Down on the peacock farm

It wasn't long ago that the curtain almost fell, prematurely, on his final act. A year and a half ago, Kesey suffered a mild stroke while going through some journals out in the garage. With immediate medical attention, and the use of an experimental drug t-PA (or recombinant tissue plasminogen activator), Kesey has suffered few long-lasting effects normally associated with stroke victims. He still has trouble writing in longhand, but his typing skills haven't been affected much.

This was the second time Kesey has benefited from being a guinea pig for experimental drugs. (The first time: government-funded LSD experiments in Menlo Park, Calif., in the early '60s. Coupled with his work in a mental ward, the experiences inspired "Cuckoo's Nest.") "It was more than the second time," Kesey says in a mixture of deadpan seriousness and a spark of mischievous humor. He does not elaborate.

Faye half-jokes that she wishes the episode had scared him a little more, causing him to slow down. If anything, friends say, tasting his own mortality has made him work even harder. "He's gone balls to the wall now on everything we're doing," says Ken Babbs, Kesey's longtime friend and right-hand man. "His energies are focused, really focused. When you get older, time speeds up. Through time, he's also grown more compassionate, loving and forgiving."

Kesey, once the harbinger for change in pre-hippie America and leader of the consciousness-expansion revolution, hasn't let anything alter his course, although the velocity has changed. There have been endless court battles and police harassment, drug busts, jail, diabetes and the stroke. The death of his son, Jed, in 1984 almost ended him, but he's survived it all. Stubborn as hell, he's outlived most of his contemporaries and friends. Even Jerry Garcia, whose Grateful Dead provided the soundtrack for his Acid Test "happenings," has gone. Kesey sits relatively alone in the pantheon of '60s counterculture icons.

Earlier this year, this fact was painfully illustrated when he was invited to the Sundance Film Festival for a screening of "The Source," a new movie about the Beat Generation writers. An interview with Kesey appears in part of the documentary. "I don't have a large part in it; I was too young to be a beatnik, and too old to be a hippie," Kesey says. "But while I was there, I realized I was the only one of them left alive -- Ginsberg was gone, Kerouac, Cassady, Burroughs."

Kesey attributes his longevity to his family and friends. "Those guys really didn't have a lot of family, and their circle was made up of literary professorial contemporaries," Kesey says. "I've always stuck pretty close to my family, and I think that's one of the reasons I've survived a lot of stuff that other people didn't." And he's become more prolific. This year, Kesey has unearthed some of his jail manuscripts and journals, to be published as "Kesey's Jailbook" later this year. [It has not yet been published.] He's also started writing another book, tentatively called "Animals," and in August finished with a Merry Prankster tour of England where the group performed the musical interactive play "The Search for King Arthur."

Writing and performing are the same to him, although hes done more of the former in recent years. He quit writing for awhile, announcing that he'd rather live his life like a work of art, but that stage was relatively short-lived, his word-processor never really able to stay silent. Kesey continued magazine work, writing for Rolling Stone and starting his own literary magazine. The 1990s saw two new novels, "Sailor Song" and "Last Go Round." Of his two children's books, "The Sea Lion" and "Tricker the Squirrel Meets Big Double the Bear," the latter was included on the Library of Congress' list of suggested children's books in 1991. Then came "Twister," a multimedia stage version of "The Wizard of Oz," with a dash of "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" thrown in for interactivity.

"'Twister' falls midway between a very modern publication, and a very, very ancient publication," Kesey says, feeling the cool of the evening and donning a sweater. "A publication is just that, when you put your work out in front of the public, that really opens it up ... instead of saying publication is when you have something printed and distributed." He continues: "I have a large body of work, that isn't published by the East Coast -- like poetry festivals, and the Acid Tests. I'm grateful to New York for putting it out there, but I feel obligated to the sport of storytelling, to spread that out wherever I can."

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