Forester says writing a novel with Kesey was serious fun, anyhow. "I mean, the class was a party. Being around Kesey was a constant party." The first day of class, Kesey assigned Forester to roll joints for the seminar; one student sparked up and passed out. "Fell to the groundout cold. One student says, 'Omigosh, is he OK? We should call someone!' Ken just stepped over the body and handed me the joint and just kept talking. Ken said, 'Aw, he'll be OK.'" A couple of minutes later, he was. "The first class, you pass outhow cool was that?" says Forester.
The Caverns pot party both was and wasn't cool for Kesey's career. It generated scant literary buzz, but did get him back in the habit of sitting down and writing, twice a week. Sailor Song and the other autumnal books that Caverns freed him up to write can't match his first two, but they have their fans. "There are those fleeting moments of startling imagery, or well-observed events that gleam like the shards of a once-great but now shattered talent," says Weddle. "Unfortunately, too much of the book is dominated by that glib, self-consciously clever, alliteration-happy voice of Kesey's later years. He was aware of the problem."
Graham Barclay / BWP Media / Getty Images
Kesey: like Faulkner
Graham Barclay / BWP Media / Getty Images
Kesey: like Faulkner
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KESEY MEETS BIG NURSE
In May 1992, Bennett Huffman accompanied Ken Kesey at a reading of his award-winning children's story
The Sea Lion in the aquarium auditorium in Newport, Ore. "This woman came up to him and said, 'Do you remember me?' He said, 'People do this all the time to me. Give me a hint.' 'The hospital,' she said. 'Which hospital?' 'The VA hospital.' He said, 'Omigod!'" It was his old boss, the original Big Nurse.
"She was a tiny little woman, too. The novel gives the impression she was big. He said, 'Oh, I can't believe itthat was the Big Nurse!' And he was really scared. He didn't usually get scared."
"Ken was absolutely tongue-tied," Kesey's wife, Faye, told Book magazine. "And she laughed and said, 'Don't feel bad about that. I learned a lot from that book. No nurse wants to be like that.'"
Think about it: Cuckoo's Nest actually converted its villainess from militaristic martinet to enlightened hipster. Presumably, she never took the Acid Test, but if he didn't win her over to the psychedelic side, he evidently enlisted her as some sort of ally in the fight against the socially repressive cultural norms he called "the Combine." T.A.
BOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS STORY:
*
Kesey's Jail Journal, by Ken Kesey, introduction by Ed McClanahan (Viking, $34.95)
*
Spit in the Ocean: All About Kesey, edited by Ed McClanahan (Penguin, $15)
*
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest: 40th Anniversary Edition with illustrations and a new introduction by the author, by Ken Kesey (Viking, $24.95)
*
Sometimes a Great Notion, by Ken Kesey, introduction by Ed McClanahan (Penguin, $14.95)
*
Caverns, by O.U. Levon (pseudonym for 13 University of Oregon grad students) and Ken Kesey (available at
www.key-z.com/books.html for $35 signed, $7 unsigned)
*
Dog Soldiers, by Robert Stone (Mariner, $13)
*
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, by Tom Wolfe (Dimensions, $14.95)
Not yet published:
* Writing Under the Influence, by Jeff Forester and others
* Untitled Kesey memoir, by Robert Stone
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Literary vice wasn't his main problem. Ominously, Caverns made Kesey revert to old notions of composing. "At the end when we were kinda getting to crunch time," says Forester, "it seemed like Ken was in the office 24/7, and there was this little vial that was stashed in a corner cabinet that had some, I think it was like grain alcohol or something that had some speed in it. Just a couple of drops of that in your drink or your coffee, and it was days, you know, and we just kinda churned through this thing and it really affected his health. By the end of the class he ended up in the Mayo Clinic."
In the end, acid had nothing to do with Kesey's fate. His liver failed, thanks to cancer following hepatitis C, which also killed Kesey's pals Ginsberg and Steve "Zonker" Lambrecht, who inspired Doonesbury's Zonker. Most people get hepatitis C from promiscuous sex (not Kesey's thing) or needles. Kesey's Jail Journal talks about his injections of speed. But his ultimate enemy was alcohol. "That's the horrible truth, that Ken drank himself to death," says Forester. "Even after he found out he had hepatitis C, he kept drinking. He had diabetes but he kept drinking, and he just wasn't gonna stop. Weddle once asked him, 'Did drugs ruin you?' He said, 'No, I know what's done me harm, and it's not LSD or marijuana, it's too many vodka martinis.' So he was self-aware, unlike most addicts." Like Carrie Fisher, he sought mind expansion and pain reduction only to wind up with pain expansion and mind reduction. Weddle, the biographer of Sam Peckinpah, compares Kesey to that cinematic genius who also self-destructed on drugs and booze. "At his funeral, Peckinpah's close friend Robert Culp said, 'Let's not obsess over all the movies he never got to make. Let's instead rejoice over the fact that there is a Wild Bunch at all. That he managed to get it made is a miracle, given the odds against it.'" McClanahan insists that Kesey smuggled plenty of miracles past his demons. "I mean, 11 books, including two indisputably great ones, ain't badfor the record, I think the jailbook ranks a close third."
In the end, it's crucial to consider Kesey's work in terms of its influence on people, because he was essentially social, a performer who could not long endure the solitary writer's life. No doubt the reality-scrambling potations he touted did harm to some, but his imagination could also rescramble reality for the better. One Oregon mental patient reportedly lost his Billy Bibbit-like crippling stutter as a result of the inspirational effect of working on the Cuckoo's Nest film. Paul McCartney says Magical Mystery Tour was inspired by Kesey. His entire life can be seen as the most influential bus ride since Rosa Parks'.
In Spit in the Ocean, Krassner relates how he and Kesey very nearly died by falling in the ocean in 1971: They climbed into a tunnel carved into a cliff during World War II (so lookouts could scan the ocean for enemy ships), found a "meek little mouse" in the tunnel, and blew hashish smoke into its face until the mouse reared up and squeaked in protest. "This display of mouse assertiveness startled us, and we almost fell off the cliff." What a perfect death! Better than John Lennon's near death during Sgt. Pepper, when he took a handful of aspirin that turned out to be acid and came within inches of walking off Abbey Road's rooftop, exclaiming, "Look at the stars!" Kesey looked at the people instead; he inhaled in order to exhale insurrectionary orders, rallying the suburban mice of the Earth to rise up and roar in rebellion.
tappelo@seattleweekly.com
