Kesey & Me

Who or what first inspired you to write?

I’ve always believed the reading experience is not only subjective, but highly situational. By that I mean that reading The Catcher in the Rye at fifteen is a fundamentally different experience than reading it at forty. Because while books do not age, their readers, and the world their readers inhabit, surely do. And when the right book and the right reader meet at the right time under the right circumstances, magic happens.

I first read One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in high school, probably around 1972. I read Sometimes a Great Notion, Ken Kesey’s epic second novel, shortly thereafter. Both books explore similar themes of the individual struggling against dark forces of conformity and convention. For a sixteen-year-old suburban kid from Long Island with one eye on his homework and one eye on the highway, they were just the right books at just the right time. They were, in a word, magical.

To this day I consider Great Notion – which I’ve re-read at least a half-dozen times – one of the greatest of all American novels. But Ken Kesey, a Colorado native, was more than just a talented novelist. He was also a cultural icon whose raucous real-life exploits are masterfully chronicled in one of the best works of New Journalism, Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Kesey was an iconoclast, a provocateur, and an American original.

In 1974-75, during my freshman year at the University of Southern California, I took an English lit course taught by a young grad student who shared my affinity for all things Kesey, and who assigned Great Notion as part of the curriculum. Needless to say, we hit it off. And so it happened that, one day toward the semester’s end, she pulled me aside to tell me that Kesey himself would be addressing a faculty-only symposium on campus, and would I like to meet him if she could arrange it?

The meeting took place in the late afternoon, outside the batting cage at USC’s Dedeaux Field. After some mumbled supplication on my part, which I’m sure embarrassed the both of us, our conversation turned to his writing, and to the Merry Pranksters, and eventually to the subject of Neal Cassady.

Cassady, for the uninitiated, was the Dean Moriarty character immortalized by Jack Kerouac in his Beat Generation opus On the Road. He later appears in sources ranging from Allen Ginsberg’s Howl to Hunter S. Thompson’s Hells Angels. And in 1964, when Kesey and his acid-tested band of proto-hippies took to the road in their magic bus, it was with Neal Cassady at the wheel.

Kesey told me a Neal Cassady story that day outside the backstop. I don’t know if it’s ever before been recorded. I don’t know if it’s true, or embellished, or merely apocryphal. (I once heard of a Kesey autograph and inscription on a Cuckoo’s Nest first edition that reads, “None of it really happened, but it’s all true.”) Whatever the case, the point that the story was intended to illustrate was Cassady’s instinctive genius for reading and understanding people.

Here, for what it’s worth, is the story, exactly how I remember it:

We were driving in a car one night on a winding mountain road outside La Honda with Cassady behind the wheel and me riding shotgun. It was a car that I think Cassady had stolen. He’d been drinking, he had an expired license and several outstanding warrants, and there may have been some pot in the glove compartment. The car had four bald tires and a broken headlight. We were speeding. And then a cop car appears out of nowhere and lights us up from behind.

Cassady considers running for it, but he decides to pull over. The cop parks behind us with his lights on. Cassady watches carefully in his side-view mirror as the cop gets out of his car and dons his Smokey Bear hat. He’s got a military crew-cut and a crisp new uniform with sharp creases. He walks with an erect bearing as he approaches the driver’s window with his flashlight. He asks Cassady for his license and registration, neither of which Cassady has.

‘Yes sir, officer!’ Cassady replies, a little too anxiously. He fumbles for his wallet and removes something – maybe a library card. And just as he’s about to hand it over, he sneezes – a great big ‘Achooooo!’ right into the cupped hand holding the card.

The cop leans away from the window. He shines his light on the card for just a second. No way he’s going to touch it. ‘Slow down on this road at night,’ he grumbles, and marches back to his car. We live to fight another day.

Within a few months of our meeting, the film version of Cuckoo’s Nest appeared in theaters worldwide. And although it would win all of the so-called “big five” Academy Awards (Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Director, and Best Screenplay), not a single Oscar recipient mentioned Kesey in his or her acceptance speech.

I had a dog-eared Cuckoo’s Nest paperback in my pocket that afternoon at USC. I was almost too shy to ask, but Kesey graciously signed it. I have it still, on a shelf behind the desk where, over forty years later, I spend my days writing fiction. And today I’m pleased to have the opportunity to publicly credit the man whose life and writing helped inspire my own second career.

Thank you, Kenneth Elton Kesey.

 

Chuck Greaves is the author of five novels, most recently Tom & Lucky (Bloomsbury), a Wall Street Journal “Best Books of 2015” selection and a finalist for the 2016 Harper Lee Prize. You can visit him at his website.