Lynn Jeffress
Neil Lidstrom
Hal Powers
Jane Sather
Charles Varani
Meredith Wadley
Ken Zimmerman
Lidia
Twelve last ditch disciples and me.
How I walked through the door of the 1988-89 collaborative novel writing workshop with Ken Kesey was that my writer friend Meredith Wadley grabbed my hand and marched me into the class without anyone’s permission. Meredith seemed to me like a cross between a gorgeous and complex Faulkner character with only the faintest hint of a southern drawl, and a wealthy English equestrian champion. Meredith had a mane of dark hair and even darker eyes. In her eyes there were electrical sparks. On the day the “class” was to begin we were drinking beers in her apartment. I admit it. I was jealous. Almost choke on beer jealous. When it came time for her to go to the class, she said, “Enough crappy things have happened to you. Come with me.”
I said, “What? That’s crazy. I’m not in the MFA program. I’m not even a grad student. They’re not going to let me enroll.”
If you look us up on Wikipedia it says the book we wrote was written collaboratively by Kesey and “13 graduate students.” I was not an MFA student. I was an undergraduate sort of trolling in English and sleeping with lots of humans and riding the drug train and drinking drinking drinking. My athlete body was gone. I had grown big tits and something called “hips.”
I had a huge hunk of permed blond hair. I wasn’t an accomplished writer. I wasn’t an accomplished anything. The only thing I was good at was being a drunk or high cock tease, as near as I could tell. Why would they let me into their group? Why would Kesey?
“Bullshit,” Meredith said, “Kesey is going to love you. Trust me. Plus you are a good writer. You already know half the people in the class. And anyway, you think Kesey gives a rat’s ass about U of O rules?”
Blushing like an idiot, I let her march me down the road between the U of O and the Kesey house that would serve as the classroom for the year, and through the front door.
Sitting at a huge table were the disciples.
My throat shrunk to the circumference of a straw. I thought I might barf.
“Everyone, this is Lidia,” Meredith said.
Great. Now I get to stand here like a moron and explain myself. I just stood there with a little ticker tape running inside my skulclass="underline" thisiskenkeseythisiskenkesey. The books my father gave me. Sitting in a dark theater with my father watching the films. Paul Newman in Notion. Cuckoo’s Nest.
Kesey, who was at the far end of the room, walked his barrel of a body straight over, pulled out a chair for me, and said, “Well HELLO. What do we have here? A triple A tootsie.” It was the first time I’d seen him not in a photo or at some Oregon literary event. The closer he came, the more nauseous I felt. But when he got right up to me, I could see the former wrestler in his shoulders and chest. His face was moon pie round, his cheeks vividly veined and flushed, puffy with drink. His hair seemed like cotton glued in odd places on a head. His smile: epic. His eyes were transparent blue. Like mine.
My face got hot and the top of my head itched and all the others in the room looked like writers with special MFA badges while I felt like a human match. Like I might burst into a puny orange flame. While everyone was laughing about the tootsie remark he leaned down and whispered in my ear, “I know what happened to you. Death’s a motherfucker.”
In 1984, Kesey’s son Jed, a wrestler for the University of Oregon, was killed on the way to a wrestling tournament when the team’s bald-tired van crashed. My baby girl died the same year. Close to my ear, he smelled like vodka. Familiar.
He handed me a flask and we got along and bonded quickly the way strangers who’ve seen aliens can. That’s all it took. No one ever questioned me, least of all Kesey. It was brilliantly incomprehensible to me. I loved it.
I was 25.
The first day of the collaborative novel writing workshop, Kesey brought out a brown cigar box and asked Jeff Forester to roll a joint. Jeff Forester had beautiful bleached brownblond curly hair and translucent eyes and tan skin. He looked like a surfer to me. But with a wicked vocabulary and mucho skill with words. Jeff didn’t seem to bat an eyelash, he just rolled a perfect fattie, and Kesey began talking his Kesey talk, which began, “I’ve always hated sitting in a room with writers.”
Bennett Huffman took a large toke from the christening joint and passed it. Bennett Huffman was tall and thin and light skinned. His quietness mesmerized me. While we were smoking in a round, Bennett closed his eyes, lost the color in his face, and fell to the ground — almost in slow motion. Passed out cold. I don’t remember who expressed alarm. It was maybe a woman. Like maybe we should call someone or do something. Beautiful Bennett there on the floor.
Kesey simply stepped over our comrade’s body and kept talking, pausing only to say, “He’ll be OK” Looking at us like don’t you know that? It happens all the time. The distance between the 60s and 1988 was as wide as an ocean. You could tell by our clothes, the beer we drank, the I’m a U of O duck looks on our faces. There was no psilocybin, mescaline, or LSD glittering on the surface of our skin. There was no CIA-financed study on the effect of psychoactive drugs. To my knowledge, only one of us had been to rehab or jail, and I wasn’t talking.
In my head I laughed my ass off while I sat and tried to write weird sentences so I wouldn’t embarrass myself. I’d never been in any “class” like that in my life. But I’d failed several classes, and I’d flunked out of college before, and I’d been to institutional houses for bad behavior or instability already by then in my life, so this house seemed at least safe to me compared to the tyranny of others.
That first day we free-wrote in the house somebody — maybe Bochner — said, lamely, “I can’t write on the spot like this.” Bochner was sort of an aggressive hippie — the tree hugger with weaponry type. Kesey said: “Then write like a terrorist just busted in and threatened to kill you all — like you have a semiautomatic machine gun at your skull.” And looked at us like we should already know that.
Kesey laid forth two rules: first, we could not talk the plot of the novel with anyone outside of the class; second, Kesey comprised 50 percent of the class. Later a third rule materialized: there could be no writing outside of class. Why? Because we’d do what Oregon writers do and become enamored with our individual voices.
Like with all cult famous folks, everyone in the collaborative novel writing class wanted to be the one Kesey liked best. But since we spent an entire year with him, that energy dissipated at least a little. We saw all the prescription medication he was on. We saw the true size of his gut. We saw how bad his allergies could get. We saw how much he slept. How he smelled. How little energy he seemed to have. How his eyes, when he drank, and he always drank, looked like swollen vodka marbles.
Still, his aura filled the room no matter what the room was. At a reading at U of O during that year he stood on a table and screaming into the microphone “Fuck You, god, Fuck You!” The crowd of about 500 burst into cheers. He believed in spectacle. In giving people the show.
In the fall of the year of Kesey I felt like an awkward jerkette most of the time. When we met as a group my ears kept getting hot and I’d make lines of sweat between my legs and sweat cups under each breast. I didn’t know how to feel close to a group. My only model of group interaction was my dreaded Oedipal family death house. And swim teams. You don’t talk to anyone when you are underwater. My distinguishing character — istics felt like tits and ass and blond. Sexual things. All I had.
I didn’t feel like a terrorist was going to bust in and kill me, but I did feel like some kind of academic authenticity police were going to bust in and cuff me and say you, you don’t belong here. You are not enrolled. You’re not even in the writing program. Look at all that … hair. But it didn’t happen. I just wrote things down on pieces of paper, like everyone else did.