The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe

  Except for Hagen’s girl, the Beauty Witch. It seems like she never even gets off the bus to cop a urination. She’s sitting back in the back of the bus with nothing on, just a blanket over her lap and her legs wedged back into the corner, her and her little bare breasts, silent, looking exceedingly witch-like. Is she on or off the bus? She has taken to wearing nothing but the blanket and she sheds that when she feels like it. Maybe that is her thing and she is doing her thing and wailing with it and the bus barrels on off, heading for Houston, Texas, and she becomes Stark Naked in the great movie, one moment all conked out, but with her eyes open, staring, the next laughing and coming on, a lively Stark Naked, and they are all trying to just snap their fingers to it but now she is getting looks that have nothing to do with the fact that she has not a thing on, hell, big deal, but she is now waxing extremely freaking ESP. She keeps coming up to somebody who isn’t saying a goddamn thing and looking into his eyes with the all-embracing look of total acid understanding, our brains are one brain, so let’s visit, you and I, and you mean, but do you-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-ueeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee”—finishing off in a sailing tremulo laugh as if she has just read your brain and it is the weirdest of the weird shit ever, your brain eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee—

STARK-NAKED

in a black blanket—

Reaching out for herself,

she woke up one morning to

find herself accosted on all

sides by    LARGE

                 MEN

surrounding her threatening her

with their voices, their presence, their always

desire reaching inside herself

and touching her obscenely upon her

desire and causing her to laugh

and

         LAUGH

with the utter

ridiculousness

of it...

—but no one denied her a moment of it, neither the conked-out bug-eyed paranoia nor the manic keening coming on, nobody denied her, and she could wail, nobody tried to cool that inflamed brain that was now seeping out Stark Naked into the bouncing goddamn—stop it!—currents of the bus throgging and roaring 70 miles an hour into Texas, for it was like it had been ordained, by Kesey himself, back in San Juan Capistrano, like there was to be a reaction scale in here, from negative to positive, and no one was to rise up negative about anything, one was to go positive with everything—go with the flow—everyone’s cool was to be tested, and to shout, No, no matter what happened, was to fail. And hadn’t Kesey passed the test first of all? Hadn’t Babbs taken Gretchen Fetchin, and did he come back at either one of them uptight over that? And wasn’t it Walker who was calling La Honda from the Servicenters of America? All true, and go with the flow. And they went with the flow, the whole goddamn flow of America. The bus barrels into the superhighway toll stations and the microphones on top of the bus pick up all the clacking and ringing and the mumbling by the toll-station attendant and the brakes squeaking and the gears shifting, all the sounds of the true America that are screened out everywhere else, it all came amplified back inside the bus, while Hagen’s camera picked up the faces, the faces in Phoenix, the cops, the service-station owners, the stragglers and the strugglers of America, all laboring in their movie, and it was all captured and kept, piling up, inside the bus. Barreling across America with the microphones picking it all up, the whole roar, and microphone up top gets eerie in a great rush and then skakkkkkkkkkkkkkkk it is ripping and roaring over asphalt and thok it’s gone, no sound at all. The microphone has somehow ripped loose on top of the bus and hit the roadway and dragged along until it snapped off entirely—and Sandy can’t believe it. He keeps waiting for somebody to tell Cassady to stop and go back and get the microphone, because this was something Sandy had rigged up with great love and time, it was his thing, his part of the power—but instead they are all rapping and grokking over the sound it made—“Wowwwwwwwww! Did you—wowwwwwww”—as if they had synched into a never-before-heard thing, a unique thing, the sound of an object, a microphone, hitting the American asphalt, the open road at 70 miles an hour, like if it was all there on tape they would have the instant, the moment, of anything, anyone ripped out of the flow and hitting the Great Superhighway at 70 miles an hour—and they had it on tape—and played it back in variable lag skakkkkkk-akkk-akkkk-akkkoooooooooooo.

  oooooooooooooooooooooooooo—Stark Naked waxing weirder and weirder, huddled in the black blanket shivering, then out, bobbing wraith, her little deep red aureola bobbing in the crazed vibrations—finally they pull into Houston and head for Larry McMurtry’s house. They pull up to McMurtry’s house, in the suburbs, and the door of the house opens and out comes McMurtry, a slight, slightly wan, kindly-looking shy-looking guy, ambling out, with his little boy, his son, and Cassady opens the door of the bus so everybody can get off, and suddenly Stark Naked shrieks out: “Frankie! Frankie! Frankie! Frankie!”—this being the name of her own divorced-off little boy—and she whips off the blanket and leaps off the bus and out into the suburbs of Houston, Texas, scoops him up and presses him to her skinny breast, crying and shrieking, “Frankie! oh Frankie! my little Frankie! oh! oh! oh!”—while McMurtry doesn’t know what in the name of hell to do, reaching tentatively toward her stark-naked shoulder and saying, “Ma’am! Ma’am! Just a minute, ma’am!”— 

  —while the Pranksters, spilling out of the bus—stop. The bus is stopped. No roar, no crazed bounce or vibrations, no crazed car beams, no tapes, no microphones. Only Stark Naked, with somebody else’s little boy in her arms, is bouncing and vibrating.

  And there, amid the peaceful Houston elms on Quenby Road, it dawned on them all that this woman—which one of us even knows her?—had completed her trip. She had gone with the flow. She had gone stark raving mad.

RIP Larry McMurtry, June 3, 1936 — March 25, 2021