An Afternoon with Ken Kesey
by David Loftus
Ken Kesey, flanked by Ed McClanahan on the left and
Ken Babbs on the right; Further II in the background
all photos by Michael J. Lessner
courtesy of the News-Review
It was clear I was gonna have to wing it.
This wasn't a standard press conference or interview. Our host wandered from painting the bus to feeding the salmon to answering the insistent telephone. Neighbors and friends kept coming through to rap.
So I tossed all my hours of preparation, of reading his recent books and drawing up a list of interview questions and putting them in the best order, out the window.
He wasn't inclined to play the celebrity any more than I was eager to impersonate a journalist. I decided just to go with the flow, look and listen, and see what happened.
I threw in the Tao, you might say.
And Ken Kesey swept me along.
"Before we had the whale, we had him touching Godzilla. That didn't work, so then we tried Donald Duck. He didn't work either, so now we have Adam and Humphrey."
Kesey is pointing to the right side of an old school bus in the front yard of his Pleasant Hill farm where Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel Adam is reaching out to touch . . . not God but the flukes of a whale's tail.
Pogo, the comic strip possum, floats above the door in a balloon. The Cowardly Lion, the Scarecrow, Dorothy, the Tin Woodman, and Toto follow the yellow brick road. The Silver Surfer glides along the left rear corner. Diatoms drift into fish and lizards, then into an Egyptian pyramid in a sort of capsule account of evolution. There's the inevitable Grateful Dead sticker skull logo.
Across the fenced balcony atop the bus a banner reads: "Smithsonian or Bust."
The famous Merry Pranksters bus, a 1939 International Harvester dubbed "Furthur" when Kesey bought it, has been refurbished and repainted for its final trip into history.
Splashed with day-glo paint in abstract blotches, the bus made an epic voyage across the nation the summer of 1964, equipped with acid-laced orange juice, video and sound gear, and an odd assortment of passengers.
That trip was immortalized in Tom Wolfe's 1968 book, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, which took Kesey beyond the well-known author of two Oregon novels -- One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Sometimes a Great Notion -- to apparent spokesman for the restless searching and experimentation of the 1960s.
"Wolfe was real good," Kesey says. "It's hard for people to understand how good he was. He didn't have a tape recorder and he didn't take notes." Like a Scientologist who seems to take in everything but doesn't hold up his side of the conversation, Kesey suggests of Wolfe, "his eyes are wide open and he doesn't blink."
The subsequent glare of publicity, however, and a marijuana bust with a flight to Mexico and a stint in San Mateo jails, was more than Kesey could bear. He returned to Oregon in 1968 and settled on the farm in Pleasant Hill, where he has lived ever since.
The bus trip also was captured on film. The resulting footage, dubbed "The Movie," provided a backdrop for some of the famed "acid tests" of the mid-1960s. "The Movie" -- which Kesey says is currently being mined for ideas by Talking Heads singer David Byrne -- has resurfaced in book form as The Further Inquiry, Kesey's new book, presented as a screenplay examining the event. Due out in December is "an Indian myth that I made up" called Shula and the Red Sea Lion.
Of Shula, along with Barry Lopez's new book, Crow and Weasel, Kesey says, "It's the oldest and newest thing in literature: people gathering around campfires and telling about animals."
Besides publicizing the book, Kesey is going on the road again to deliver the bus to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. The caravan is due to arrive in Roseburg Monday.
The Smithsonian had been interested in the bus for quite a while, Kesey says, although he hasn't talked to anyone specific in recent months.
"Further" is not only correctly spelled now (with a personalized "FURTHR" Oregon plate), but sports cohesive pictures instead of its original color blotches, three working horns, a CD player, and a cellular phone so the caravan can talk to anyone.
Kesey made sure all the lights were working and an AAA sticker was prominently displayed.
"I'm behind enemy lines," he says in a sly reference to the war on drugs. "This bus would be an excellent trophy for a deputy sheriff in Fresno."
The spirit of play permeates an afternoon with Kesey and friends. At my suggestion that he resembles a pirate with the purple hanky tied on his head and the parrot on his shoulder, he has a friend fetch an old sword and takes some jaunty poses atop the bus.
But it's not just his lust for life, it's play that questions the essence of things many of us automatically take too seriously.
When Kesey took the bus to the last Eugene Celebration, he filled it with school children in sailor's hats, who burst into a rendition of The Beatles' "Yellow Submarine."
"Suddenly the song had a strong ecological statement to it," Kesey recalls. "The earth is all we've got; we're pinned on it. We're all on the Yellow Submarine. That's ecological, global consciousness that says our resources are limited, we have to live together, we have to pay attention to the air and the water, we have to develop a relationship with the animals.
"This thing with the spotted owl. Whether you're for or against the spotted owl, suddenly every owl ranks! It's not a minor-league animal anymore. What we're finding out is that this is a whole lot more delicate tapestry than we used to think."
Despite having cleaned up and prettified the bus, Kesey's attitude toward drugs, the government, and radical ideals hasn't changed.
"If our government had its wishes, it would have Baptists coast to coast, all the same. Our job is to keep alive Buddhists, and satanists, and witches, and Hell's Angels, and scorpions and rattlesnakes and the blues -- and all that stuff government would like to do away with because they're an irritant."
As for the much-vaunted war on drugs, he notes, "The Constitution is written on hemp. Now we're eroding our Constitution to pursue this war on drugs. The issue is not whether we buy drugs, but who we buy 'em from. They want us buying from them."
Halcion, a legal depressant, gave Kesey and many other Americans health problems, he says. "It was the biggest selling drug in the world for a while. You'd have been a hell of a lot better off with a slug of whiskey. We know that's bad for ya, but we know in what way it's bad for ya."
Kesey ridicules Oregon Attorney General Dave Frohnmayer for pursuing a case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court "to keep from paying unemployment to two 70-year-old Indians because they admitted taking peyote. Nobody ever abused peyote in the history of the world!"
There was Wednesday morning's news, of course, which pitted Kesey's alma mater against his old buddies who furnished the soundtrack for the acid tests of 1965.
"[The University of Oregon is] way out of line. The Dead were as good as they could be last time. If they're not going to let the Grateful Dead in Autzen Stadium because it might send a message that we're soft on drugs, it seems to me that they ought to stop school tours through the House of Representatives because it might send a message that weÕre soft on child perversion." In Washington, D.C. for the PEN/Faulkner awards two months ago, Kesey noticed nude cherubs on the cupola of the Capitol: "When is Jesse Helms gonna raise his eyes and see those babies with their dicks hangin' out? God I hate that phrase, 'send a message.'
"Whenever anybody wraps himself in a flag, you can bet he's a fascist. Nobody else does it but fascists. But it's beginning to fray on Bush and the other Republicans."
Kesey says he was uncomfortable when he encountered the likes of Robert Stone, Jerzy Kosinski, and Norman Mailer (not to mention himself) all in tuxedoes at the PEN/Faulkners: "We sold out. You wouldn't have seen Woody Guthrie there. Faulkner would have stayed home and said, 'I got another two days to drink.' We betrayed the mission of the writer, which is always to defend the small. The large can hire public relations people. To be caught kissing up to the government. . . ." He shakes his head.
Even icons need a little fossil fuel now and then:
Further II at a service station in Roseburg
Then there is the potential war with Iraq over Kuwait. Kesey says that as the personnel and machinery sit in the desert running up a tab, President Bush is forced to talk tougher and tougher because too many Americans are growing bored and want some action. "You go to a porno flick, you want to see a come. We want to see some kind of orgasm in the sand. We paid for it."
Kesey says he hopes the recent TV documentary on the Civil War may have gone a ways toward rubbing viewers' noses in the ugliness of war.
For inspiration, Kesey says he's lately drawn it from the collected works of Thomas Paine. "Such clear, clean stuff! He's equating slavery with the women's movement, and we haven't moved one inch beyond that."
The Sixties, especially the crowd that Kesey hung out with, are experiencing a resurgence. His neighbor and fellow Prankster Ken Babbs has just published On the Bus, and several books are due out on Neal Cassady, the man Jack Kerouac portrayed as Dean Moriarty in On the Road, including an oral history being compiled by Kim Spurlock. Cassady drove "Furthur" on the 1964 voyage, and figures prominently in Kesey's new book.
"The flow of that [period] really has never been interrupted," he says. "It's risen into the light, and the media sees it, and then it drops out of sight for a while."
Kesey and his crowd, from Babbs to Ed McClanahan, both of whom are going on the latest bus ride, bridged the gap between the beats and the hippies. "We really were neither one. I aspired to be a beat, but I never was one. I really never aspired to be a hippy. We were a particular, funny transitional avatar at that time."
Kesey doesn't even dwell on the setbacks of Reaganism, or whether things will get better in the 1990s.
"The truth is that we are losers. You make enough fuss that you attract the real forces down on you. And then you have to hide. We're always gonna be in the minority, and we're always gonna lose. We've always lost, all through history. We're the divine losers. And I keep inviting all these young, smart people: 'Come with us. Lose with us. Lose beautifully. We are not meant to win.'
"If we had triumphed like we thought we were going to in the '60s, we would have become assholes like the rest of them. There's something about winning that makes you an asshole. When you're a loser, you have to scuffle and you have to keep your head down. The meek ain't gonna inherit shit.
"The democratic majority has never come up with one good scientific theorem in their life. It always comes from one person who everybody thinks of as wrong, and then they burn him. But 20 years later everybody says, 'Hey, you know, that guy was right that we burned.'
"There are always gonna be more dumb people than smart people. That's the bane of a democracy. I wouldn't change it -- I don't want a communist government. But the smart person is always going to end up last. The smarter he is, the laster he is gonna end up. But it only takes one. It only takes one Pythagoras. It only takes one Galileo. It only takes one Hoffman, who comes up with the acid. It spreads out from him.
"Here's the quote I always use. You can count the number of seeds in an apple, but you can't count the number of apples in the seed. It only takes that one seed. And then the thing sprouts and lives."
On the bus on Interstate 5, leaving Roseburg and in the shadow of Mt. Nebo
[Note: Versions of this interview appeared in the Roseburg, Oregon News-Review, entitled "Trippin' Again," on October 28, 1990; and in Willamette Week, Portland, Oregon, under the title "Thus Spake Kesey: an aging Prankster's guide to the galaxy," on November 22, 1990. I have combined the best of both pieces in the above version.
[I did not mention in either piece that Ken Babbs, neighbor, author, and veteran of the original 1964 Merry Prankster cross-country trip aboard "Furthur," and Ed McClanahan, also an author but not one of the original Pranksters, were also hanging out on the ranch that day. Somewhere I have a photo of me standing with the three of them. At one point, Kesey found an old rusty sword, tied a rag around his head, and climbed on the roof of the bus to take some piratical poses with both. I saw a suitably dramatic photo from that shoot in Esquire magazine with a short piece written by McClanahan sometime in the ensuing year.
[The bus described in this story turned out not to be the original 1939 Harvester known as "Furthr," which reportedly sits moldering somewhere on the back forty of the Kesey farm, but a spruced-up newer model, maybe a '47. When word got out about that, the Smithsonian decided it didn't want it.]