A great good friend and great husband and father and granddad, he will be sorely missed, but if there is one thing he would want us to do it would be to carry on his life’s work. Namely to treat others with kindness, and if anyone does you dirt forgive that person right away. This goes beyond the art, the writing, the performances, even the bus. Right down to the bone.

- Ken Babbs (Merry Prankster and close friend of Ken Kesey)

The trickster with the key to the rainbow gate passed away last week. A guide to many, his tender hand held our shaken one, until we could comprehend the visual madness of it all. He gave us a literary masterpiece in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, turned a CIA project into a million-strong vision quest with the dispensing of LSD, and made many believe that there was real skin underneath the required suit and tie.

Ken Kesey was a symbol of the 1960s, a merry prankster who told the whole world to lighten the hell up. Without him, Chief Broom would have never suffocated the system, and Jerry Garcia would probably have become the leader of the jug band movement.

“His belly was hurting and the docs did a scan and found a black spot on his liver,” said Ken Babbs. “It was cancerous but encapsulated, which meant there was no cancer anywhere else. They decided to cut it out and the surgery went OK. He had 60 percent of his liver left to carry the load, but in one of those dirty tricks the body can play on you, everything else went to hell and this morning at 3:45 a.m. his heart stopped beating.”

I didn’t like Ken Kesey when I first heard of him. I was barely 14, penniless, and begging my dad to buy me a copy of Stephen King’s Pet Semetary.

“I’ll buy it for you,” he told me, “but first you have to read two books that influenced me.”

I imagined rolling my eyes and agreed to his terms. The next day, a copy of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, and Kesey’s One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest awaited me on my bed. My brain barely filtered either book. Stephen King was my morbid hero, and nobody, not even stupid old Chief Broom, was going to sway my opinion.

Eight years later, I learned the definition of “further.” I had discovered the Grateful Dead and everything was changing — hair, music, opinions, politics, rediscovered pheromones, and literature. One of the required readings of a wannabe hipster was Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, a somewhat condescending (but entertaining) look at Kesey, the bushwhacker of the 1960s revolution. In the early ‘60s, Ken and his band of Merry Pranksters had introduced the world to LSD and dispensed it with the flair of an ice cream truck driver.

“This is the same Ken Kesey?” I asked, recalling the man who was once a brick wall between Mr. King and me.

Oh yes, the same one who bought a 1939 International Harvester school bus to drive himself and the Pranksters to New York to see the World’s Fair in 1964. The paint job on the bus looked like a blind man’s rant on paintcans. Day-Glo was applied with brooms spray, feet, hands, and unidentified body parts. Speaker Systems were put up everywhere around the bus to capture every moment of the trip.

The word “Further” was painted on the destination shield in a shamanic intent to keep the bus rolling. Kesey even hired Neal Casady (who inspired the character, Dean Moriarity in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road) to be the cross-country chauffeur. Riders wore costumes, painted themselves, and ingested tons of LSD. The intention was noble  to expose the world to an alternative lifestyle and show that not everything revolves around the 9-5 rat race. Ken saw no wrong in their intentions. LSD was a way to see through the mirror and understand that life had a lot more innards than what was on the outside. Kesey believed his message was boiled down positive, and he felt a duty to administer to the “blind.”

“That stuff that happened in the ‘60s,” he told Todd Brendan Fahey. “All of us who were part of it ... you can tell when you break new ground. If you’re a farmer, you can tell that this sod has never been broken before, the plow is laying open great, purple earth and something comes out of it and you can smell it. It wasn’t just me. It was not anybody. It wasn’t rock and roll; it wasn’t art; it wasn’t cinema or dance. Something was happening at that time, and it was a wave that some of us were able to surf on. And none of us started the wave; I don’t think there’s any way you could start the wave. The wave is still going.”

The tidal began in California and flowered east. America was not sure how to take these freaks in jester clothing and their “non-linear conversations.” Tom Wolfe called it “tootling the multitudes”  referring to the way a Prankster would stand with a flute atop the bus’ roof and puff sounds to imitate people’s diverse reactions to the bus.

“The sense of communication in this country has damn near atrophied,” Mr. Kesey told an interviewer from Publishers Weekly after the bus arrived in New York City. “But we found as we went along it got easier to make contact with people. If people could just understand it is possible to be different without being a threat.”

Strange coming from a guy who grew up as all American as a cobbler cooling on a windowsill. Ken Elton Kesey was born on Sept. 17, 1935, in La Junta, Colo., the older of two sons born to the dairy farmers Fred A. and Geneva Smith Kesey. Early on, his family migrated to Springfield, Oregon, where his father founded a prosperous marketing cooperative for dairy farmers, the Eugene Farmers Cooperative. Springfield is where Kesey learned to become the rugged outdoorsman that Tom Wolfe later described as having “an Oregon country drawl and too many muscles and calluses on his hands.” Despite the suburban surroundings, Kesey and his brother learned to box, wrestle, hunt, fish, swim, and even brave the rapids of the local rivers on inner-tube rafts.

The wilderness made Kesey into a hulking specimen, and he became the Darwin poster child of his high school  football star, wrestling guru, and even being branded “most likely to succeed” in his graduating class in 1953.

This spilled over into the University of Oregon, where he was immersed in sports, fraternities, and even college plays. His gift for the grapple got him the Fred Lowe Scholarship for the most outstanding wrestler in the Northwest. The white picket fences and the two kids weren’t far behind when Kesey married his high school sweetheart, Norma Faye Haxby, in May 1956.

The American Dream was in full swing in 1957 when Kesey and his wife moved to Perry Lane, the bohemian section of Palo Alto. He had won a writing scholarship to Stanford’s coveted graduate writing program and was already bending minds with his prose. His work would progress rapidly, thanks to a little part-time job at the lab.

His buddy, Vic Lovell, was a graduate student in psychology who informed Kesey about drug experiments at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Menlo Park that were paying $75 a session to volunteer subjects. Kesey guinea-pigged in for financial reasons. The psychomimetic drugs (i.e. LSD and mescaline) were supposed to bring on states related to psychosis. Instead, Kesey felt emancipation. Everything was transparent under the drug. The swirls of hallucinogenic dyes revealed wisdoms underneath. Visions were tribal, and Kesey was a changed mortal.

He forgot about his first book, End of Autumn (a never published book about college athletics), thanks in part to a giant Indian who paid him a visit one night. Ken had taken a job as a night attendant on the psychiatric ward of the hospital. Boredom at the night ward meshed with curiosity of the unknown had Kesey popping hallucinogens like orange Tic Tacs. His “hyper focus” observations revealed that the patients were not receiving the therapeutic care necessary for mental replenishment. His aggravation at the system was manifested into raw angry prose and became the rough outline for One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest.

However, he needed a lodestone, a central character or symbol, to make sense of his ranted scribbling. One night, while high on peyote, he envisioned (As Tom Wolfe described) “a full- blown Indian  Chief Broom  the solution, the whole mothering key, to the novel.”

The epiphany of Chief Broom, despite not knowing anything about American Indians, gave Ken a “ditch character” between the two warring factions: on the inmate side was Randle Patrick McMurphy, a flamboyant fellow who fought the draconian ward system; and on the other, the leader of the authoritarian system, Big Nurse Ratched, the starched white tyrant who ends up lobotomizing McMurphy. Chief Broom’s schizophrenic mental state (thanks to the author’s frequent altered mind) allowed Kesey to uplift the hospital (which Chief Broom called “the Combine”) into a metaphor of repressive America.

Cuckoo’s Nest became a manual for folks who saw the smudge under America’s polish. Released by Viking Press in 1962, the novel became an instant classic. Time Magazine called it a “A roar of protest against middlebrow society’s rules and the invisible Rulers who enforce them.” The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael wrote, “The novel preceded the university turmoil, Vietnam, drugs, the counterculture. Yet it contained the prophetic essence of that whole period of revolutionary politics going psychedelic.”

I didn’t know until now that Kesey hated the Oscar-winning movie. He disapproved of the script, and thought the thespian deity Nicholson wrong for the part of McMurphy. He fervently believed that the producers, Michael Douglas and Saul Zaentz, had not lived up to handshake deal he had made with them. He sued them for 5 percent of the movie’s gross and $800,000 in punitive damages and eventually agreed on a settlement. He died without ever watching the movie.

Ken, however, created his own little movie, known as The Electric Kool Aid Acid Tests. He had been smuggling large quantities of LSD out of the labs and having huge parties at his place in Perry Lane. Somehow, the hallucinogen kept finding its way into large vats of kool aid. The parties started to spiral out of control and the law started poking around. Fueled by paranoia (and a touch of common sense), Kesey used his money that was coming in from Cuckoo’s to buy a home in La Honda with his wife and three children. An exodus of revelers followed him — some inspired by the book, others for the taste of the liquid that made you question everything. Kesey strung up speakers and cameras all over his property to catch the 24-hour trip.

All dignified members of the woodwork began showing up. One evening, the Hell’s Angels (despite his friend’s pleading not to) showed up and were dosed by the rueful Pranksters. Many thought hell would unleash, but a memorable night bonding between the hipsters and the Angels was captured on camera. The bikers got up the next morning, thanked their merry hosts, and rode away without so much as a scuffle (although two years later Kesey was beaten by several bikers).

The popularity of the cross-country trip attracted many to the La Honda home. Kesey started bringing his altered brew down to San Francisco. Kesey and Company organized “happenings” at local halls (which was kept secret up until the last moment). The only requirement was to get as weird as possible. The greeter at the front was a big garbage can full of “Electric Kool Aid.” Once ingested, the reveler would be exposed to all things uncanny  strobes, haunting feedbacks, random film clips, costumes, and anything else to enhance the spectacle.

At the center of this freaking out was a struggling psychedelic blues band known as the Warlocks. They too had drank from the can, and their dives into the musical unknown turned the Kool Aid Tests into stuff of legends (at least for those who could remember the next day). The LSD changed the house band’s music, and eventually the name Warlocks got chucked in favor of the Grateful Dead.

However, just like any good party, someone has to crash it sooner or later. The government decided that LSD was harmful and made it a felon to possess it.

“People don’t want other people to get high, because if you get high, you might see the falsity of the fabric of the society we live in,” Kesey told Fahey. “We thought that by this time that there would be LSD given in classes in college. And you would study for it and prepare for it, you woulded have somebody there who helped you through it; you would know what to sing, where to be, how to stand out among the trees. We were naive. We thought that we had come to a new place, a new, exciting, free place; and that it was going to be available to all America. And they shut it down.”

The celebrated author had become a celebrated public enemy, and he fled to Mexico to escape the cuffs. When he came back to the country in 1967 (after attempting a faux death), he was arrested for marijuana possession and served six months on a work farm. Ken decided it was time to settle down after the incarceration and moved his family to a farm in Pleasant Hill, Oregon.

For the next 30 years he raised livestock, grew blueberries, and practiced magic. He joined school boards; ran a Web site, Intrepid Trips; edited a magazine, “Spit in the Ocean “(founded in 1974) and worked on completing the films and tapes of the bus trip. He coached wrestling at several local schools and taught a graduate writing seminar at the University of Oregon, where he collaborated with 13 students on Caverns, a mystery published in 1990 under the pen name O. U. Levon.

One thing he could never shake, though, was that taint of celebrity. Ken shied away from being called the “first hippie,” and he kept his bus hidden on his property. Despite his writing prowess, he could never surmount One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest.

“The thing about writers is that they never seem to get any better than their first work,” and, “this bothers me a lot,” he once told an interviewer. “You look back and their last work is no improvement on their first. I feel I have an obligation to improve, and I worry about that.”

He shouldn’t have. His personal crowning achievement came when Little Tricker the Squirrel Meets Big Double the Bear, which he wrote from an Ozark mountains tale told by his grandmother, was included on the 1991 Library of Congress list of suggested children’s books.

The child that leaves most of us had stayed with Mr. Kesey.

In the last year, hallucinogens had taken a backseat. Last April, he and his close friends had gone on their annual Easter Sunday hike up Mount Pisgah, near his home. For the first time in more than three decades, Ken declined the taste of LSD for the upward pilgrimage. He was on medication for both diabetes and hepatitis C, and felt the extra drug would do a disservice.

“I felt like I was high enough just walking up the hill with nothing but adrenaline,” he told The Times Union of Albany. “Besides, I figured I ought to try making the hike at least once without psychedelics. The past few years that’s been about the only time I’ve taken acid, and even then not much. Just enough to make the leaves dapple.”

For many, he showed the dapple on everything-inward and outward. And up to his death, he believed that society was beginning to see through his optimist focals  “I really did have a sense that what we were doing was important,” he told Fahey. “Historically important, in a way that still hasn’t been understood or recognized. [pause] The Sixties aren’t over; they won’t be over until the Fat Lady gets high.”

As I rummaged around in search of the perfect soundbite for Kesey, I came across an article that had a quote from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. It defines Mr. Kesey and his intentions with the world. It’s hard to say if he knew that he was writing a psychological profile at the time, but the similarities between him and McMurphy stir chills.

“I think McMurphy knew better than we did that our tough looks were all show, because he still wasn’t able to get a real laugh out of anybody. Maybe he couldn’t understand why we weren’t able to laugh yet, but he knew you can’t really be strong until you see a funny side to things. In fact, he worked so hard pointing out the funny side of things that I was wondering a little if maybe he was blind to the other side, if maybe he wasn’t able to see what it was that parched laughter deep inside your stomach.”

Kesey is survived by his wife, his daughters, Shannon and Sunshine, and three grandchildren.

(Hunter Pope can be reached at w.h.pope@worldnet.att.net)

 

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