I got the closest to Jeff and Bennett. Maybe that opening scene somehow imprinted on me — Jeff carefully rolling the joint. Bennett passing out like a reverse miracle.
The things I remember about everyone else are retinal flashes — how white Hal’s hair was. How lithe Robert walked. How Jane’s mind and sharp green stare intimidated me. How I wished Lynn had been my mother — a better more magnificent drinker than my own had been. How heavenly Meredith’s ass, how Bochner became our Judas, how Charles became a cop and James had an impressive vocabulary to go with his blazing red hair, how Zimmerman appears elsewhere in this book.
In the winter of the year of Kesey we all went to his coast house near Yachats together. A run down old place with wood paneling, a crappy stand up shower, a table with some chairs, and no heat. But the front windows looked out onto the ocean. And of course the rooms were filled with Kesey. We drank, we walked on the beach, we listened to Kesey stories. Look I’d tell you the stories but you already know them. And he’d say the same ones over and over again. We were, simply put, a pile of new ears. At the coast house we listened to stories about Tim Leary and Mason Williams and Jerry Garcia and Neal Cassady. At the coast house we got high, some of us fucked some others of us, we wrote in little notebooks. We slept on the floor in sleeping bags. We waited for something to happen.
I’m not sure if this is true; I’d have to call all 12 of them and take a poll. But I think we had a dumb hope the whole year. Our hope had nothing to do with the not very good at all book we were collaboratively writing. I think our hope was that Ken Kesey would write another perfect book. That he still had one in him and that we could somehow get it out. But all he kept doing was drinking. No amount of our getting high with him or walking the beach with him or listening to his stories could resurrect the man within the man.
Sometimes a Great Notion and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest are on my bookshelf next to As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury, and Absalom, Absalom. Some books take your breath away. Is it the books, or the writers? When I hold Kesey’s books in my hands, when I open them, I can hear his voice. I can see him. Smell him. Feel him. But it’s the words that take my breath. Isn’t that enough?
In the spring of the year of Kesey, on Easter, we walked up Mt. Pisgah to Jed’s resting place. Some of us were high on pot and some of us dropped acid and some of us ate mushrooms. And always Kesey drank from a flask. At the top the wind shuddered the leaves of trees. The mound of grass hill like one of Kesey’s shoulders. I liked being up there. Jed underneath us. I felt most alive near death anyway. I just didn’t talk about it much. Except a few times with Kesey. We embraced up there at one point.
Toward the end of the year of Kesey at his house in Pleasant Hill he showed all 13 of us video clips of Neal Cassady. I think Babbs brought them over. Some of us were high on pot and some of us dropped acid and some of us ate mushrooms. And always Kesey drank. Faye was in the kitchen, then she went to church. We sat on the floor we sat on old stuffed chairs we sat on a sunken couch.
When Neal Cassady came on the screen my chest filled with butterflies. He looked and acted exactly like a Kerouac sentence. The close up face of Neal Cassady … all that random quixotic fantastic gibberish and eye shifting and head bobbing and facial tic-ery … it was beautiful. Still though it seemed unreal, or surreal. We were nothing in the face of history but a bunch of waiting ducks. Someone could have picked us off one at a time in a pond. I sat there and wished our watching meant more.
I turned to look at Kesey watching Neal Cassady. The look on his face. Sitting there in the dark with the last ditch disciples. His smile was crooked — an inside joke kind of smile. His eyes narrowed. He chuckled once or twice. Then I saw him rub his forehead — no doubt a migraine — but in the glow of Neal Cassady it looked to me more like a man trying to rub out time.
The whole experience made me feel like Alice in Wonderland. How was it again I was in a room with Ken Kesey watching a video of Neal Cassady with a group of people who were “writers?” Who were we? After the video Ken talked a little and we asked him a few questions. Then he had to go to bed. It was 4:30 p.m. I felt like we’d failed at something but I had no idea what.
The end of the year of Kesey culminated in a reading and reception for the book in Gerlinger Lounge at U of O. We all wore 1930s vintage clothing to mimic the characters in the book. We drank peppermint schnapps one at a time from Kesey’s flask, which sat up at the podium like a flag of his disposition. We’d been interviewed by People. We’d had a photo in Rolling Stone. There were a few parties after that. I barely remember them.
My father actually flew up to Eugene from Florida to attend the reading. He sat in the audience in a $400 grey twill suit. He looked proud. Of something. In Kesey’s presence. When I was born, we lived in a house in the hills over Stinson Beach. 1963. Close enough to ride a bike to La Honda, where Kesey began his parties and acid tests the same year.
When it was my turn to read I drank from the flask and looked out at the audience. My father’s steely architectural gaze. His unforgettable hands. Then I looked at Kesey. He pinched his own nipples and smiled and made me laugh. At the end of the reading my father shook Kesey’s hand and said “I’m a great admirer of yours.” I knew it was true. I watched their hands press together.
When he met Kesey, my father’s voice tremored. In parting, Kesey said to my father, “You know, Lidia can hit it out of the park.” Having gotten as far as a tryout with the Cleveland Indians, that meant something to my father. The phrase, I mean.
The relatively crappy novel that came out of us, Caverns, was inspired by an actual news clipping, an Associated Press story on October 31, 1964 entitled “Charles Oswald Loach, Doctor of Theosophy and discoverer of so-called ‘SECRET CAVE OF AMERICAN ANCIENTS,’ which stirred archaeological controversy in 1928.” Set in the 1930s, Loach is imagined as a convicted murderer who is released from San Quentin Prison, in the custody of a priest, to lead an expedition to rediscover the cave.
It isn’t a very good novel. Whatever it was we entered, it wasn’t a novel. And if we followed an ex-con priest into a cave, all we found was sea lion excrement.
I don’t know if the posse would agree with me on this, but it seemed to me like what we’d entered that year was an ending. The most extreme part or point of something. Or a small piece of something that is left after it has been used. Or perhaps it was simply Kesey’s last act — to further his own end.
Every Oregon writer has a Kesey story. I’m serious — go to literary readings in Oregon and 85 percent of the time his name will rise, whether or not whoever is speaking knew him. Sometimes it’s about his house in Pleasant Hill. Sometimes it’s about the bus. Sometimes it’s about writing. Sometimes it’s about his “wild spirit.” Often, if I’m in the audience, it gives me a stomachache to hear his name used in such … soft and impotent ways.
I think that everyone that knew Kesey knew him differ — ently. Maybe that’s true about all larger than life people, or it may be that no one really ever knows them at all — we just have exper — iences near them and claim them as our own. We say their names and wish that something intimate is coming out of our mouths. But intimacy isn’t like in books or movies.