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

that we've played the cops-and-robbers part of the game, you can go ahead and like me. And a lot of them in there go along with that, because that's all they know.
    "When you're running, you're playing their game, too. I was up in Haight-Ashbury and I heard something hit the sidewalk behind me and it was a kid had fallen out the window. A lot of people rushed up and a woman was there crying and trying to pick him up, and I knew what I should do is go up and tell her not to move him but I didn't.
    I was afraid I was going to be recognized. And then up the street I saw a cop writing out parking tickets and I was going to go up and tell him to call an ambulance. But I didn't. I just kept going. And that night I was listening to the news on television and they told about a child who fell out of a window and died in the hospital."

    And that's what the cops-and-robbers game does to you. Only it is me thinking it.
    Figuring out parables, I look around at the faces and they are all watching Kesey and, I have not the slightest doubt, thinking: and that's what the cops-and-robbers game does to you. Despite the skepticism I brought here, I am suddenly experiencing their feeling. I am sure of it. I feel like I am in on something the outside world, the world I came from, could not possibly comprehend, and it is a metaphor, the whole scene, ancient and vast, vaster than ...

    TWO GUYS COME IN OUT OF THE DAYLIGHT ON HARRIET
    Street, heads by the looks of them, and walk up to Kesey. One of them is young with a sweatshirt on and Indian beads with an amulet hanging from the beads—a routine acid-head look, in other words. The other one, the older one, is curiously neat, however. He has long black hair, but neat, and a slightly twirly mustache, like a cavalier, but neat, and a wildly flowered shirt, but neat and well-tailored and expensive, and a black leather jacket, only not a motorcycle jacket but tailored more like a coat, and a pair of English boots that must have set him back $25 or $30. At first he looks like something out of Late North Beach, the boho with the thousand-dollar wardrobe. But he has a completely sincere look. He has a thin face with sharp features and a couple of eyes burning with truth oil. He says his name is Gary Goldhill and he wants to interview Kesey for the Haight-Ashbury newspaper The Oracle, and when could he do that—but right away it is obvious that he has something to get off his chest that can't wait.
    "The thing is, Ken"—he has an English accent, but it is a middle-class accent, a pleasant sort of Midlands accent—"the thing is, Ken, a lot of people are very concerned about what you've said, or what the newspapers say you've said, about graduating from acid. A lot of people look up to you, Ken, you're one of the heroes of the psychedelic movement"—he has a kind of Midlands England way of breaking up long words into syllables, psy-che-delic move-ment—"and they want to know what you mean. A very beautiful thing is happening in Haight-Ashbury, Ken. A lot of people are opening the doors in their minds for the first time, but people like you have to help them. There are only two directions we can go, Ken. We can isolate ourselves in a monastery or we can organize a religion, along the lines of the League for Spiritual Discovery"—the League for Spi-ri-tu-al Dis-cov-ery—"and have acid and grass legalized as sacraments, so everyone won't have to spend every day in fear waiting for the knock on the door."
    "It can be worse to take it as a sacrament," Kesey says.
    "You've been away for almost a year, Ken," Goldhill says. "You may not know what's been happening in Haight-Ashbury. It's growing, Ken, and thousands of people have found something very beautiful, and they're very open and loving, but the fear and the paranoia, Ken, the waiting for the knock on the door—it's causing some terrible things, Ken. It's re-spon-si-ble for a lot of bad trips. People are having bad trips, Ken, because they take acid