It was a treat to find this unique work, the (partial) journals of Ken Kesey while he was in jail for about half a year, beginning June 23, 1967. The story of how he came to be jailed is told brilliantly in the introduction from friend, author, and fellow Merry Prankster Ed McClanahan, and it’s quite a tale. Convicted in 1965 for possession of marijuana, Kesey faked suicide and hid out in Mexico for eight months in 1966, first in Puerto Vallarta and then, aware that the FBI knew he was alive, the more remote Manzanillo. In the fall of 1966 he returned to America, crossing the border on a borrowed horse, and made his way back to the Bay Area. After hiding out for a couple of weeks in the homes of friends, federal agents spotted him in stop and go traffic on 101 near the old Candlestick Park, and caught him after he attempted to flee on foot.

The fact that so much FBI time and energy was spent on a marijuana case, and that Kesey had to serve time, boggles the mind. Kesey spent some of his time in the San Mateo County Jail in downtown Redwood City before being transferred to the Sheriff’s Honor Camp near La Honda, a work facility in redwood country that closed in 2003, and is now part of Pescadero Creek County Park.

Part of the enjoyment of reading what he wrote while imprisoned was in looking up all these local Bay Area places he referenced – Perry Lane (now Perry Avenue in West Menlo Park) where had led a bohemian life and frequently run afoul of Wallace Stegner while at Stanford beginning in 1958, the VA hospital in Menlo Park where he had voluntarily taken psychedelic drugs in 1961 as a part of CIA-financed research (which of course led to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest), and the houses he frequented at 710 Ashbury in San Francisco (inhabited by the Grateful Dead) and the one across the street at 715 Ashbury (inhabited by the Hell’s Angels), where one time he was driving and his brakes gave out, causing him to crash into the latter.

Kesey describes his experiences with his guards and fellow inmates with honesty, and his artwork on the original pages (and also transcribed) is beautiful and livens the work up. Always with an eye for playfulness and satire, he also shows an honest sense of humanity towards those he meets, like Joe Meeks, the “sex fiend” who had done something so heinous that he was on death row (though in looking him up, it appears he ultimately was not executed, instead getting sentenced to four consecutive life terms). Kesey is not judgmental, and includes some of the poetry Meeks wrote.

We also get a glimpse into the sometimes uneasy race relations and the evolution of Kesey’s own views, as he recounts Jerry Garcy telling him “Hey, Keez…the appellation ‘spade’ is permissible only if you’re a jazz musician.” It was nice that these things that were less flattering to Kesey weren’t edited out. One seriously cringe-worthy bit was when Kesey writes of talking to another prisoner in for a rape charge, and saying “I sympathize, telling him about various Hell’s Angels sex raps that are like this – ‘Some chick thinks she can do the whole Angel thing and about half-way through a chapter she gets scared or sore and freaks and hollers rape…’” Ugh.

These moments are mercifully few in number. Most of what Kesey describes are things like life around the camp, the work, listening to music, playing a game of pickup football, and visitations from his wife and friends that sometimes resulted in drugs being smuggled in. The journal entries and letters have a stream of consciousness, informal style, and yet the quality of the writing is high, and Kesey was able to paint a picture of his experience. As to one inmate’s baritone, he says it’s “a voice so heavy it’s beyond sardonic or bitter or cynical. It groans under a burden of sorrow so immense it sounds Biblical.” Of a time he expounds in a group therapy type session, he says he held forth on entropy thusly: “Entropy is the anarchy of sunshine off a chrome bumper. Entropy is Owsley’s story of the runaway train, highballing down a steep grade, overloaded with passengers without any knowledge of the tight turn coming up at the bottom of a hill…” Of the group being implored by a guard to watch the film Shane, he writes that a black inmate quips “Them westerns ain’t so great to this cat; the redskins never win.”

There is also an afterwards of sorts written by Kesey decades later, a poem references his son’s tragic death in 1984, and his explanation of how some (but not all) of his journals survived, given county officials wariness over the author creating a book out of them. All in all, this is a window into the life of a fascinating author, a guy who wrote two monumental books in the early 1960’s, and then chose to take the road less travelled. Certainly recommended if you’re a fan of his. ( )