Conversations with Ken Kesey

Scott F. Parker, Scott F. Parker

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781626741201
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

Ken Kesey (1935–2001) is the author of several works of well-known fiction and other hard-to-classify material. His debut novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, was a critical and commercial sensation that was followed soon after by his most substantial and ambitious book, Sometimes a Great Notion. His other books, including Demon Box, Sailor Song, and two children's books, appeared amidst a life of astounding influence. He is maybe best known for his role as the charismatic and proto-hippie leader of the West Coast LSD movement that sparked "The Sixties, " as iconically recounted in Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. In the introduction to "An Impolite Interview with Ken Kesey, " Paul Krassner writes, "For a man who says he doesn't like to do interviews, Kesey certainly does a lot of them." What's most surprising about this statement is not the incongruity between disliking and doing interviews but the idea that Kesey could possibly have been less than enthusiastic about being the center of attention. After his two great triumphs, writing played a lesser role in Kesey's life, but in thoughtful interviews he sometimes regrets the books that were sacrificed for the sake of his other pursuits. Interviews trace his arc through success, fame, prison, farming, and tragedy—the death of his son in a car accident profoundly altered his life. These conversations make clear Kesey's central place in American culture and offer his enduring lesson that the freedom exists to create lives as wildly as can be imagined.

An Impolite Interview

Paul Krassner / 1971

From The Realist, Fall May/June 1971 (No. 90). © 1971 by Paul Krassner. Reprinted by permission.

Q: Okay. Let’s start off with a simple one. How would you distinguish between freedom and insanity?

A: True freedom and sanity spring from the same spiritual well, already mixed, just add incentive. Insanity, on the other hand, is dependent on material fad and fashion, and the weave of one’s prison is of that material. “But I didn’t weave it,” I hear you protest. “My parents, their parents, generations before me wove it!”

Could be, but when you’re a prisoner, the task is not to shout epithets at the warden, but to get out.

Q: Well, specifically, when you were in East Palo Alto, sitting in the back yard of the only white family in a black area, and there was a police helicopter hovering above you, and you wanted to shoot it down—now, even though you may not have meant that literally, can you stretch the fantasy enough to consider the possibility that you were being dogmatic when you chided Tim Leary for being Another Nut with a Gun?

A: Yes.

Q: Stop hemming and hawing . . . Is there anything you want to add to that?

A: I’m sorry that I used that phrase in my letter to Tim. I intended to be emphatic, not dogmatic, because I’ve had enough dealings with both ends of guns to feel qualified in making strong statements. I’ve shot ducks, deer, elk, geese, coyotes, and a hole in my grandfather’s kitchen ceiling, and I’ve been shot at by farmers, cops, and federales. All of it is negative energy. When I said the thing about the helicopter, what I meant was that the men manning these abominations had better take heed of a growing impatience with this kind of bullshit. I mean I had no thirty aught six with Enfield scope handy in the closet, but if I was, say, a black home-owner sitting out in his patio with his family, still, say, smarting from the burn of doing a hitch defending the sanctity of the American Dollar in Vietnam, and that racketing monstrosity started hanging out over my house fucking with my weekends, I might think, “Who the hell did I ever know up in a helicopter that wasn’t workin’ for the forces of slavery!”

That then it might cross my mind to get the gun out of the closet and clean it a little sitting out there in the sun under that motherfucking chopper, is all I was saying.

Q: It’s no accident that the initials of your protagonist in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest are R. P. M.—Revolutions Per Minute—and that you don’t take that word lightly, but where is your vision of revolution in relation to both Ho Chi Minh and Charles Reich?

A: Chuck and Ho? Naturally I can’t hope to under the circumstances with reference to each of their personal visions huh?

Q: I’m talking about the spectrum from Chuckie’s bell-bottoms to Ho’s anti-aircraft.

A: Ah. I see. Well, I think that either sticking a leg in a pair of bell-bottoms or loading a canister into an anti-aircraft weapon may or may not be a revolutionary act. This is only known at the center of the man doing the act. And there is where the revolution must lie, at the seat of the act’s impetus, so that finally every action, every thought and prayer, springs from this committed center.

Q: You’ve said, regarding the media, that if you follow the wires, they all lead to the Bank of America. Would you expand on that?

A: When you’ve had a lot of microphones poked at you with questions like “Mr. Kesey, would you let your daughter take acid with a black man?” “Mr. Kesey, do you advocate the underwear of the Lennon Sisters?” “Mr. Kesey, how do you react to the findings of the FAD indicating that patchouli oil causes cortisone damage?”—you get so you can follow the wires back to their two possible sources. Perhaps one wire out of a thousand leads to one of the sources, to the heart of the man holding the microphone, while the other nine hundred and ninety-nine go through a bramble of ambition, ego, manipulation, and desire, sparking and hissing and finally joining into one great coaxial cable that leads out of this snarl and plugs straight into the Bank of America.

Q: Would you care to speculate as to the motivation of performers like Paul Newman and Country Joe McDonald in contracting to lend their graven images to advertisements for Coca-Cola?

A: They need the money.

Q: In Sometimes a Great Notion, you had this idealistic logger in the role of a strikebreaker, and yet now, back in real life, you’re glad that the union has shut down the local paper and pulp mill. What’s made the difference—ecology?

A: Women’s Lib.

Q: Are you just being a smart-ass or do you mean that?

A: No, I mean Women’s Lib has made us aware of our debauching of Mother Earth. The man who can peel off the Kentucky topsoil, gouge the land empty to get his money nuts off, then split for other conquests, leaving the ravished land behind to raise his bastards on welfare and fortitude . . . is different from Hugh Hefner only in that he drives his cock on diesel fuel.

Women’s Lib was the real issue in Notion. I didn’t know this when I wrote it, but think about it: It’s about men matching egos and wills on the battleground of Vivian’s unconsulted hide. When she leaves at the end of the book, she chooses to leave the only people she loves for a bleak and uncertain but at least equal future.

The earth is bucking in protest of the way she’s been diddled with: is it strange that the most eloquent rendition of this protest should come from the bruised mouth of womankind?

Q: And yet, since you’re against abortion, doesn’t that put you in the position of saying that a girl or a woman must bear an unwanted child as punishment for ignorance or carelessness?

A: In as I feel abortions to be probably the worst worm in the revolutionary philosophy, a worm bound in time to suck the righteousness and the life from the work we are engaged in, I want to take this slowly and carefully. This is the story of Freddy Schrimpler:

As part of his training, a psychiatric aide must spend at least two weeks working the geriatric wards, or “shit pits” as they were called by the other aides. These wards are concrete barns built, not for attempted cures or even for attempted treatments of the herds of terminal humanity that would otherwise be roaming the streets, pissing and drooling and disgusting the healthy citizenry, but for nothing more than shelter and sustenance, waiting rooms where old guys spend ten, twenty, sometimes thirty years waiting for their particular opening in the earth. At eight in the morning they are herded and wheeled into showers, then to Day Rooms where they are fed a toothless goo, then are plunked into sofas ripe with decades of daily malfunctions of worn-out sphincters, then fed again, and washed again, and their temperatures taken if they’re still warm enough to register, and their impacted bowels dug free in the case of sphincters worn-out in the other direction, and their hair and cheesy old fingernails clipped (the clippings swept into a little pink and gray pile), and fed again and washed again, and then usually left alone through the long afternoons.

Some of these derelicts still have a lot going and enjoy trapping flies and other such morsels in the snare of their baited hands, and some engage in contented and garrulous conversations with practically anything, and some watch TV, but most of them lie motionless on the plastic covered sofas or in gurney beds, little clots of barely breathing bones and skin under the government sheets. Even the doctors call them vegetables.

In caring for these men something becomes immediately obvious to all the young aides undergoing their first real brush with responsibility. The thought is very explicit. After the first meal squeezed into a slack mouth, or after the first diaper change or catheter taping, every one of the trainees have thought this thought, and some have spoken it.

“Without our help these guys would die!”

And, after the hundredth feeding and diapering and changing, the next thought, though never spoken, is: “Why don’t we just let them die?”

An awful question to find in your head, because even young aides know that age can happen to anyone. “This could I someday be!” But even fear of one’s own future can’t stop the asking: Why don’t we just let them die? What’s wrong with letting nature take its own corpse? Why do humans feel they have the right to forestall the inevitable fate of others? Freddy Schrimpler helped me find my answer:

Freddy was seventy or eighty years old and had been on the Geriatrics Ward for close to twenty years. From morning until bedtime he lay in the dayroom in a gurney bed against the wall, on his side under a sheet, his little head covered with a faint silver gossamer that seemed too delicate to be human hair—it looked more like a fungus mycelium joining the head to the pillow—and his mouth drooling a continual puddle at his cheek. Only his eyes moved, pale and bright blue they followed the activity in the ward like little caged birds. The only sound he made was a muffled squeaking back in his throat when he had dirtied his sheets and, since his bowels were usually impacted, like most of the inmates who couldn’t move, this sound was made but rarely and even then seemed to exhaust him for hours.

One afternoon, as I made my rounds to probe with rectal thermometer at the folds of wasted glutinous maximus of these gurney bed specimens—hospital policy made it clear that the temperature of anything breathing, even vegetables, had to be logged once a month—I heard this stifled squeak. I looked up; it was Freddy’s squeak but since it was his temperature I was attempting to locate I knew that he hadn’t shit his sheets. I resumed my probing, somewhat timidly, for the flesh of these men is without strength and a probe in the wrong direction can puncture an intestine. The squeak came again, slower, and sounding remarkably like speech! I moved closer to the pink and toothless mouth, feeling his breath at my ear.

“Makes you . . . kinda nervous . . . don’t it?” he squeaked. The voice was terribly strained and faltering, but even through the distortion you could clearly make out the unmistakable tone of intelligence and awareness and, most astonishingly, humor.

In the days that followed I brought my ear to that mouth as often as the nurses let me get away with it. He told me his story. A stroke years ago had suddenly clipped all the wires leading from the brain to the body. He found that while he could hear and see perfectly, he couldn’t send anything back out to the visitors that dropped by his hospital bed more and more infrequently. Finally they sent him to the VA, to this ward where, after years of effort, he had learned to make his little squeak. Sure, the doctors and nurses knew he could talk, but they were too busy to shoot the breeze and didn’t really think he should exhaust himself by speaking. So he was left on his gurney to drift alone in his rudderless vessel with his short-wave unable to send. He wasn’t crazy; in fact the only difference that I could see between Freddy and Buddha was in the incline of their lotus position. As I got to know him, I spoke of the young aides’ thought.

“Let a man die for his own good?” he squeaked, incredulous. “Never believe it. When a man . . . when anything . . . is ready to stop living . . . it stops. You watch . . .”

Before I left the ward, two of the vegetables died. They stopped eating and died, as though a decision of the whole being was reached and nothing man or medicine could do would turn this decision. As though the decision was cellularly unanimous (I remember a friend telling me about her attempted suicide; she lay down and pl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chronology
• Ken Kesey’s First “Trip”
• What the Hell You Looking in Here for, Daisy Mae?
• Ken Kesey at N.D.E.A.
• The Evening Standard Interview: Ken Kesey
• Once a Great Notion
• An Impolite Interview
• Ken Kesey Summing Up the ’60s, Sizing Up the ’70s
• Ken Kesey: The Prince of Pranksters
• Getting Better
• The Fresh Air Interview: Ken Kesey
• Collaboration in the Writing Classroom: An Interview with Ken Kesey
• Comes Spake the Cuckoo
• Ken Kesey: Writing Is an Act of Performance
• An Interview with Ken Kesey
• Ken Kesey: The Art of Fiction No. 136
• Ken Kesey: Still on the Bus
• Ken Kesey’s Last Interview
• Index