Further: Ken Kesey?s American Dreams

A very. Few. I was happy to be getting out of the US. The book about me in my Kool-Aid Acid

cronies had just come out and I felt the hot beam of the spotlight on me at home. 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 casualty standa while in the spotlight. You never forget it forget it forget it forget it forget it forget it forget it forget just PC do you feel like you have the right to do what you want whatever you want and still live in this world. I feel a man has a right to be as big as he feels it in to be. If I. Go out would you be having him period. Thought.

Easy Rider wrestler wizard all-American athlete all-American outlaw farmer family man and the Paul Bunyan of LSD. I never said I wanted to be right here. I am magician. The writing is just one of the tricks that I do.

Tell me do you think there's anything wrong with your mind reading. This. Back. Among them are modern science. Kin t z wrote his first novel One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest when he was only 25 years old. The book A modern American Classic has sold more than 7 million copies and the movie version though he never approved of it broke box office records in 1976 and won five Academy Awards including Best Picture. In 1964 keys he published his second novel. Sometimes a Great Notion the story of a logging family in the Pacific Northwest. Notion was an epic story an ambitious complicated novel which established key Z as a major new literary talent a contender. I think. One of the most important.

American writers in the second half of the 20th century. But just when he seemed so promising key Z turned his back on writing. Instead he became a leader of the new psychedelic movement declaring he wanted to live a book not write one. The refurbished a 1939 school bus painted that day glow colors and roared off into one charted territory. Tom Wolfe supercharged best seller The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test made a national called Hero. But paid a price for his outrageous exploits to marijuana convictions. Six months in a California prison by the late 60s he'd had enough. Keys he retreated to Oregon. The bus trip was over. Turn around today. He's he works a 70 acre family farm in Oregon. For the past 20

years he's devoted himself to his wife and four children only occasionally publishing a piece in Esquire or Rolling Stone. You said. You were going to. Go there. Thank you. But once again ki Z is stepping out. He's back in action with a new book The demon box and a traveling road show with that wacky old keys the spirit. That's one of the things that I admire about him is he's able to stay in adventure and explore even in this relatively lame Reagan era you know he's still able to keep that going and I that's that's special stuff. The judge who sent key Z to jail in the 60s called him a tarnished Galahad. Twenty years later TC still the knight errant sallies forth to do battle with Republicans yuppies and the Moral Majority. He

worries about what he calls the nations are darkening spiritual climate and he's eager to revive the spirit. And sadly those of the sixties counter-culture don't forget the magical summer of love in the chilly season of Reagan. In Oregon keys he campaigns for the legalization of marijuana and he supports the campus anti-apartheid. Let's get her out on her own again. Here her was. Her. Through or. Was. Rather. As a calling. You a charlatan an anachronism. A right to the public health and safety the feeling of course you can handle a survivor a provocateur a transition figure. We took up where the beats left off. What Kerouac promised he delivered. The real on the road adventures. A. Way of life and a

way of culture and a revived national sense of possibility. In 1960 the bland dies and how our era gave way to the exuberance of the Kennedy campaign. It was like a high crest of the American wave. Kennedy had been elected. The country was more powerful more secure more prosperous. Than they they were. The way in which people lived was very good and everybody expected more. The motto of the early 60s in a way was more. For cheesey and his friends it all started in California at a most unlikely place. Stanford University Keyes he had graduated from the University of Oregon where he'd been a state champion wrestler. He was drawn to Stanford by an

extraordinary graduate writing program run by novelist Wallace Stegner. Another teacher. Malcolm Cowley The poet and Faulkner expert became he sees spiritual light. Calley taught us that any piece of good writing is a victory for all writers so that we're not in competition with each other and we became a team. The team included Larry McMurtry who would write Terms of Endearment and Lonesome Dove and Robert Stone whose powerful Vietnam novel Dog Soldiers won the National Book Award. You can't learn your craft. At any better time or from any better teacher are in any better place I don't think than. It's early 60s there in Stanford. Well not a day for an hour only to pull out all the Country Club camps.

Then you have to spend your Stamberg at it and then there are a lot of us trying to be like. My wife and I were among the most earnest would be beats because we had come from the Lower East Side and Manhattan and we we I went around looking sort of unhealthy and my wife wore black. At first the pseudo beatnik parties were fueled by cheap red wine and maybe a little marijuana. Then thanks to the US government the Perry lane gang discovered psychedelic drugs the night l asked me the other side of reality. Our special report encounter on the most powerful of a new group of synthetic drugs which alter the consciousness of man. For reasons that we had no comprehension of at that time all of a sudden everybody wanted to do research in psychedelic drugs.

They were called my medic Dan and the story was that you would find out what it was like to be crazy. Vic Lovell was a graduate student in psychology at Stanford. He told his friend Kim Ki Z that researchers at the local Veterans Administration hospital were paying students $75 a day to swallow mind altering drugs. He took the plunge. I was so naive I believed these doctors knew what they were doing. You know this is the American government giving me these drugs how could they make a mistake. So they used to pay us to take LSD and masculine and suicide and many other things whose names I had forgotten until this book Acid Dreams came out which described all the things that the CIA was trying to study and apparently most of this research was. CIA initiated and funded.

All analysts were secretly financing their own chemical warfare and they were giving him these drugs because they were trying to learn how to help crazy people. As time went by you found out that when hit at all they were giving these drugs to find out how to make people crazy. He had some frightening episodes in the hospital but he also found that LSD gave him moments of pure ecstasy and remarkable insight. It wasn't long before keys he started sharing the acid with his friends on Perry lane. Sometimes I get the feeling that I went to a party on on Perry land in 1962 and the party spilled out of the house and came down the street. And covered the world. One. More.

Thing. Or. Something. One. Way. Or even mescaline and scary a lot of the time. One guy came in one time when I'd been writing and they're frightening running away and suddenly there was a guy standing there holding a big court coke bottle Entocort Coke modeling has it ever occurred to you these things can be used as a weapon. And I said let me get that down. Put the head down there. But ordinarily I was never afraid of the guy's scared of the nurses and doctors and people like that. A gifted young writing student experimenting with hallucinatory drugs observing mental patients firsthand. Under these conditions keys he created One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest. She slides through the door with a gust of cold and locks the door behind her and I

see her fingers trail across the polished steel tip of each finger the same color as her lips. A funny orange like the tip of a soldering iron collar so hot or so cold if she touches you with it you can't tell which the novel is about repression and rebellion in a mental hospital and Big Nurse is the obvious villain. But the real enemy is what keys he calls the combine. The system that denies life that demands conformity that folds spindles and mutilates. The ward is a factory for the combine. It's for fixing up mistakes made in the neighborhoods and in the schools and in the churches the hospital has. When a completed product goes back out into society all fixed up good as new and better than new Sometimes it brings joy to the big nurse's heart. He Z modeled his fictional patients on the real patients he had met and

sketched while working on the mental ward. They were the victims the rejects the Minn broken in spirit warehoused and forgotten. But the hero Randle Patrick McMurphy was key Z's creation a brawling lusty red headed Irishman played by Jack Nicholson in the movie Mick Murphy is the rebel the Savior who comes to breathe life into men suffocated by the system. That's in the horse town it's just most of us can see here but I don't like the idea of taking something if I don't know what it is. To get it said Mr McCarthy. Not getting upset. It's just that I don't. Want. Anyone to try and slip me Sir Peter. You want to tell me. If Mr. McMurphy doesn't want to take his medication orally. I'm sure we can arrange that you could have it some other way. But I don't think you'd like it just to make her.

Feel like it wouldn't you know but I'll give it a minute to cous Nast is an indictment of shock therapy overmedication and Labatt of me but the real breakthrough in the novel. What makes it work as fiction is that key Z tells the story from the point of view of an inmate an Indian college Chief Brandon who was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenia. That's what makes that book is in India. Where she's a stock character the situation is a fairly stock situation the conflict is a stock conflict. But. Truthfully it's true that India. Didn't know Indians. But. Had written the first three pages that book on. Parity. And I think it came from that. The Indian has nightmarish visions and describes shock therapy in a kind of heightened poetic realism. OK all right. The metal door looks out with its rivet eyes as the door opens. Sex the

first man inside. A beam like neon smoke comes out of the black panel in the room fastens on his plate. Mark forehead and drags him in like a dog on a leash. Summer's cold. Frosted crackling up above the light winds. Tube's long white and icy. Graphite savve. Like the smell in the rise. And smell acid of fear. What infuriates PC about the movie version is that the Indian was relegated to a minor character and the hallucinatory quality of the novel was ignored. KI Z was hired to write the screenplay but his script was rejected for being too surreal. A bitter financial dispute was finally settled out of court as he

vows never to see the movie. I got a bad rep in Hollywood for the same reason a lot of writers do. We're smarter than most of those people and that bothers them. Although the movie is not as daring or experimental as QIs novel it does work dramatically. The climax of both film and book is a scene of redemption and freedom. Catharsis and escape. I took a breath. And bent over and took the levers. I put my back toward the screen and then spun and let the momentum carry the panel through the screen in the window with a ripping crash. The blast splashed out in the moon like a bright cold water baptizing the sleeping earth. I put my hand on the sill. And vaulted after the pan. And in the moonlight.

So for her so for us. S.. S. S.. S.. S.. Will phone. They are. The cutting. The. Sunset. Thanking them for a. Sign. Saying. The word. Phone. John. Then. A. Year. After finishing Cuckoo's Nest he was he returned to Oregon to research his next novel. Sometimes a Great Notion. He lived in a logging town on the coast and listening to the incessant rain. The kitchen was hot and silent except for those tiny rain sounds the monotonous drumming on the porch rough the sluggish gushing as

the downspout sliced into the worn ditch the endless reiteration of rain spattering against the window long sound that served to sink one into that state of drowsy fascination that Oregonians label Trendall itis for the job and title more graphically standing than staring. Sometimes a Great Notion is a sprawling complex and somewhat confusing novel over 600 pages long. It's a demanding book Dark and mythic operating on many levels but it's firmly rooted in Oregon timber country. When I was a logger I had the feeling that somebody has got to do the Moby Dick of this profession because it has the same huge deep qualities of whaling as a something so strange that men do. And people who do are of. Such a Lost character and strengths. Of the forest fight against the attack on it's a it's a little domain

and all the second nature to me. But the tree. And. Grasping signs and go on being against the spongy earth to be trimmed and locked in the logs. To be coaxed and cajoled downhill into the river with unflagging regularity. And spite of all nature to do to stop it. Thanks thanks. Sometimes a Great Notion chronicles the stamper of family. A crude stubborn clan of restless stringy muscled men the stampers run a family logging business fighting big lumber and big unions for survival. Their motto is Never give an inch. They live in stoic isolation in a ramshackle house on a river island a river smooth and seeming calm. Hiding the cruel phyla edge of its current beneath a smooth and calm seeming surface. Across. On that southern shore. An

ancient two story wood frame house rests on the structure of tangled steel. Of wood in earthen sacks of sand. Like a two story bird with split shake feathers sitting fierce and tangled nest. Notion it is also a novel about vengeance a struggle between brothers one a superman longer played by Paul Newman in the movie version the other a dope smoking college student from Yale. Yet it took my kid brother coming to spend the week with us to show me that there are. Other ways of winning by giving off. By getting your goddamn teeth and getting your best told winning by not for damn sure. Being on that is west of the Rockies. The movie starring Newman and Henry Fonda is a pallid version of the book but it does

have dramatic logging scenes including a superbly rendering of a brutal accident. Why. Hank is a big piece of wood is going to use my butt is going to be stuck real good. Let's hold all the hope for you think it's come up and still be publishing any. They're just moving on. Spent time working as a longer so he could write sharp

descriptions of that world. But he was attempting a lot more in the ocean. He was experimenting with styles rapidly shifting time and point of view different perceptions of the same event. To suggest the complexity and mystery of life. Sometimes a Great Notion wildly divergent reviews none of this seemed to matter. By the time notion appeared in 1964 he'd already decided to abandon writing to live a strange life. In 1963 easy fete and their two small children moved to a

cabin in La Honda a secluded area in the hills above Stanford. Here keys he and his friends decided to immerse themselves in psychedelic drugs. Easy was the natural leader strong charismatic he asked. I want to be the quarterback I want to be the ball. I want a coach I don't need the audience I want to be the guy out there was calling the plays and making them go and then he turned out to be this football player like Caraway. Kind of a rough and ready. American you know with a sense of humor a Yankee do you do American in the midst of all that. Incredible. You know it's just a golden hearted cream. The so.

He and his cohorts called themselves the Merry Pranksters. Some of the original members included Kim Babs a Marine helicopter pilot just back from Vietnam and his wife Gretchen Fanchon Jane Burton a philosophy major at Stanford. George Walker who filmed the prankster capers run by a virgin who everybody called Hasler brother Chuck and his wife sued Mike Hagan the playboy from Oregon Carolyn Adams nicknamed mountain girl Sandy Lehmann helped a troubled kid from New York and Neal Cassady the fastest man alive. CASSADEE at 40 was by far the oldest a veteran of the Beat

Generation. The inspiration for Carroll X here rolls in on the road. He was a speed freak a nonstop rat for a wild ride. You must've been to people like Kerouac and Ginsburg. He he must have stood for the American West in the American road. Cowan I met him at 45 so he was only twenty then. And within that year he and I had a romance that lasted on and off or. Well till. At least to the left and we were in bed together was 66 so that's 21 years. Right the way I actually write him as someone happening or that that's now out. In the summer of 64 the pranksters decided to take their psychedelic circus on the road and to record the adventure on film. The fantasy was to see just how far out you could go. Cassidy of course was at the wheel. Just. Stuck. Right.

Yes. After careening across America the bus pulled into New York. But in 1964 even New Yorkers weren't ready for the Merry Pranksters. The Pranksters thought the highlight of their trip would be a visit to Millbrook New York where ex Harvard professors Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert were quietly experimenting with LSD in the solitude of an old mansion in the psychedelic underground East. I was about to meet West and we were around the kitchen table.

And finishing something eat and we were all going to bed. You know that quiet time after a trip when you just want to be very mellow and drives the bus with the. Speed freaks. And they come to have fun and play with flutes. The whole thing was I mean everybody in the house took one look and fled. Leaving me to welcome them. Leary locked himself in his room. He said he was meditating to the pranksters the whole scene was too somber. They jumped back on the bus and roared off to California. I think there was an ideological split. You know we would have tried to keep it cool but that already is elitism in a way. You know and can Wasn't that it was you know Kool-Aid for everybody. Most of the pranksters seem to thrive on the anarchy of keys bus trip. But there were casualties too like Sandy Lehman helped Sandy was just coming out of the army at that point and I didn't quite know what to do with himself and

my brother Carl said well maybe hitching up with Casey would be a good idea. And. Being the Apollonian brother as opposed to Carl who is the DI and the guys in brother and brother. Disagreed and we kind of we kind of debated the 60s before they happened. Carle prevailed and Sandy joined the Merry Pranksters as one of the sound engineers on the bus. And the whole experience wasted him. To use that expression I mean he did not. Respond well to the. To the whole drug scene. The heavy use of psychedelics day and whatever else. And he has never recovered. Despite the obvious risks of taking potent drugs like LSD people were flocking to La Honda to join the pranksters. The local police were not amused. In April 1965 they raided Jeezy's camp and LSD was still legal but marijuana was not. They caught key z in the

bathroom and charged him with possession. Out on bail keys he decided to raise the stakes. He invited the notorious Hells Angels to party with the pranksters. Allen Ginsburg was there too. One muscular smooth skinned man sweating dancing for hours. Beer cans banned littering the yard. I hanged man sculpture dangling from a high Creek branch. And children sleeping softly in their bedroom bunks and four police cars parked outside the painted gate red lights revolving in the leaves. In November 9 6 the pranksters began a series of public events the kind of acid test it was the most daring audacious move so far public parties with strobe lights freaky costumes

bizarre music and LSD in the Punch-Bowl. The posters asked Can you pass the acid test. LSD was definitely out of the closet pan and the group on the West Coast. Just took the stuff and with the first acid test I mean I just remember the San Jose newspaper with a drug orgy as this huge headline. I mean they just blew the scene apart. The descriptions that have come out you know that have dribbled down make it sound more lurid and weird. And though it was lurid and weird it was it was a whole lot of other stuff mostly funny. The Pranksters recruited Jerry Garcia and his struggling new band The Grateful Dead to play at the acid tests and they were all like our first and best audience. The Pranksters were you know they were the first ones to get off on us and I was a big charge after we'd been empty in nightclubs for months or years.

They were noisy they were really brash they play excruciating long songs at incredibly loud and lost folks just weren't ready for it. Longing. For. More good some. Good news. Conference Good morning. Good Morning America. Played. The acid tests were kidding he's easy American dream factory. The Public Theater trying to make people more open more spontaneous more adventurous and keys easier for this is

moving off of dead center. He says most people. Are born live and die without ever. Moving off of. Dead center and his idea was that everyone should. Move off of. Dead center at some point just to see what he or she can do. He and his friend Stewart Brand began to plot an even more ambitious event a trips festival at San Francisco's longshoreman's hall. Well the church festival was two things it was the largest of the acid tests and it was really just picking up on key Z's invention of all light public entertainment where you really didn't know what was going to happen next. And there is a certain amount of the whiff of danger on the eve of the trip's festival San Francisco Police arrested key Z and another prankster Carolyn Adams on charges of possessing marijuana. Surely not this experience thing. I. Tired of it all. Are you glad it happened. Fine I'm glad I haven't but

I'm not sorry about it particularly. No I'm not. I'm not. We think you're. Released on bail keys even mountain girl we're out just in time for the Tripps Festival which was a huge success thanks in part to a new promoter on the scene. Bill Graham. We were meeting people from different planets for the first time I was like you were different I was I came from New York City talking to. Keyes or Ramon or Jerry and these musicians who come from other Palo Alto upstate California talking about communes and making changes in our society. And I found myself dealing in in their world and they had to put up with a guy with a clipboard who was looking at a watch and there are no watches in this system. Thousands of people came out to the trip's festival that weekend in January 1966 the Haight Ashbury era was born. During 1966 the psychedelic subculture monthly but in

October of that year the state of California declared the illegal drug he who had been hiding out in Mexico returned to San Francisco and announced that the pranksters would sponsor and graduation. Big commencement exercises for you will be held at Wonderland on Monday night. That's how Wayne. And of course the man it was going to be passing out the diplomas is easy. I know I'm not going to be passing out the promise of. Neal Cassady is going to be passing on the poems I'm just kind of helping put it together you know the people that are writing can do what what's the theme of this commencement exercise at the last minute Bill Graham

who controlled Winterland canceled the prankster extravaganza and it broke up and jammed. And really for other. Bitter. Politicking. And. As a result. This thing never did occur. And when I landed there finally. The Pranksters ended up having. A kind of home movie version of it. It wasn't a psychedelic summit conference but it was still a big local news story even if the press had no idea what was going on. Are you a member of the graduating. Until about 2:30 in the morning.

It was a big party. Then it began to get increasingly religious. They have a break. Only the Pranksters were left in a tight circle around the sadness and that. Much had been attempted and perhaps much of that someone should have. Been. The next week. Reagan was elected governor of California. Well I'm terribly proud of the problem of LSD. I think it's been a great deal of misinformation by those who seem to see no harm in it. But as a parent and a citizen certainly now in this position I am greatly concerned. The authorities began to crack down on the rebellious new youth culture but it was too late in the Pranksters had help to set in motion was now a

movement. But he himself wasn't around to enjoy it. In June 1967 he began serving time. What he said. During the 1967 Summer of Love Janis Joplin and the other San Francisco rock groups were making the Haight Ashbury world famous. It wasn't long before the tourists descended off right where I live which they live in. They take many of them. I'm not sure why.

I want to sell marijuana chord melody to you. You know it's while there really wasn't people were coming from all over there were migrating there. It just finally got to be more than traffic and bear was a logical disaster far away. Almost as quickly as it blossomed. Haight Ashbury wilted many of the original hippies began to move to the country pushers and hustlers replaced them bringing in speed and heroin. By 1969 the Haight was a violent slum. Neal Cassady who had seemed indestructible was one of the first casualties. He died in Mexico the victim of an alcohol and drug overdose. The innocence and idealism of the early 60s was turning sour. U.S. planes were raining down on North Vietnam. The anti-war movement was frustrated and becoming more militant. Governor

Reagan sent in the National Guard to crush people's park in Berkeley. A disheartened kin GZ retreated to Oregon. I think that he got exhausted basically. He got he was chased by the FBI he was put in one jail after another long went to court and went to court and went to court and spent an awful lot of his money defending himself. Couldn't beat it and had to do six months at the honor farm family and cemetery county and. He just decided I think that that was enough. To. Live. His life. I. Miss. My time and I'm. Sure. It's going to close.

Hello. But. Anyway. O O. O o o. O. At first key Z's farm in Pleasant Hill Oregon was a prankster commune and strangers were constantly dropping by to meet. He and fate and the family really retreated in there and sort of shooed away. The people who had become really not only just their fun colleagues but a little hangers on in a way to his money and success. And I think it was he was beginning to feel that it was going to ruin his his edge. Slowly he began to write again in his new book demon box he recalls the strange evolution of his farm. OK mind with this awful goat. Much the same way the farm came by a lot

of its animal population. The animals were donated by animal fanciers who had run out of space or patience. Our original peacocks had been abandoned by Krishna's whose ashram had been repossessed. The horses were from rockstars girl friends adrift without permanent pastures donkeys without gold mines sheep without shearers parents without perches. They had all found their various ways to the seeming stability of our farm. OK you dogs. Go get a merry This is the Gulf area to my patrols this area constantly for the basic both go for. The bull go first learned that I hold out like that and have a side hoe or can come back up and once the nose is down and I like to sit by Trayvon and the dog and it shames or deepen our spirit. Going to marry those gophers. Keys he respects his animals reveres his land and takes an obvious visceral pleasure in physical labor. But he's not exactly your typical

American farmer. Thunder machines beginning to breed with the bus and here I'm expecting to turn out a little letter of the thunder machine is the contraption that ki Z uses in his zany traveling show. The bus is fading and falling apart but can't bear to give it up even though the Smithsonian asked him to donate it to their collection of Americana. I mean Canon Fay are Christians you know they are a psychedelic American Gothic. And just because he's holding a pitchfork you know it doesn't mean that the problems don't have like what I asked about the end of them. My head is full of color. He likes to decorate his kitchen floor with dayglow paint so he can dream in Technicolor. He also smokes marijuana and on rare occasions takes LSD.

Yeah it's not anything that I am trying to sell. I'm not and I'm never trying to sell taking drugs to people were enough to go around. While Kees e is still fascinated by the possibilities of LSD He's militantly opposed to mind numbing or addictive drugs like heroin or cocaine. Drugs linked to organized crime. In fact when a local Oregon newspaper reported hearsay that key Z might be connected to cocaine dealers he picketed the paper. Pro-marijuana. Separate ourselves in this criminal. Come in here. I am feeling. John Roberts. A psychedelic. Is. A very.

Radical and also playing is to many old fashioned values and savors his small town roots. He's in both his sons at the time to this. Oregon high school. Pleasant Hill in the strange as it might seem at first glance this state semifinal championship game is sort of the Merry Pranksters get together. Nice to meet you. Can bat is one of the wild boarders is now the father of the Pleasant Hill quarterback and key Z's cousin day another prankster who tripped across America on the famous bus is the father of the star running back Dave. Easy. Number 44. Was the tragedy

in kin he Z's life. Is that his son Jed died in 1984. Like his father Jed was a wrestler at the University of Oregon. He was killed along with a teammate when the college band transporting them to a match skidded on an icy road and plunged over a cliff. It was an hour filled with emotion from the moment the first strains of music filled the hall to the condolences offered the families of the slain wrestlers. Residents by their nature. Are strong and courageous people. And by all accounts of the people who were there. Do you read the letters or. Die.

Like the rest of us are true champions and they were. They never quit and never cried until. The team gave the families of Lorenzo West inject easy a terrarium a living gift. The memorial service ended the way it began with the university trombone ensemble. He is he now in his early 50s has a keen sense of his own mortality and the death of Prince figures prominently in his recent writing. The. Two pieces for Esquire that come to mind to me. One is one he did after the death of John Lennon the other was after the death of Neal Cassady and whenever people ask me you know Ken Keyes he still ran I just say read those in the linen story.

He describes an evening at home watching football on TV with an uninvited guest John the groupie. Suddenly Howard Cosell interrupted his colorful commentary and said a funny thing. Apropos of nothing discernible on the screen he said. Yet however agree just a loss might seem to either side at this point in time. We must never lose sight of the fact that this is only a football game. A very un Howard Cosell like thing to say I thought and I turned up the sound. After a few moments of silence Howard announced over the play action fake unfolding on the field that John Lennon had been shot and killed outside his apartment in New York. I turned to see if John the groupie had heard the news he had. We looked into each other's eyes across the room and our ropes fell away. I was no more of the scowling land owner. And the ingratiating tramp. Simply old allies

united in the sudden hurt. By the mutual news of a mutual hero's death. Even Jeezy's harshest critics concede he can still write with blank gelati invasion demon box is part memoir part gonzo journalism part feebly but it is not the long awaited third novel. The question is will he ever write it. A. Lot of things I like in life. I'm. Writing. Very difficult. Lonely. Introspective. Corrosive. Action. Writers don't live very long. They. Write themselves and philosophical cul de sacs and. Can't get out of it. Especially if you don't have. A family to keep you. Sane. But ki Z has not given up on the novel. In fact he spent a

good deal of time in Alaska doing research on one. I know the energies there in Alaska. I just don't know that I'm capable of transmitting it. It may be a younger man's job somebody who's ready to get up there and battle those elements. I know you and I sit around watching Gilligan's Island. But I'll get it done. I mean that's what I keep working on. He's he is collaborating on several screenplays and he's intrigued by the possibilities of working in video. But for now Keyes literary reputation rests on two novels and his recent collection of short fiction. The. New York Times book critic Christopher Lehmann helped relegates along with J.D. Salinger to the lesser ranks of American writers I think that they will both be remembered as. Relatively minor figures who wrote. Books that were. Promising in a kind of literary phenomena. I think that.

Is about the extent of it. When he was being a journalist about the V.A. Hospital for being a journalist about lawyers for Flibanserin last forthcoming book about Alaska there's nobody better. There are times on his farm when key Z still the prankster seems light years away from the US literary debates swing to the left camera people. You know so you look at that. This was. The. Most exciting. Way to not wear the flag on the way that. He draws solace and pleasure from his farm where he can spend an evening with

family and friends painting astrological signs on his living room floor. But that night he will be alone at his desk working on his novel and the next week he'll get itchy to do something in public. Stone batter. Is still stirring the ashes and embers of the six trying to spark a flame demon boxes a book about keeping the faith in a faith easy and his friends never lost. And he wants his readers to remember heroes like John Lennon and his message of love and universal peace. We ordered another round of mall violence such things not talking but I suspect and we were all thinking privately as receptor drinks at night. It was time to talk a little of that old Sky once more for all the danger of Debian's or cross-hairs

else how are we Yanks going to be able to look that little bespectacled Liverpudlian in the eye again when the revolution of the role is up yonder called. Thank you. Ramona this is the.

Kind of. Lifea.