When Writers Go Weird: That time Ken Kesey faked his suicide.

Are writers ever normal? No, otherwise they'd be productive members of society. 'When Writers Go Weird' is when we remember writers acting strange, odd, off, or--yeah--just plain weird. Also known as Tuesday to them.

Today: That time Ken Kesey faked his suicide.

Contrary to what Hollywood would make you believe, faking your own death to get out of something isn't a common occurrence. This is because faking your death is hard work with you still being alive and all.

Kesey thinking up ways to not kill himself.

This brings us to Ken Kesey. Kesey--who looked like a middle-aged patron in a South Boston back alley bar--is in that group of one-hit wonder authors, but with only a fraction of the fame of your J.D. Salingers and Harper Lees. He wrote more, it's just that none of it was memorable. His most notable work was One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, a massive hit made even more popular with its 1975 film adaptation starring Jack Nicholson.

Kesey sprung to critical and commercial success in his mid-twenties for Cuckoo, which was partly inspired by his time spent in an illegal medical trial run by the CIA for psychoactive drugs run. The trial tested drugs like LSD, cocaine, and mescaline, creating all of the allure of a club scene but without the great dance beats, which Kesey detailed in his writings. Not surprisingly, Kesey continued the medical trial long after the medical trial ended. Drugs are funny that way.

After Cuckoo garnered success, Kesey moved to a ranch in La Honda, CA, south of San Francisco. There, Kesey and a large gathering of acquaintances and friends dabbled in then-legal psychedelic drugs like LSD (notice a pattern yet?), and held parties dubbed "Acid Tests." The group came to call itself The Merry Pranksters and criss-crossed the country in a bus painted for a bad trip--a trip on acid, not Interstate 95--for no other apparent reason than they could.

There's probably at least three dozen
illegal things going on with this bus.

By 1965, Kesey was arrested for marijuana possession, one of the few illegal drugs at the time. Then he found himself busted a second time for the same crime. For reasons unknown--paranoia? fright? looking for a thrill? a history of bad decision making?--Kesey decided to create a faked suicide to escape pending jail time.

Driving up to northern California, outside Eureka, Kesey parked a truck near a seaside cliff and left an elaborate suicide note with the line "Ocean, Ocean, I'll beat you in the end." Suicide never sounded more poetic or romantic. Then, through the help of his friends and luxurious trunk space to hide, Kesey snuck over the border into Mexico to hide from the FBI for his marijuana arrests.

Puerto Vallarta, Mazatlan, then Manzanillo all received a visit from Kesey, his friends, his family, and even the bus. The FBI didn't buy the supposed suicide, although the media reported Kesey's death as fact. U.S. authorities tracked the author to Mexico, enrolling the help of the Mexican Federales, but Kesey remained largely hidden, even escaping undercover stings a couple of times. For eight months he hid in plain sight in the town with friends. As the New York Times later recounted, a former hotel owner in Manzanillo, Bart Varelmann, wrote in a memoir that "[t]he interior of Ken's bus was a cornucopia of strange pills, exotic herbs, magic mushrooms, peyote buttons, LSD, uppers, downers, poppers, and of course marijuana." Varelmann also noted that "[o]n a windless day one could get stoned just strolling past the bus." If you think this sounds ideal, clearly you were alive for the 1960s.

Then, as randomly as he faked a suicide, as abruptly as the hijinks began, and as if the vacation was over, Kesey headed back to the United States and accepted five months in jail for his prior arrests. The ruse of a suicide was over.

Can you fake a rebirth? If so, Kesey tried his best version of it. The general absurdity of the previous two years faded as Kesey, out of prison, moved to rural Oregon and wrote largely forgettable material for books and magazines, including a memoir and tour in a new version of the psychedelic bus. He remained largely uninteresting--dare say, normal--until his death in 2001.

The weirdest thing Kesey did at the end of his life was that he became boring. And that was maybe the most criminal thing of all.

Mother wants texts banned from high school, while mildly confused about plots.

"My feeling is once something is that graphic, is there not another book? Cal is not Hamlet. There are other books about oppression."

That would be Siobhan Fallon Hogan speaking, a mother of a senior at Rumson-Fair Haven Regional School District in New Jersey--and she's none too pleased about the books and plays her nearly-adult son has to read for school.

Hogan has started a petition, garnering 250 signatures, and has taken her case to the school board to have two specific texts removed from required reading lists: the aforementioned Cal, and the play Death and the Maiden. Both texts are award winners, both are read widely in high schools across the country, and both usually aren't banned.

Cal does involve some violence, and includes a sex scene. Death and the Maiden has a back story about rape and similarly involves some violence. Both are seemingly too much for Hogan or her son's tender sensibilities to handle.

But Hogan apparently hasn't read much of Shakespeare's dramas, and especially not Hamlet, if she thinks it's a feel-good story. Why? Let's count up the deaths in Hamlet--and how they died--shall we?

• Hamlet is stabbed to death by a rapier coated in poison by Laertes!
• Laertes is stabbed to death by a rapier coated in poison by Hamlet! (What timing!)
• Gertrude is accidentally poisoned by Claudius!
• Claudius is poisoned in a couple ways by Hamlet!
• Opehlia decides to commit suicide by drowning!
• Hamlet's dad is poisoned through his ear!
• Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are both killed by pirates!
• And I don't know why I'm using so many exclamation points, but it seems appropriate!!

This doesn't even include Horatio, who was all set to off himself as well, but Hamlet talks him out of suicide, saying that someone needs to be left to tell the story of what happened. As if that isn't the most obvious thing Shakespeare ever wrote.

No decision has come down yet from the school board as to whether the two texts will be removed from the required reading list.

One thing is for certain though. Hogan was right. Cal is no Hamlet. Cal is a lot less violent and a lot more gentle to read.

The Friday Poem: Cause And Effect, by Charles Bukowski

As another week concludes, we end with a random poem. Famous poets, obscure poets, amateur poets, whatever poets--just a poem to cap off the week.

Like this one:


Cause And Effect, by Charles Bukowski

the best often die by their own hand
just to get away,
and those left behind
can never quite understand
why anybody
would ever want to
get away
from
them

Gene, We Hardly Knew Ya

Memorial Day. Hallmark holiday #6 for the year if you count Patriot's Day. Negotiating traffic through a parade route in Cambridge on my way to the beach, I accidentally drove past your old address on Concord Avenue. Of course, the rickety old piss-yellow three decker you shared with a couple of other Vietnam Vets burned down about twenty years ago, but no matter.

It's been twelve years since you shot yourself in the head at Marblehead Light with your marine service revolver. I still think of you almost every day. And I wonder, like the rest of us who knew and cared about you, what exactly made you give up the good fight. We made sure the marines gave you a military funeral because, even though you were convinced you deserved no honors, those who were soldiers with you, as well as your civilian friends, knew that you did.

You once told me that you performed acts of obscenity in 'Nam. I did not believe you and you angrily pulled out a battered old photo of you and a couple of buddies standing around, armed to the teeth, festooned with scalp necklaces of people you had killed. You pointed to one and exclaimed, "This was a four year old girl. If that isn't obscene, I don't know what is!" I was shocked into a silence unusual for a 26 year old alleged woman of the world.

But Gene, you gave me/us a lot. You taught your friends the wondrous art of skinny dipping in the Fresh Pond Reservoir at 2 AM. You taught me how to shoot that marine service revolver at a target of the boss you hated in the Concord Avenue back yard. You were loyal to a fault. When my marriage broke up, you appeared unannounced in Philadelphia with a U-Haul and moved me home to Boston without judgement.

Sadly, none of us, including you could heal your pain. None of the girls you loved, loved you back enough to commit to fighting your demons. The job you had as a therapist laid you off and you could not find another. Nowadays, we call it PTSD of returning vets and it is worth a Dateline-like special once a week. Back then, you took your silent place among soldiers who came back from the unspeakable, drank heavily, and finally started building arsenals in their houses to either do damage to themselves or others.

Was it the silence that killed you? The guilt over what you had seen and done? The lack of respect returning soldiers suffered back then? Or just the fact that the World was not like 'Nam and the bottom line was that you did not fit in either place anymore?

We, your friends and your family still miss you, Gene. The truth is that you showed each of us a small part of you. Even if we put it all together, we would still end up with a fragmented Picasso-like mosaic.

Gene, it's Memorial Day. I write this in your memory and hope in death you've found the peace you never knew in life.

And like many soldiers who come back to the World each day from today's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Gene, we hardly knew ya.