Going Home with Ken Kesey
Why the weirdest party I ever went to was the first place I felt like I belonged
In April of 1999, when I was twenty years old, I moved to California with my boyfriend. We had been dating for eight months, and I’d been pregnant for five of them. I’d decided to drop out of art school in Baltimore and go back to the West Coast, which felt more like home than anywhere else, but did not feel like home. I was terribly lonely.
Two months later, I was at a party with Ken Kesey and other hippies three times my age, feeling like I’d found home for the first time in years.
I’d grown up in Southern California, but when we moved, we moved to the San Francisco Bay Area. It seemed to me to be close enough to have support, far enough to be separate.
The apartment we’d rented was in Oakland, and I’d arranged the whole thing over the phone, sight unseen. We packed up most of our stuff and mailed it west. We gave things away. The rest we stuffed into suitcases, and carrying a cage with my glum blue parakeet, Rasputin, we boarded a plane. The moment we took off, Rasputin began to sing. It seemed like a good omen.
Before we left Baltimore, I bought and read a copy of Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, which documents the escapades of writer Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, his band of artists, musicians, and other misfits. It felt like the right way to prepare for a move to the Bay Area. The tech boom was currently in full swing, but for a lot of people, San Francisco and its surroundings were still associated primarily with hippie hedonism. I figured getting a historical head start on the lore would serve me well.
My reading didn’t lead me to new tolerance and understanding. If anything, I was slightly sickened by the seediness of it all. In many ways, the liberation the Pranksters advocated was far more conservative than it first appeared. Free love seemed to benefit men at the expense of women. Living in the moment, replacing ego with id; so much of it was about untrammeled appetite, without consideration for whose appetites were prioritized and whose appetites had to be further inhibited to make room for those at the top of the hierarchy that was going largely unacknowledged.
Nonetheless, it was a mesmerizing read, and one that offered many appeals even when I drew back from some of the consequences. The Pranksters had so many hopes, so much enthusiasm, and were so ready for a party at any moment. As a person who was and is at heart fairly straitlaced, the lack of constraint held a fascination for me. There was an immediacy to the New Journalism writing style that pulsed with vitality.
Our new apartment in Oakland was large enough, but far from public transportation. The landlord lived upstairs from us, and I could hear her screaming at her children during the day. Sometimes she’d tell me about how she used to beat people up, casually dropping this into conversation before she’d raise the rent or make new rules.
Our families were supportive, both emotionally and financially, but we were far away and keeping secrets. When you’re already more dependent on people than you want to be, you don’t want to tell them about the math you’re doing to decide whether you can afford enough food this week and still make rent. The little humiliations piled up. I applied for state funded insurance, where I filled in forms detailing identifying marks on my boyfriend’s body, insurance against the inevitable day he would leave me and the state would want to track him down. At the doctor’s office, they handed me a pamphlet entitled “How You Got Pregnant,” as if being pregnant and poor meant I didn’t understand human reproduction.
Indignities are aggregate entities. Each, on its own, seems small, but as they increase in number, they become monsters. I know there’s nothing new about this, but in the moment, pregnant, navigating an unfamiliar world in which I occupied a space of shame, it felt like my boyfriend and I were the only people inside that crushingly small plot of ground. If we had friends and art, I thought, it would be better, even if we didn’t have money or, sometimes, dignity. We knew Oakland had to have an art community like the one we’d left behind in Baltimore, but we didn’t know how to find it. Daniel was looking for a job and I couldn’t paint because all of the materials I typically used were now nausea-inducing nightmares. I felt cut off.
One day, Daniel was coming back from a job hunt, and as he started to walk home from the BART station, he noticed an art car in the parking lot. It was low-slung, painted in bright blues and yellows, covered in toys and a series of steamer trunks that made up a large compartment above the roof. It looked like the sort of thing we’d been missing. Daniel left a note on the car’s hood, telling the unknown owner about how wonderful it was to see an art car. He left our phone number.
The car’s owner called the next day. Daniel was ecstatic. He made arrangements to meet up with the guy in person. I was more skeptical. We felt isolated, but things were hard enough without inviting strangers in. Anyway, this wasn’t the sort of art I did. I wasn’t sure who this person was or whether we’d fit in with him any better than we fit into our neighborhood or into the lives we’d once imagined for ourselves.
We went to San Francisco to meet the art car guy, Rick. He was affable and friendly in person, and we sat in a coffee shop, drinking hot drinks and chatting. Rick and Daniel hit it off right away and I sat back and watched them, still uncertain, still guarded.
It was while I was wondering about the whole thing that Rick casually mentioned that he was invited to a party Ken Kesey was throwing in San Francisco, but he wasn’t sure if he could go. Art cars get pulled over a lot and he didn’t have a California license, so he was worried the cops would hassle him.
“Kristen has a California license!” Daniel said. “She could drive it!” I could have said no. Maybe I should have said no. I hadn’t driven in a while, and I certainly hadn’t driven a parti-colored top-heavy metal sculpture across the Bay Bridge. The last time I’d driven in San Francisco, I’d nearly been in tears from the unfamiliar traffic and general lack of parking.
“OK,” I said. Daniel apologized almost immediately for committing me without thinking, and told me I could change my mind. By that time, though, I’d thought about the benefits of having a new friend. We were two people in their early twenties who hadn’t planned on having a child any time soon. We’d only been dating for three months when I found out I was pregnant. But Rick hadn’t known us before the pregnancy. There was nothing to shock him. The pregnancy was an established fact from the moment we met him. As great as our old friends were about everything, they’d had to adjust their pictures of us — who we were separately, who we were together, whether we’d always be together. The pregnancy changed the past and the future and who we were. But to Rick, we were just a couple of artists who were having a kid.
Besides, I was pretty curious what a Ken Kesey party would be like.
The day of the party I put on an aviator cap that Daniel happened to own, because it seemed like the right thing to do if I was going to be the pilot of an art car. We met Rick and he showed me how to drive the car. It wasn’t much different from any other automatic. You put it into drive and went. The main thing was that it needed to be driven slowly and you needed to be aware of how much the car’s accoutrements jutted out beyond a normal car’s footprint. A couple of cops looked at us curiously, but then again everyone was looking at us curiously as I drove slowly along the bay and then out across the bridge into the city.
The drive itself was uneventful. We made it to the site and I parked the car next to a bunch of other art cars. There was a gorgeous patchwork-glass-covered Beetle, and a van covered in cameras that could also take pictures of passersby. The restored bus Further— which, back when it was more idiosyncratically spelled Furthur, had ferried Kesey and the other Merry Pranksters to adventures across the country — was parked around the corner. We walked up to the door and gave our names, and the guy found them on the list and let us in.
I don’t go to parties. My idea of a good time is making fun of a bad movie with several close friends in someone’s living room. I wasn’t sure what to expect at a San Francisco party with a guest list and a line and aging celebrity hippies who wrote about taking copious drugs.
After all my twisting and turning after I read The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, here I was, at a party thrown by the Merry Pranksters, and it was loud and hot, and we didn’t really look like anyone else. In one room, Kesey and the Pranksters were onstage, performing the play Where’s Merlin? that they would soon be taking on tour in the UK. They were miked, but it was hard to understand anything they were saying. It was hot in that room, and loud, and the lights made the whole space glow red. There was nothing there that really looked like home, and yet, all of a sudden, I felt completely and wholly comfortable. We watched the play for a little while, and then danced in a hot room crowded with people and smells. Several middle-aged naked men were dancing nearby and there were young people, beautiful with youth, and old people, beautiful with age.
When the smells got to be overpowering, we wandered downstairs, where there was a pool. A group of not-all-that coordinated adults were performing what was billed as a synchronized water ballet, but looked more like a splash fight. A beautiful woman walked up to me and introduced herself as a midwife. She tried to get me to swim naked, praising my beautiful pregnant belly.
I didn’t swim naked. We left the party on the early side, after meeting Wavy Gravy and failing to recognize him for a while. We walked to the BART station holding hands and went home.
This party, so far outside of my personality and inclination, so much the opposite of anything I’ve ever wanted to do and expected to enjoy, was somehow the moment we felt like we had found home. What made us feel like we belonged was, paradoxically, the fact that none of us belonged — that we were in a space that could make room for everyone. There were people our own age there, and people in their seventies, and people with clothes on and people with no clothes. There were people making art cars and people making literary art and putting on plays and acts and people in swimming pools trying to dance, and none of them seemed weird. It felt like a place where you could say, “Hey, I’d like to try a thing,” and you’d immediately find five more people who’d say, “Great! I want to help you.” When everything else in my life felt like a sharp edge jutting out into nothingness, that feeling — that it was OK to be confused and adrift, that we were all confused and adrift together — made the world a little safer. It didn’t blunt the edge entirely, but it dulled it. Home is a space where we feel a little safer, and we can never fully occupy it, since we have to keep building it as we go along. Ours started there.
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