That can't be Kesey they wheeled away from Sacred Heart in Eugene, Oregon, last November, like hauling off the corpse of some lobotomized savior in a movie about lunatics. Kesey was much bigger than that. Younger. Louder. Handsomer too. Looked kind of like Paul Newman, some said, before Kesey lost his hair, and that middle-age spread set in. And those hands--folded like doves' wings as some orderly rolled him away, no doubt.

Listen up. I knew those hands. They contained worlds, man. They bled two novels onto the page that may never be surpassed.

Read 'em and weep. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Sometimes A Great Notion. Brassy, voluptuous, tender and, yes, sometimes vulgar books, not what you'd call PC at all.

Yet subtle too. Subtle as voices of doves. Subtle as new moons and heat lightning.

Ah, what Kesey could do with voice and perspective. He proffered gifts and notions that made him a writer's writer. That first book--published in 1962--made you want to give up reading and writing, except for the haunting idea that lightning might strike again. Read on. Write on. Further. You read his later books wishing Kesey had turned out more classics, but he had nothing left to prove after all. He attained immortality with those early works, and if not with them, then with the movement he started. A movement that changed the world if the truth be admitted.

Kesey dead? You might as well say Captain America died that day. Or Santa Claus. Buddha. Jesus even. Tepid descriptions buried inside newspapers and magazines following Kesey's death scarcely resemble the man who once slew giant timber and hauled driftwood logs up off wild Oregon beaches, and midwifed dairy calves for most of sixty-six years. Such descriptions don't account for those hands, after all:

A wrestler's hands that grappled their way to a Big Ten crown and alternate on the U.S. Olympic team.

Hands that transformed a family barn into home for generations of Keseys and also a pilgrimage shrine--destination for seekers after truth of one sort or another.

Hands that dug a grave in 1984 for Kesey's own son, Jed, killed, understand, in a bus accident while on his way to compete in a college wrestling match.
Kesey's fingers were the thick, deft digits of a magician who could make coins disappear and who--take a deep breath now...

Wrestled the wheel of a 1930s-vintage psychedelic bus back and forth across this country several times in the sixties, with a little help from his friends.

Wired California warehouses and clubs into electrified palaces that conjured revolutions in music, fashion, art, lighting and social mores.

Clutched a microphone as Kesey carney-barkered the Grateful Dead and other bands into existence.
Grasped an iron ladder and heaved himself aboard a moving train one afternoon in Old Mexico, just before the authorities would have nabbed him in the middle of a desert.

Those hands hauled his brawny hide out of harm's way more than once while on the lam for drug charges both trumped up and real.

Pages: « [ 1 ]  2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9   10   11   12   13  »