The Electric Kool-Aid Rorschach Test, by Tom Dinard

I’m writing a book. It’s the story of another man’s life, in his words. He’s not a writer. He’s a professional athlete. We met when he played for a team I covered as a member of the media. He called me a few years ago and asked me if I wanted to write the book with him, and I agreed. Now it’s getting serious. We have the ear of a literary agent and I’m plotting out chapters and doing two-hour interviews and recording the conversations and trying my best to put onto the page a perfect combination of his speaking voice and my writing. It’s going slowly.

A few weeks ago, I decided to do what I always do when I’m stuck with the daunting, looming threat of a large writing assignment that is expected to move, intrigue, possibly impress readers and students of the craft, and then generate income — hopefully in life-altering amounts:  I head down to the freezing office/library I’ve shackled together in the partially finished basement of my house, I pick out a single book by a great writer that I haven’t read but have a reason to believe might better connect me with the imminent task I’m confronting, and I muscle through it, hoping that pyrotechnics, maybe a symphony or two, and the sweet flood of confident creation will ensue. At the very least, it’s a hell of a way to procrastinate.

So I chose Tom Wolfe’s “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” which I somehow had not even opened despite being intermittently urged to tackle it throughout high school, my college-stoner-road-trip days, the six years living in the San Francisco Bay Area (routinely passing the haunts of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, the protagonists so wonderfully depicted in every one of the book’s groundbreaking chapters), and the close to two decades of being employed as a so-called “journalist.”

Maybe deep down I knew why I hadn’t read the book. Maybe deep down I knew that Wolfe, by being a ballsy, white-tuxedoed martini-and-shit stirrer, a man who instantly gained the unbreakable trust of his subjects, and a writer and reporter with boundless talent and instinct, had a swashbuckler’s movie of a life full of what I envy the most: the freedom, through time and money, to turn ideas, whimsy, experimentation and experience into guaranteed mass publication.

So yes, I knew full well that “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” would whack me in the back of the head with a two-by-four while kicking me squarely in the nuts. And yes, I read it anyway, even under the guise of “inspiration.” And yes, after digesting every one of its horrifyingly brilliant words over the course of twenty or so nights with nothing but blankets to protect me from the soul-jacking spirits descending, I will cop to some serious jealousy.

The first thing that pissed me off was how lucky Wolfe was to even be alive in the time and place he described. He was a masterful mosquito, sure, but he also happened to be crawling up and down the most exalted windows of the 1960s, peering in with bookish bloodlust as history unfolded. He was smart and lucid enough to be taking notes as budding legends of the counter-culture movement in the United States — Kesey, Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, Jerry Garcia and Timothy Leary, just to jot down a handful — were accelerating their minds, artistic abilities and profound powers of persuasion further, and his prose shouted to the galaxies how fucking fortunate he knew he was.

The second key to my gradual decline into literary depression came from the fact that I didn’t even have to isolate a specific passage of “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” to prove how much better Wolfe was at writing than I’ll ever be.  He didn’t simply chronicle the famed bus trip of the Pranksters and segue it into rollicking tales of drug use, parties with the Hell’s Angels, a Beatles concert at the Cow Palace gone awry, free love, Vietnam protests, the notorious “Tests” referred to in the title, Kesey’s multiple arrests and a doozy of a bender in Mexico. He birthed a visceral chameleon of a story in which he unapologetically and necessarily wheeled from past to present tense and back, laughed heartily at notions that there even exists such a thing as proper :: :: punctuation (!!!), mixed in poetry, cited obscure philosophical tie-ins that you could figure he found in an underground stone library near Ararat, and managed to pull the reader into the pulse of the ‘60s and into the enlightened brains of the full-on “heads” who were zonked out of their gourds on Owsley’s finest.

I found that I could open the book with my eyes closed, point at a page as if picking a place to visit on a globe, and pinpoint a paragraph that was far beyond the greatest literary accomplishments of my future: “He came back to the house at dark, into the yard, and there were a million stars in the sky, like tiny neon bulbs, and you could see them between the leaves of the trees , and the trees seemed to be covered with a million tiny neon bulbs, and the bus, it broke up into a sculpture of neon bulbs, millions of them massed together to make a bus, like a whole nighttime of neon dust, with every particle a neon bulb, and they all vibrated like a huge friendly neon cicada universe.” That one’s on page 87, by the way.

The moment I finished the book, I was ready to call up my prospective athlete co-author and tell him to quickly find another partner. I was ready to take a job in corporate public relations and use words like “stakeholder” and “vis-à-vis” all day. I was ready to start DVR’ing “So You Think You Can Dance” to spend my nights doing anything but writing. And I was ready to fashion the hardback spine of Tom Wolfe’s “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” into a penitentiary-style shiv and pile-drive it right into my solar plexus.

I couldn’t sleep, so I limped out of bed and into the family room, where I pulled my laptop out from under the sofa. My inbox had one new item — an email from a colleague who happens to be a brilliant writer responding to a piece I had sent him for edits and feedback.

His response: “Holy fuck this is good … I didn’t change much, just some little piddly shit. … I love reading your work … it crushes me and makes me jealous all at the same time.”

I smiled and read the email again. And again. And again.

I wrote back and thanked him, telling him — honestly — that his writing made me jealous, too, and that it’s strange how this happens and that it’s probably a good thing.

The next morning, my wife noticed me heading back to the basement with “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” in my hand.

“You finally finished that, huh?” she said.

“Yeah.”

“Well, it took you long enough. How was it?”

“Awesome,” I said.

“Inspiring.”

***

Tom’s on the bus right here …

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