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
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
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