Twisting in the Wind: A Memoir of Ken Kesey at Naropa University 1994 by Keith Kumasen Abbott

Final Part

At the press conference the next day Kesey asserted, aiming to hold back any further assignation of blame, that the message of Twister was to bring people together.  Yet the urge to play l’enfant terrible remained. According to witnesses, Kesey announced that if O.J. Simpson had smoked a joint every morning over the course of thirty years as Kesey had done, then Simpson would have simply put off “killing the bitch until the next day”, meaning that the murder of Nicole Brown Simpson never would have happened.  (I was later informed that the quote was only printed in one newspaper.) Was this an example of behaviour that could be labeled as aiming to “outrage the squares”?

Speaking to Emily Hunt later about the news conference, she sighed and said to me, “He doesn’t need to do those things anymore.”

To recap: One reporter from out of town cast Kesey as the aggrieved author, a victim of stuffy and intolerable politically correct clones, the bane of Boulder and added that Twister dealt with “race relations, AIDS, environmental disaster…with a light touch, an old-style medicine show.” 

The writing students had different opinions. Rick Jaynes laconically reported the workshop enrollment had dropped. And the collaboration was stagnating as editorial changes on contributions were being rejected. Despite the rumbling and rumors, the Summer Writing Program staff informed me that Kesey would be the last reader on Thursday night. 

Arriving early to the Boulder High auditorium and passing along the wings, I spotted Kesey sitting on the stage and reading a magazine. The curtains were partially opened and his chair was pulled up behind the curtains and as close to center stage without being seen. Hunched over, Kesey gave off a vibe as if he were a fullback about to bolt through the defensive line. 

No one else was around. I stepped on stage. Kesey looked up from the magazine. I said that I was introducing him that night. 

“Keith,” Kesey said, “I’m going on first.”

“Okaay,” I replied, “then I will be in front of you.” I held up the loaded hanger I was holding and told him that I needed to change clothes. We were both sweating.

Kesey eyed the hanger of clothes.  “Wish I had thought of that,” he said, but he wasn’t going to abandon his position. 

On my way down to the green room I felt relieved that I wasn’t introducing a clutch of students as was rumored. Kesey was making a smooth move. Why wait to play the sacrificial lamb? As he had lost considerable support from the Writing and Poetics Program, I could follow his line of thinking. Why not lead with your right, like a good Irishman? If you missed with your knockout punch, hey, no one could doubt your sincere wish to put an end to the tensions. Of course if the punch missed, well then, more trouble was coming. But that was for later. 

Bobbie Louise Hawkins was already in the greenroom. She was running through her lines like the pro she was, but looked up at me when I entered. I held up my hanger of clothes. 

“I’m glad to see you weren’t going to introduce me in shorts,” Bobbie said, eyeing me in my shorts.

“Bobbie, it’s a hundred degrees out there.” But the truth was that I brought the only clean change of clothes I had. Which happened to be a pair of pants.  “By the way, Ken’s going first.”

Bobby’s head snapped up. She stood up. “He is not,” she said and left the greenroom with her manuscripts in hand. 

I gave Bobbie Louise and Ken twenty minutes to sort out their arrangements. My bet was on Ken. I made tea, changed my clothes, reviewed my texts and checked my watch before going back upstairs. I witnessed Anne Waldman leaving via the exit into the alley. She had a determination about her that told me she did not willingly intend to return. Bobbie was nowhere to be seen but the stage manager and his assistant were standing around backstage, looking glum.  

Kesey was still in his chair, reading his magazine, but now Ken Babbs was sitting next to him. Babbs was drinking from an orange juice bottle. As I approached I smelled vodka. 

“Don’t worry about a thing,” I said with a smile. “I’ve got you covered. You’ll be out there before they know what hit them.” 

Kesey glanced up and smiled. He was still sweating. 

A peek out from the curtain confirmed that the auditorium was rapidly filling with audience members. The official line up was Bobbie first, poet Michael McClure following her before the intermission, then Furlinghetti with Kesey last. 

Suddenly I realized that my two quotes from Kesey’s Demon Box that I planned as part of my introduction were unrehearsed. I retreated to an empty spot backstage and did a quick run through, marking up the pauses and accents with a pencil. Kesey’s writing was so good, it talked itself right off the page. Three minutes from the start of the show, Anne Waldman reappeared and the front of her looked just as grim as the back of her. She told me that she was going to make a very brief introduction to the night’s show and then turn the proceedings over to me. She didn’t look directly at me, and I understood that earlier she had been called into the President’s office and been informed of the trustees’ outrage at Kesey’s comments during the press conference which had included Kesey’s suggestion that the students were being “taught wrong”. 

After Waldman’s brisk opening speech, which did not list the order of the night’s readers, I started my intro with an anecdote about why people remember writing, how vivid language and scenes and characters are paramount. I mentioned that few people finish reading a novel, story or play and say to someone, “You’ve got to read this. It has a great idea.” 

Without naming Kesey, I further stated, “Tonight’s first reader has created emotions and scenes that stayed in our imagination. But, while the public might focus on one aspect, professional writers see quite different skills in fellow writers and they recognize and honor such craft.” And I quoted an example:

“Sleet is worse than snow with none of the redeeming charm. With nasty slush all day long and black ice all night long, every citizen was depressed, the beasts as bad as the folks. Beasts don’t have any calendar, any Stonehenge Solstice, any ceremonial boughs of holly to remind them of the light. Cows have a big reservoir of patience, but it isn’t bottomless. And when it’s finally emptied when month after miserable month has passed and there is not theology to shore up the weather-beaten spirit, they can begin to despair. My cows began to stand ass to the wind and stare bleakly into a worsening future, neither mooing nor moving for hours on end. Even alfalfa failed to perk them up.”

Besides being funny, this was a superb and traditional paragraph. I pointed this out. “It is one that most readers would simply skim through because that’s what the paragraph is designed to do. But,” I insisted, “professional writers notice the skill there. And these skills are why we were here at Naropa.”

Because few had ever read Demon Box, which is what I was counting on, the audience still did not know whom I was talking about. The passage could have been Hawkins. Bobbie habitually wrote of humorous Texas country matters. So there was an assumption out there beyond the footlights, and I exploited it. 

I continued. “Not only did we expect our writers to be adroit at presenting memorable scenes and characters along with those unnoticed but essential skills of pace, metaphor and transition,” I remarked, “but readers also ask for more than that – we ask for self examination and honesty.” Then I read the second passage from Demon Box. 

“I was happy to be getting out of the U.S. That book about me and my Kool Aid cronies had just come out and I felt the hot beam of the spotlight on me. It burned like a big ultraviolet eye. The voltage generated by all this attention scared me a little and titillated me a lot, and I needed a breather from it before I became an addict, or a casualty.”

Some of the people in the audience know from the Kool Aid reference that Kesey was going to be the first reader. I heard that sound out in the darkened theater before me, that animal and physical shift that is so exhilarating and frightening for performers. Even as I continued my deliberate reading of the passage, I paused and glanced up from the text. I half expected people to start to get up to leave, but I didn’t hear any rustling. 

“Stand in this spotlight, feel this eye pass over you. You never forget it. You are suddenly changed, lifted, singled out, elevated and alone, above any of your old bush-league frets of stage fright, nagging scruples, etc. Self-consciousness and irresolution melt in this beam’s blast. Grace and power surge in to take their place. Banging speed is the only thing even close. Drowsing protoplasm snaps instantly to Bruce Lee perfection – enter the dragon. But there’s a scaly rub, right? Because if you go around to the other end of that eye and look through at the star shining there so elevated, you see that this adoring telescope has a crosshair built into it….”

“And,” I said, just before stepping away from the mike, “here is the man in the spotlight.” My mystery intro left them nailed to their seats and now the audience was set up for Kesey. I smiled at Ken as he passed me to take the stage. He gave me a big grin. 

The first thing Kesey did was to borrow a handkerchief from a person in the front row, charming the audience with his grandmother routine and reciting the nursery rhyme where he first heard the title One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Then, still as his grandmother, Kesey improvised a rendition of the children’s story Little Tricker the Squirrel Meets Big Double the Bear. Kesey acted out all the parts, orchestrating audience participation with his own sound effects, cranking up the story’s suspense and playing with the crowd’s reaction or lack of it. It didn’t matter. Such a strategy of old style storytelling is daring, and it hardly resolves any social or personal problems from previous behaviour. This diversion deflected attention and salvaged the moment. 

The audience was won over because no one was expecting Kesey to go first and they never could disconnect from the grandmotherly storytelling. And because everyone sitting in the theater seats came to witness a disaster, they already were Kesey’s voluntary captives, only they didn’t know it. But Kesey knew it. 

I couldn’t fault him. If someone’s work stirs up the people, so much the better. Twister was representative of the gap that exists between intention and performance while, at the same time, this void is magnified by the flaws. 

Kesey was never going to acknowledge complaints directly or talk his sins over with his accusers. He didn’t, obviously, feel he owed them that. You pays your money and you takes your chances.