The Chronology of Water - Lidia Yuknavitch [36]
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.