After All These Years – Excerpt
Buy it here: Powells
Ken Kesey lumbers through the door of his house, laughing, talking, harumphing, shaking the persistent Oregon rain from his plaid golfer’s cap. He’s wearing jeans, a fuchsia and yellow tie-dyed T-shirt and, under his work boots, fire engine red socks. Behind him trail Pranksters Zonk, Babbs and Hagen. In the kitchen, Faye is brewing tea.
It could be 1964, when day-glo field marshal Kesey led his psychedelic troops on the cross-country bus trip that both symbolized and heralded the coming counterculture. It could be 1968, when Kesey, fresh out of jail from a marijuana conviction, returned to the family farm, parked the bus aIongside the barn, wired the trees for sound and gathered the Prankster survivors around him.
But it isn’t. It’s 1988. And Ken Kesey-52, balding, with grown kids and a 60-acre farm-is still at it.
“I’m a member of the tie-dye mafia,” he says. His grin is at once beatific and goofy. “And my belief is: Ya nevah quits da mob.”
Kesey’s mob, in fact, is pretty much intact. The key Pranksters moved to Oregon with him twenty years ago, and they’re still there, partying, picnicking, planning political stunts, musical extravaganzas and cultural blowouts.