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With his apostles—a group of hippies who called themselves the Merry Pranksters—Kesey set out on a manic, sometimes terrifying, sometimes comic trip through and "beyond catastrophe" to the eternal "Edge City." LSD, Methedrine, DMT and pot were taken like communion wafers in a psyche-bucolic setting of redwood trees. Wolfe describes the scene, which was wired for folk-rock music and painted with luminescent colors:
"Suddenly, a whole bed, an old-fashioned iron bedstead, a mattress, a cover, but all glowing with mad stripes and swirls of orange, red, green, yellow Day-Glo. Then a crazed toy horse in a tree trunk. Then a telephone—a telephone—sitting up on a tree stump, glowing in the greeny deeps with beautiful glowing cords of many colors coming out of it. Then a TV set, only with mad Day-Glo designs painted on the screen. Then into a clearing, a flash of sunlight, and down the slope, here comes Kesey. He has on white Levi's and a white T-shirt. He walks very erect and his huge muscled arms swing loose. The redwoods soar all around."
Mass Baptism. Kesey and his apostles then began a pilgrimage which turned into a crusade. It was a trip aboard a 1939 International Harvester schoolbus, also paint-splashed and electronically amplified, from La Honda to New York City and back. The idea was to make converts and generally freak out the American countryside. The nation survived.
Later, Kesey and the hip Pranksters staged a mass baptism, with hundreds of people, some unknowingly, sipping Kool-Aid spiked with LSD. When Kesey was busted by the California police for possessing marijuana, he fled to Mexico. Suffering in the jungle wilderness, he wrestled with the temptations of the devil. Would he keep the faith? Finally, he returned to California to face his crucifixion in the courts. (He spent five months on a penal work farm, has since given up acid, and is now in Oregon writing a novel.)
Wolfe captures it all, the hilarity and the horror. But the trouble with this bacchanalian bible is that none of the characters seem like the live people they were and are. Wolfe never explains the real Kesey but is satisfied with presenting him as a comic-strip guru, prophet of psychedelia, and mind-blown messiah, rolled into one, acid-consuming, cosmic force. Perhaps that is the flaw in much of Wolfe's writing. In his effort to come to terms with these phenomena, he often distorts more than he reveals. His mixed-media word show, boosted with screaming audio amplification, is well-suited to the hyped-up hallucinatory scenes of the acid generation. But the relentless speed of Wolfe's electronic wordmobiles some times makes the reader wish for a few rest-stops this side of catastrophe.