135 It was left to Marty, who was by then perhaps a little gassed, to do the job. “I think the common man is probably on your side. You know, it’s ironic that over fifty percent of the American people believe in flying saucers. But I doubt ten percent of them believe the CIA is in control. But all of the rational evidence points out to me”—Marty suddenly spoke in headlines—“THAT THEY PROBABLY ARE.” As an irradiated gold standard of bohemia—an isotope whose hand was sure on the joy stick during key flights to the stratosphere—Kesey had here behind his balding fleecy head a laminated dollop of a man with whom he could confide. “I feel that the Venusians are real. And they are the bad guys. But—that people with more power than we have, have those forces covered. I felt like, after being there in Egypt and talking to certain people, that those guys— those arcane forces—have those otherworldly villains under their thumb.” ****** Long before being resurrected as a progressive savior from a metaphysical time gone by, Kesey had, like Ernest Hemingway before him, promoted himself from literature to fame. Hemingway had hot-rodded nihilism, understatement, “life style,” and celebrity to achieve, with his safari suit iconography, brand name recognition. By the 1950s, Hemingway was as recognizable as a stop sign. Writer promoted to product. But unlike that legendary literary lion, Kesey saw a much larger life than Letters. For like his sometime mentor Tim Leary, Kesey understood what America wanted in 1965 was a magic sacrament to enfranchise a new religion—acid had told him so, and all you had to do was take one look around the psychedelic Neverland that was Kesey’s Stanford digs at Perry Lane to see that young America was ready for a new divinity. A religion not of God, but of the self. An “acid Christian” crucified as underachieving psychedelic superman—Kesey liked to recite: Of offering more than what I can deliver, I have a bad habit, it’s true. But I have to offer more than what I can deliver, To be able to deliver what I do. Which would be, of course, the Holy Grail. A job that—if not God—at least fate had created for him. Hippie he-man Kesey waxed poetic like a prophet from a nihilistic Bible Belt, a perfect poster boy for flower-powered liberation and godless heavenly ideals. Opinions vary. “I have great love and affection for Ken Kesey,” Tim Leary said. “I have a deep sense of brotherhood and companionship for Ken Kesey. I have seen him as very Protestant and quite moralistic, and quite American in a puritanical way. And basically untrustworthy, since he is always going to end up with a Bible in his hand.” Fitting perhaps for a man who got shit on his shoes milking cows, and was a friend of rural remedies. “I’ve used cornstarch on my balls for years,” Kesey told Krassner. “Y’know how it is when you’re swarthy anyway and maybe nervous like on a long freeway drive, or say you’re in court when you can’t unzip to air things out, and your clammy old nuts stick to your legs? Well, a little handful of plain old cornstarch in the morning will keep things dry and sliding the whole day long. Works better than talcum and don’t smell like a nursery.” A wearer of the coat of many colors, like no writer, hippie, or messiah I’d ever heard
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The Cenacle | 79 | October2011