march on Oakland, but by the time they get there the energy of the rally has flagged. The marchers turn around and go back to Berkeley, where they listen to an old "jug band" play on the student lawn. Someone throws tear gas into the crowd and everyone disperses, but the band, high on acid, can't do anything but stand there. The rally has degenerated into a big "half-ass, with the frozen jug band the picture of how far they had gotten."

Analysis

Kesey's experience with the Beatles begins with a continuation of his desire to "control" things, but ends up as something completely different. The power to control people and make them bend to his wishes that he found at the Unitarian camp has infected him in some way. He believes that by simply hanging a sign welcoming the Beatles, he will entice them to come to La Honda and be in The Movie. The great acid trip that they all have on the bus on the way to the concert symbolizes their belief in this power to transcend the normal world and to connect with anybody they want to, bringing those people into The Movie, as well.

When they arrive at the concert, however, they are greeted by a throng of screaming people. For once, the Pranksters don't stand out. They aren't special, and they aren't the center of attention. Even with their Day-Glo costumes and drug-addled behavior, they don't mean anything in the larger scheme of the Beatles craze. As Kesey watches the Beatles on stage, he can see that they exert a different kind of control over the crowd. Kesey sees that the crowd is just one big teeming mass of hysteria that bends to the will of the Beatles, and he knows that he himself does not possess such power. After World War II, "crowd-psychology" became a minor discipline in the field of psychology and caught on with some famous and semi-famous artists and intellectuals.

This realization of the power of the crowd and the nature of what they want turns Kesey and the Pranksters off, and the great acid high they were on during the bus trip turns bad. The crowd is giving off bad vibrations, and the Pranksters want nothing more than to leave. The power of the crowd is turned towards base desires: commercialism, sex, and fame. These aren't the goals of Kesey and the Pranksters, and their love affair with the Beatles thus comes to an abrupt end.

Soon, however, Kesey gets another chance to experiment with crowd control when the Vietnam Day Committee invites him to be a speaker at their rally. Instead of going with the theme of the day, Kesey instead decides to kill the crowd's buzz just as the crowd killed his buzz at the Beatles concert. He does the one thing that a crowd like that can't tolerate: he tells them that they are not important. The entire rally is built around the idea that a mass of people can come together and effect great change in world affairs, but Kesey tells them that they are fighting a worthless fight and that their best option is to give up. It's another experiment in power, and Kesey realizes that he can have as much control over a mass of people as a mass of people can have over a single man. It is an interesting paradox and a theme of the book: how can one person exude so much charisma that people will simply bend to his will?

In verses of poetry, Wolfe describes some of the changes happening around the Prankster camp. Kesey puts up a sign telling all the Pranksters to prepare for a trip to Mexico, though none of the Pranksters know when this trip is going to occur. Mountain Girl returns to her hometown of Poughkeepsie, NY, because she is pregnant - presumably with Kesey's child. Sandy also returns to New York because he begins having neurological problems from his intense drug use. He promises, though, that this is not the end of his trip.

After spending a night in a graveyard, Kesey comes up with a new vision for the Prankster life called the "Acid Test." This is Kesey's attempt to "extend the message to all people." Wolfe describes the problem that the Pranksters face as being the problem that confronts all religious movements: how does a group take their experience and bring it into the wider world? Kesey comes up with the acid test as a way to solve this problem.

At first, Kesey envisions "the Dome" as a solution. The Dome would be a giant tank in which people could take Owsley's LSD while being surrounded by a multitude of lights, video, color, and sound - the beginnings of a mixed media party. But for practical purposes the Pranksters see the Hell's Angels party as a better model for the Acid Test. That party had been "an incredible concentration of energy" - and that energy is what the Acid Test will be about.

The first Acid Test ends up being just another acid party. The Pranksters, not being particularly inclined towards organization, fail to find a party hall in time and so end up just having a party at "The Spread," which is the name of the house that Babbs owns in Los Angeles. Since they haven't done much advertising, the attendees are mostly from the La Honda and Berkeley crowd, including Allen Ginsberg and his gang. As the party dies down, Kesey and Ginsberg begin to disagree about the solution to the conflict in Vietnam, until Babbs, a Vietnam vet, says "it's all so very obvious," seeming to make sense of everything. Though this Acid Test doesn't reach out to the world, the Pranksters see it as a good start.

The next Test happens in San Jose. The Pranksters decide to advertise to the crowd at a Rolling Stones concert, and they talk a local bohemian character named "Big Nig" into letting them throw the party at his old house. Kesey hooks up with a local rock-and-roll band, The Grateful Dead, which is fronted by Jerry Garcia, who had been a "dead end kid" he had known back on Perry Lane. The band agrees to come and play the party. Big Nig's house is old and the circuit box can't accommodate the band's electrical needs, so they keep blowing out the circuits in the house. Big Nig tries to get Garcia to pay rent for using the place, but Garcia is so stoned that he just grooves off of what Big Nig is saying.

The third Acid Test is scheduled to take place at a secluded bohemian beach resort named Stinson Beach, but gets changed to Muir Beach at the last minute. Nobody worries about the change, because the Pranksters all feel that whoever is "on the bus" will simply know where to go. And, as it turns out, people do find it. At this Acid Test the Pranksters bring out a new toy, strobe lights, which help take the Test to another level. Everyone has taken LSD this time, including Owsley, whom no one has seen actually take the drug before. Owsley ends up having a very bad trip in which he sees himself in the French Revolution amidst rat corpses and time flies by him. He screams out to Kesey for help. His bad trip becomes legendary, and is talked about for years to come.

The Acid Tests begin to make some of the leaders of the psychedelic movement, such as Richard Alpert, nervous. These leaders want to make the psychedelic experience mainstream, and they don't like that the Pranksters are using LSD for "manic screaming orgies in public places." But the Pranksters continue holding Acid Tests - ultimately more than ten of them - throughout California. According to Wolfe, the Acid Tests were "the epoch of the psychedelic style and practically everything that has gone into it." The Grateful Dead epitomized the "acid rock" sound, and it all started in the Acid Tests. Even the psychedelic posters that the art world would embrace began there.

The Trips Festival takes place in January 1966. It is the brainchild of Steward Brand, who thought it up as a way to incorporate a multi-media celebration that "was going to simulate an LSD experience, minus the LSD." Kesey and the Pranksters are scheduled to coordinate the big night of the festival. Kesey has just put on his biggest Acid Test yet at the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco, which the cops shut down. They try to arrest Babbs, and eventually all of the Pranksters, but Kesey's lawyers bail them out of the situation. Kesey's lawyers have been very busy dealing with Kesey's arrest at the raid at La Honda. The cops are trying to say that Kesey dealt drugs to minors, and the lawyers are trying to prove that the raid was unwarranted. Eventually, Kesey makes a deal with a judge and gets three years probation and six months on a work team. Ironically, this is the same punishment that Randle McMurphy, the wayward hero of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, received. To further the irony, the work team is given the assignment of clearing land in La Honda, right next to Kesey's home.

A few days before the Trips Festival, Kesey and Mountain Girl go to Steward Brand's apartment to make plans. They sit out on the roof of Brand's building and talk about the electronic setup. They throw small pebbles off the top of the roof and into the alley below. Kesey, feeling old and tired, begins to recall his days as a wrestler in college, and how all the wrestlers would take drugs that would get them excited for the match. They don't know it, but one of the residents of the building calls the cops on them for being rowdy. When the cops arrive, they say they see Kesey throw a small bag of brownish material onto the roof of another building. Kesey begins to wrestle one of the cops. The bag the cops find contains marijuana, and this begins the majority of Kesey's legal troubles.

Kesey is bailed out of jail, but this charge is quite serious: he could go to prison for five years if convicted. The Trips Festival must still go on, however, and so he and the Pranksters load into the bus and ride around San Francisco advertising it. Kesey is not supposed to hang out with the Pranksters anymore - or go to the Trips Festival - but the enormity of the thing is starting to dawn on everyone. The night of the festival, a huge mass of "heads" show up, already high on acid. The Pranksters have built an enormous tower of scaffolding in the center of the hall they rented out, and have covered it with electronic equipment. Kesey dresses up in a spaceman suit and has a projector that he uses to project things onto the wall. There are two bands playing, one of which is The Grateful Dead, and a huge acid party ensues. One of the Pranksters, Norman, takes so much acid that he begins to imagine that he is God and that he can control the crowd, levitate them, and make them move at his command.

The festival lasts three nights, and out of it is born a new kind of club experience. Weekend Trips Festivals begin happening at the Fillmore on a weekly basis, and for the first time the acidheads can come out into public, stoned. All the while, the media outlets still believe that it is an acid experience "without the acid." According to Wolfe, "the Haight-Ashbury era began that weekend."

After the Trips Festival, Kesey's troubles are waiting right where he left them. A judge makes him sell his house and leave San Mateo county, and so goes to stay at Babbs' home in Los Angeles. Another warrant is put out for his arrest, this time for having violated his parole at the Trips Festival. Since parole violation carries a mandatory prison sentence, Kesey comes up with a plan: he is going to run away to Mexico and become an outlaw. One of the Pranksters will sneak him over the border at night. They also devise to fake Kesey's suicide by having one of the Pranksters slam his truck into a tree by a cliff and leaving a suicide note in the truck saying that he'd jumped off the cliff into the ocean. Kesey and the Pranksters get high on drugs and compose a long, maniacal suicide note, and Kesey leaves for Mexico.

Analysis

The Acid Test is a sort of coming-out party for acidheads and for Kesey and the Pranksters. The theme of religion continues as the Pranksters seek out a way to evangelize those who have not had the acid experience. The only way to do this, of course, is to create an environment in which people can experience the transcendence of the acid experience. This is what the Tests are intended to accomplish.

Kesey's movement, however, is always teetering on the line between religion and anarchy. Some of the prominent leaders of the psychedelic movement, such as Richard Alpert and Timothy Leary, believe that the ultimate goal of taking LSD is to have a true religious experience, and they view Kesey's use of the drug as more of an abuse - all Kesey wants, they think, is to have a never-ending party. Nevertheless, Kesey's approach to LSD is gaining more and more converts, and soon the acid movement begins to really take off in San Francisco.

Race also plays a small role in these chapters. For the Beat Generation, African-American culture was something to idolize. For these proto-hippies, however, racial distinctions don't seem to matter as much. This is epitomized by Jerry Garcia's confrontation with "Big Nig," the African-American bohemian who hosts one of the first Acid Tests. Big Nig asks Garcia and the other partygoers to help pay his rent, as he is obviously not as economically well-off as the Pranksters. But Garcia, stoned on acid, doesn't understand that Big Nig is telling him about his needs. In a way, the Pranksters and the acidheads exhibit racial ignorance. Acid makes them blind to the social and economic realities of the lower classes. The Beat Generation sought to emulate those lower classes; the Acid Generation just doesn't care.

In this section the interactions between the Pranksters and the police grow more heated. Kesey and the Pranksters have always had a tenuous relationship with authority figures, seeing police and law officials as being part of the "game" and part of a greater conspiracy to keep them from achieving transcendence. However, they have often relied on the police and on lawyers to protect them when things get out of hand. Now, the Pranksters have broken too many laws, and their situation has grown far more serious. Unlike previous counter-cultural forces, which sought to stay under the radar and avoid police attention, Kesey and the Pranksters seek to confront authority. Ultimately Kesey, like so many other counter-cultural figures, is forced to go on the run not out of a sense of adventure or to find a truer American culture, but rather for his own self-preservation. The fake suicide shows just how little regard Kesey has for authority or for those around him. Indeed, the Prankster lifestyle seems to be characterized by an inherent selfishness.

The Trips Festival is an all-out acid bonanza that somehow manages to pull the wool over the eyes of the media and the authorities. Again, Wolfe's New Journalism style tries to get inside the heads of the participants in the festival. He is not just reporting on who was there, what they were doing, and what happened, but is instead trying to get into their minds. This is best expressed through Wolfe's description of Norman's God delusions. Through Wolfe's jerky, strange prose, the reader is transported into the minds of the Pranksters.

With Kesey leaving for Mexico, Babbs becomes the de-facto leader of the Pranksters. They move the Acid Tests down to Los Angeles, but the Pranksters are unhappy with Babbs' leadership. He "runs this like the Army...like the Boy Scouts." When Pancho Pillow tries to get on the bus with the group, Babbs cruelly kicks him off. All of the Pranksters are having a hard time dealing with the loss of Kesey. Even though they aren't trying, the Tests seem orchestrated. One of the Tests takes place at Paul Sawyer's Unitarian Church, and everyone - even the "squares" - gets into the act. Everyone participates in the Acid Test, pineapple chili is served, and "everybody was in The Movie, on the bus, and it was beautiful."

The next Acid Test that the Pranksters host is in Watts, a place where massive race riots broke out just months before. According to Claire Brush, an editor for a hipster magazine in LA, the choice had to do with "the politics of taking such a party into the recently stricken neighborhood, as a friendship-thing; also a humorous - ironical? - site for such carryings-on."

Clair goes to the Acid Test, and at first thinks it is kind of lame. People are just sitting around, watching the film of the Pranksters' bus trip and various slide shows of things like flowers. Then, someone pulls out a giant trashcan full of Kool-Aid. Clair, who has never used drugs in her life, doesn't know the Kool-Aid is laced with LSD. She starts drinking it, and then begins her first acid trip. She doesn't know what's going on, and keeps asking people until finally someone tells her. The whole room begins to melt around her, and a person holds her close. She feels that their bodies melt into one, their "bones merged, our skin was one skin, there was no place where we could separate, where he stopped and I began."

There is a large crowd at this Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Police show up as well, but they are so overwhelmed by the whole thing that they can't do anything, and they definitely don't want "a jail full of 150 people on acid." The festivities only calm down when several neighborhood dignitaries show up to observe the party. As far as they can tell, the white kids are simply engaging in a goodwill gesture by throwing a huge party in a predominantly black part of town. As soon as they leave, however, the party starts back up and the Kool-Aid is put back out. Claire continues her acid trip, but she notices a few others who are not doing as well. Several of the attendees begin to have bad trips. In another room, a woman lies on the floor and shouts out "Who cares!" at the top of her lungs. Some of the Pranksters try to help her, and they take one of the microphones into the room. Her screams can be heard over the noise of the music, but they don't - or perhaps can't - help her because they are so stoned. Instead, they use her screams to go further into the acid trip. As dawn breaks, the party finally winds down and the cops tell the Pranksters that they have to leave.

By 1PM, news of the Acid Test is breaking. One of the Pranksters, Paul Foster, has been arrested, and some of the "anti-Babbs" faction of the Pranksters state that they didn't like the way the Test went. They question the ethics of lacing the Kool-Aid with acid so that even those who didn't want to take it did, and they think the way they held the microphone to the "Who cares girl" was cruel. News of these Acid Tests is breaking on a larger stage as well, and Life Magazine comes to do a cover story on the Pranksters. At the photo shoot, however, Babbs pulls the ultimate prank: he steals the bus while some of the Pranksters are getting their picture taken, and then goes to the Prankster hideout and takes all their food and money. Not knowing what to do, some of the Pranksters head back to San Francisco and some to New York. It is suddenly clear that the Merry Pranksters were over the day Kesey left for Mexico.

In Mexico, Kesey is trying to adjust to life as a fugitive. He is renting an $80 a month apartment in a bungalow close to the jungle, but is extremely paranoid that the cops will find him nevertheless. The trip down to Mexico was "easy," according to Kesey. Kesey, Boise, Zonker, and Jim Fish all drove Boise's truck down into Tijuana, blowing a third of their money on audio equipment along the way. Kesey is not particularly impressed with Mexico, and in great chunks of run-on sentences and rambling prose, Wolfe recounts Kesey's sensation of Mexico as having its own "Rat aesthetic." To Kesey, Mexico is one big desert of a dump. Boise, in contrast, keeps his spirits high. They make it to Mazatlan, which has become a Mexican hangout for acidheads. In a bar at a resort in Mazatlan, Kesey and Zonker meet up with some other acidheads, but they don't tell anyone who Kesey is. Kesey hooks up with a girl from California whom he calls "Black Maria," and she joins the group of fugitives.

Kesey can't help but make calls back to the U.S., and eventually the "jig is up." The fake suicide was botched by one of the Pranksters, and the suicide note which had sounded beautiful when they had written it high on weed didn't make any sense to the sober authorities, and so they knew from the start that Kesey wasn't really dead. Kesey calls one of his friends back in California, and that friend happens to talk to another friend who happens to be a newspaper reporter, and so the story of Kesey's fugitive status in Mexico hits the national newspapers. Kesey's paranoia increases, and he comes up with an escape plan in case the authorities find him. The plan involves running into the jungle and living there for several days until Black Maria hangs one of Zonker's yellow t-shirts from a clothesline to signal that the coast is clear. But Kesey, who is enormously paranoid and high on drugs, takes off into the jungle frequently, regardless of whether or not anyone is actually chasing him.

Analysis

Kesey's departure for Mexico signals the beginning of the dissolution of the Pranksters. Babbs turns out to be an ineffective and often cruel leader, and lacks Kesey's ability to temper the selfish behavior of many of the Pranksters. Nothing highlights the selfishness of the group like the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

This Acid Test, which takes place in Watts, is the epitome of the acid movement. In one way the Test is a mockery of the other counter-cultural movements of the '60s, like the peace movement and the Civil Rights movement, which were about equality and social justice. The Pranksters' counter-cultural movement is far more selfish. The fact that the Test is held in Watts may position it as a mockery of the realities of race in America. What it really shows, however, is just how ignorant the Pranksters were about the realities of inequality. The Pranksters hold the Test in Watts simply because it is an economically depressed area and they can rent out the hall at a very cheap rate. The police and the community leaders can't really stop them, because they have no power in that neighborhood. The Pranksters are simply using the misfortunes of others for their own benefit.

Their selfishness is also epitomized in the bad trip of the "Who cares girl." The Pranksters, instead of helping her out of the bad trip, use her cries to enhance their own trip. Romney, who tries to help the girl, feels that he does care about her trip, but he is rendered useless by his own drug experience and can't care enough to help her out. This selfishness does not sit well with the other Pranksters, who feel that Babbs is being unusually cruel. The Pranksters finally implode just as Life Magazine is writing a cover story on them for national publication. By this time, the acid movement has taken on a life of its own. The Acid Tests have actually accomplished what they set out to do: take the experience to the masses.

As the narrative shifts to Mexico and Kesey, the reader finds that things aren't much better there. Instead of the land of the "real people," Kesey discovers that Mexico is really just a "Rat hole" of a place. He doesn't like the poverty of it or the "who-cares" attitude of the residents. Part of what the Prankster life was about was rebelling against societal norms, but in Mexico the people are simply numb to Kesey and the behavior of the acidheads who come to Mazatlan. The Prankster aura just doesn't have the same feel in Mexico.

Kesey is also being consumed by his paranoia that American law enforcement is going to find him and take him back to the U.S. His intricate plans to escape show that the law and the protection once afforded him because of fame, money, status, and race don't mean much anymore. The life that he has devolved into no longer intrigues him. He now uses drugs predominantly to escape the realities of his situation, rather than in order to achieve transcendence. But Kesey's charm and charisma still work for him, and he attracts Black Maria to his fugitive gang. According to her, "even while he was reeking with paranoia, he seemed to have total confidence."

Mountain Girl is almost eight months pregnant when she receives a package in the mail from Mexico. It contains an audiotape that Kesey made for her, but the entire thing is inaudible. She can only discern that he "was in the jungle somewhere and paranoid as hell and smoking a lot of grass." They make the decision to take the bus to Mexico and to meet up with Kesey. The "heat" is turning up in California and the press runs more stories about the Watts Acid Test. First, however, Mountain Girl has to go on trial for possession of marijuana from the rooftop bust that started the Pranksters' legal trouble.

The trial is a bit of a farce. Mountain Girl and Hassler show up wearing strange clothes, and suggest that her problems are all Kesey's fault. Mountain Girl gets off with only a $250 fine, and the group immediately heads to Mexico. The trip down is a hard one. The bus breaks down every twenty miles, and the Mexican landscape sends off "bad vibrations." They find out that after the American newspapers ran stories about Kesey's faked suicide, the Mexican authorities began to look for him. Kesey's paranoia, however, motivated him to escape back to Mazatlan before they could find him. He now has a new identity and a fake ID.

When the Pranksters arrive in Mazatlan they are the talk of the town. All of the locals call them "Diablos" (devils) because of their Day-Glo colors and crazy outfits. No one is quite sure what to make of them. Finally Kesey shows up, looking much older, and the Pranksters feel that their fortunes are turning and that the great party can start again. Even as the Pranksters are beginning to establish a new routine in Mexico, the locals are becoming increasingly wary of them. Just as the "crazies" roll into town, so does a red tide, a biological poisoning of the ocean caused by plankton. The red tide kills all of the fish, and has a devastating economic effect on the village. Although everyone knows the red tide is a natural biological phenomenon, they can't help but associate its arrival with the arrival of these foreign devils and their crazy Day-Glo suits.

Eventually, the Pranksters choose to settle in the village of Manzanillo because it is out in the middle of nowhere: hard to find and hard to get to. However, the conditions ("can't git out in the daytime and do anything because of the heat; can't git out at night because of the mosquitoes") begin to drive them all a little crazy. They can do nothing but wait for telegrams from Kesey's lawyers in the U.S. as they try to work out a deal to get them back home. But so far, no good news is coming from the North.

They only have a few books to keep them company, one of which is the Bible. They begin to read the Bible and "linger" over it, and soon all the Pranksters begin to re-imagine themselves as biblical figures. Kesey is Esau, and they each take on a character from the book of Genesis. It is "3,000 years ago; for there is no time in this place; only an eternal now stretching on infinitely over the entire world..." The days continue to roll by without much happening, and they all plan for Mountain Girl to marry one of the Pranksters, George Walker. She had wanted to be legally married by the time the baby arrived, but of course she can't marry Kesey, though Kesey, his wife Faye, Mountain Girl, and Black Maria are all living together in a small shack in Manzanillo. Mountain Girl goes through with the wedding, and has her baby in a local hospital.

Slowly the Pranksters' spirits begin to pick back up. Hagen buys a huge turtle, and they paint a Day-Glo skull and crossbones on its shell and set it free. Sandy returns, as does Cassady, who carries a four-pound hammer that he constantly throws up in the air and catches. Then Bob Stone, from Perry Lane, comes to town to write a story on Kesey for Esquire. Stone and Kesey take off on a drug binge road trip in which they take massive amounts of speed and acid and have wonderful hallucinations in the Mexican desert.

Kesey begins to see the Pranksters' time in terms of Nietzschean ideas of the superman. Nietzsche, Kesey thinks, was actually an acidhead, and some of Nietzsche's thoughts begin to sound like the same ones that Kesey himself has when on drugs. The idea of the eternal return - that all life is always happening and the point is simply to go with it - seems to make perfect sense to Kesey, and he realizes now that the great goal of the Pranksters is to shoot through time and become superheroes.

Analysis

When things start to go wrong for the Pranksters in the U.S., they all decide to head to Mexico to meet up with Kesey. They even pull a prank on the lawyers and judges at Mountain Girl's trial, promising to take care of her. In reality, Mountain Girl simply wants to leave with them and continue on their journey. Once again, the Pranksters take advantage of the protective nature of the legal system.

Like previous counter-cultural generations, the Pranksters see Mexico as a land of the "real," full of real people and real experiences, where the law is lax and people can do as they please. In Mexico, however, economic and social realities are more apparent to the Pranksters than they were in places such as Watts. In Watts, the bourgeois culture that the Pranksters were used to was always just right across town - they could return to the comforts of money and privilege whenever they wanted - but in Mexico, they are surrounded by the realities of poverty. Mexico is both literally and figuratively a desert, and offers them no safe haven where they can simply be Pranksters.

Back in the U.S. things are no better, as evidenced by the bad news that arrives daily via telegram. Several of the former Pranksters have been killed or seriously injured, and the money for lawyers and legal help is running low. Much like the biblical characters they compare themselves to, the Pranksters are now nomadic desert wanders with no real home and no real family.

Soon, however, Mountain Girl gives birth to a new baby, a new Prankster, and this signals a kind of rebirth for the group as well. Slowly they begin to regain some of their Prankster charisma, and when Bob Stone, a writer and old friend, comes to do a story on Kesey, he brings new hope for fun (as well as a batch of drugs). Kesey and Stone race across the desert, high on drugs, and Kesey begins to develop a new vision for the way things could be. He begins to compare his own philosophy to that of Nietzsche - though of course Nietzsche went mad and died alone and neglected. Regardless, Kesey thinks that his experiences might be the ultimate expression of the ideas that Nietzsche developed a hundred years ago. With these new ideas, Kesey envisions a way "beyond acid" that might just be able to take him and the Pranksters back home.

One of the Pranksters, Hagen, finds himself in a lamentable situation when he brings a young girl from California with him to Mexico. The girl's father pulls every string he can to try and get her back, and though it is unclear as to whether or not this situation is the cause of the Pranksters' troubles, they blame it on the girl nonetheless. As they are driving down a highway one evening, they suddenly encounter a roadblock of Mexican police. The police find pot in the Pranksters' car, and begin to arrest Kesey. Kesey, however, runs away from them, into the jungle. There is a train going by, and though the cops are shooting at him, he jumps on the train and ends up in Guadalajara, many hundreds of miles away from the Pranksters and the village. In Guadalajara, a young American befriends him and offers him food and shelter. Kesey eventually goes to the U.S. consulate's office posing as a deadbeat fisherman, and the consulate gives him bus fare to get back to the Pranksters. Back in Manzanillo, Hagen and Ram Rod are both in jail, which turns out to not be so bad, because as long as they have money they can order in any drug they want. Kesey begins to feel consumed with paranoia, and things aren't going very well for the other Pranksters, either. For the first time, many of the Pranksters begin to feel an unfamiliar sensation: loneliness.

One afternoon Page discovers a man taking pictures of the Pranksters' "Rat shack." Worried that the man is from the police, Page talks to him, and the man asks him if he's seen any Russian submarines surfacing lately. Page, putting the man on, tells him that yes, there are have been Russian submarines, and that he should come back at night to see them. The next day Page and the man go to a local restaurant, where Kesey joins them. The man shows them his badge and tells him that he is "Secret Agent Numero Uno" and relates stories about his secret missions on which he busted people for pot.

Though Kesey makes friends with the "secret agent," the man's stories seem to hit too close to home, and Kesey decides it's time to head back to the United States. They decide to throw a series of Acid Tests in Mexico on the way home. They hold the first one in Manzanillo, the second in Mexico City, and more at other stops along the way. The parties are not the big affairs they were back in California, but they draw the attention of the authorities nonetheless. Eventually, having been pressured by the Mexican authorities to leave, Kesey crosses the U.S. border dressed as a drunken country musician. The authorities never suspect a thing.

Back in the U.S., Kesey hatches a plan to be a full-time fugitive who only shows himself in public on occasion - just to annoy the authorities. He is holed up at a friend's house in Palo Alto and vacillates between extreme paranoia and indifference. He throws loud, wild parties at his friend's house before hiding in the basement, afraid he's going to be caught.

Wolfe describes the time while Kesey and the Pranksters were out of the country. The Acid Movement came out of hiding after the great Acid Tests, and the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco became the center of the movement. Different leaders were leading different movements, and it was all so strange that the cops didn't know what to do about it. They knew the dangers of alcohol and dope, but they had never seen what LSD could do and they didn't know how to handle it. Even some of the leaders of Civil Rights and peace movements gave up their work and moved to San Francisco to take part in the "head" movement. As it turned out, they believed that Kesey had been right when he had told them to turn their back on activism.

Kesey begins to negotiate with other leaders of the Acid Movement, including Owsley. They are all suspicious of his idea to "move beyond acid." They believe that Kesey is selling out just to stay out of jail. But he remains popular and begins to plan a great Acid Test Graduation: a costume ball where he will show everyone how to move beyond acid before disappearing into America as a fugitive. Kesey also starts showing himself in public more. He gives an interview to a San Francisco newspaper reporter, and agrees to do a secret television interview. In all of these he talks about how he wants to be the "salt in J. Edgar Hoover's wounds." Just as the television interview is airing, however, Kesey and some of the Pranksters are driving along a San Francisco freeway when the cops find them. They pull them over and Kesey once again tries to run, but this time he fails to escape.

Analysis

Until now, the audacity of the Pranksters has only worn thin the patience of the American authorities. Now, however, Kesey and the Pranksters are proving to be a problem for the Mexican authorities. Their bust on a Mexican highway sends Kesey on the run and several of the Pranksters to jail, but when Kesey returns things pick up almost as usual. It's not until a Mexican Secret Agent finds them that the authority of the Mexican law hits too close to home.

Kesey's problems with the law - even in the supposedly lax Mexican system - speaks to the Pranksters' need to act in total opposition to societal dictates. The Pranksters did not come to Mexico to stir up political or social trouble - they only hoped to find a place where they could experiment freely - but their experimentation is so contrary to the system that even the Mexican authorities eventually ask them to leave.

There is dissension in the Prankster ranks, as well. Sandy, who drove down from New York on a motorcycle, takes the big Ampex amp that was the center of all the Prankster auditory experiments off the bus, using the ruse that he just wants to test its weight on the motorcycle. When Kesey finds out, he immediately knows that Sandy has taken the amp and left the bus for good. This kind of behavior has never happened in the Prankster ranks before. Their organization is built around a kind of communal living, but now even that is falling apart. This speaks to the difficulty of keeping an organization moving based solely on an experience. When the experience ceases to be as real for members, the result is dissension...or even dissolution.

Wolfe's analysis of the growth of the hippie movement is an insightful look into the differences between the peace movements, the student movements, and the hippie movements - all of which tend to be conflated in modern history. But Wolfe paints them as very different. In fact, he suggests that it was the LSD movement that effectively killed the peace and student activist movements, because many of those young leaders became lethargic after experiencing LSD. They began to see such causes as futile, and no longer liked the kind of crowd that was hanging around activist movements. LSD, Wolfe suggests, zapped the energy from the protest movements and moved it all into the psychedelic movement.

The final chapter of the book picks up where the first chapter began: with Kesey's arrest, hearings, and bail, awarded only because he promises that he is going to tell the country's youth to move beyond acid. However, Kesey's lawyer's promises don't ring quite so true in real life, when Kesey begins his attempts to fulfill these deals.

Kesey finds himself caught between two camps, neither of which trusts him: the authorities on one side, and the Haight-Ashbury scene that has taken over the acid movement in Kesey's absence. Kesey begins to plan a great Acid Test Graduation in a large auditorium for Halloween night, but other leaders of the movement feel he is engaging in a power play, and eventually back out of the deal. Kesey finds himself with nowhere to hold the Graduation, and no Grateful Dead to play it. Instead, he begins to plan for something else.

He tells the Pranksters that they are going to hold the Graduation right in The Warehouse, the new "Rat shack." He tells them to invite all of the acidheads and Pranksters that have ever come along for the ride on the bus. They begin compiling a great list of all the characters from previous chapters, and try to decide how they are going to get them all there. The Pranksters go to work fixing up The Warehouse and preparing for the Graduation the next night.

There is a great buzz around town about the Graduation. Reporters and journalists from all over the country show up with tape recorders and cameras to document the ordeal. Even though The Warehouse is a complete dump, the Pranksters have rigged it with all the electronic equipment they could find, along with a stage and a new band to play the music for the event. Soon people begin pouring in, including the Hell's Angels and other acidheads from San Francisco, all curious to find out what this great party is going to be like. The music and lights begin, and some people take acid, but the Pranksters stay away from it.

Neil Cassady begins the ceremony, and all the lights go off. They build a crude altar by throwing junk into the middle of a big spotlight, the only light in the room, and Kesey gets on the microphone and tells them about the experience they had of moving beyond acid when they were in Mexico. The crowd doesn't seem to be really getting what Kesey is saying. Soon, some cops filter into the room, giving the whole party bad vibrations, but Kesey and Cassady are still trying to build up the ceremony without acid. They have the lights and the music...but people just aren't getting into it.

Soon people start clearing out of The Warehouse. Things aren't going as planned, and Kesey gathers all of the Pranksters around him in one last attempt to find a unified mind without having to take acid. They get very close, or so says Kesey, and the band breaks into an acid rock version of "Pomp and Circumstance." Cassady jumps onto the stage wearing nothing but khakis and a mortarboard hat, and begins handing out diplomas to all of the Pranksters. Most of the people who are left simply don't understand what is going on.

For the next few days rumors of what happened at the Graduation float around, and everyone seems to agree that the party was a disaster. The Pranksters move out of The Warehouse but leave most of their junk piled in an abandoned lot. The neighborhood petitions the mayor's office to have it cleaned up, and as the bulldozers come in to demolish the Day-Glo equipment and junk, the neighborhood passes from one time to another. Many of the Pranksters scatter to other places, though Cassady sticks around San Francisco. He shows up at an Acid Test one night, but it's a very different kind of Test than the ones the Pranksters used to throw. The faction of acidheads who want to link acid trips to Eastern religion have taken over, and the Test Cassady attends incorporates Indian music and ceremony. Cassady tries to get a more raucous party started, but no one seems to pay him any attention.

At a local club, The Barn, the remaining Pranksters come to play a set of music. The opening act is a group called The New Dimensions, and they are a throwback to the post-World War II era jazz of the Beat Generation. They are a good band, but the Pranksters wire up all their sound gear and start making strange noises. The New Dimensions get angry and leave, and the Pranksters take the stage with their strange music. They aren't really playing any songs, just taking acid and making noise, and soon the entire place clears out, even some of the Pranksters, until it is just Kesey and Babbs trading lines of unintelligible poetry and the line "WE BLEW IT!"

Three weeks later Kesey began the first of two trials for possession of marijuana. Both trials end in hung juries, and eventually Kesey pleads no contest to a lesser charge. He has to serve a few months in jail, after which he will work on the farm near La Honda. He takes his family back to Oregon, and they settle down there before he begins his sentence. The other Pranksters finally scatter, and Neal Cassady leaves for Mexico. A few months later, Cassady is found dead outside a small town. The cause of his death is unknown, though several witnesses say that he drank alcohol on top of barbiturates. Others say that he committed suicide. After completing his jail time, Kesey returns to Oregon, where he begins to write again and starts taking visits from several of the Pranksters. The bus, however, stays parked beside his new house.

Analysis

The Acid Test Graduation is a smashing failure. Kesey cannot get the acidheads on his side because they fear he sold out to the cops, and Kesey becomes a scapegoat for the legal problems some of them are beginning to face. What the Graduation really shows is that the LSD movement has grown bigger than Kesey and the Pranksters, and they no longer have control over it as they did before.

In a way, the Acid Tests were a massive success. Their goal had been to take the LSD experience to a bigger audience, and that is exactly what they achieved. By the time that Kesey begins the Graduation the national news media is there, ready to report. This is no longer an underground phenomenon: the whole world now knows about the Acid Tests and is eager to see what Kesey will do next. They are also curious to find out whether he will hold up his end of the bargain to move beyond acid, as he has promised the authorities.

The Graduation is a failure because for the first time in the book, Kesey makes a miscalculation. Kesey and Owsley have a heated argument over the nature of the acid movement in the first part of the chapter, during which Kesey says that the experience is not based around drugs and Owsley insists that it is. As it turns out, when Kesey tries to control the movement through the sheer force of his charisma, he fails. The movement is based around the drugs, and when the drugs aren't there, the movement cannot be sustained. Kesey is not able to turn his experience on LSD into a true religious experience because it cannot move beyond its attachment to LSD. The drug is essential.

As the book closes, the Pranksters begin to look like a sad group. Time, and the movement, has simply passed them by. Their demise signals the beginning of the end for LSD and the hippie movement in general, but the Pranksters are the first casualties. Cassady realizes that the Acid Tests have taken on a life of their own, and that he can no longer control their content or message. Kesey and Babbs' performance at The Barn is emblematic of their failure. Their music, though it once had power and made perfect sense to them, simply doesn't appeal to people anymore. In the end, the lights are turned out on them and they can do nothing but lament the fact that they had the opportunity to own the world and "blew it."

Perhaps the most tragic figure of the book is Cassady. He was the hero both of Kerouac's earlier novel and Kesey's great psychedelic adventure, but even though Kesey had hoped to create a kind of Nietzschean superman exemplified by Cassady, the reader sees that Kesey's vision of this future is a flawed one, and Cassady becomes more of a victim of his own fast-paced lifestyle than a hero in any meaningful sense. As the book closes, one is left to ponder whether the entire Prankster experiment was one big joke, after all.

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