KEN KESEY FLASHES BACK TO LEARY

By KEN KESEY

Give 'em while they can smell 'em. --A SIGN IN A FLORIST-SHOP WINDOW During the '70s Ken Babbs and I put out a little homegrown periodical called Spit in the Ocean. The idea was to have a different editor for each issue and let them call the deal. Dr. Timothy Leary had agreed to do an issue from his San Diego prison cell. I guess we expected some kind of bleak, jailhouse blues--but no: Doc writes to inform us that the theme for his issue will be "Communication with Higher Intelligence"--an ambitious aim even from atop the loftiest ivory tower. But from behind bars?

So Babbs and I fly south to ask our incarcerated editor a few probing questions. I confess I had some reservations. The famous professor had always been more a distant phenomenon than a close friend. Previous attempts at encounters had always seemed jinxed. In the summer of '63, my family and friends were booked for a high-level seminar with Leary and Richard Alpert at the International Foundation for Internal Freedom's paradise in Zihuatanejo. As we bustled through San Francisco Airport to our Mexicana flight, we saw the headline: DOPE DOCTORS ARRESTED AT MEXICO MANSION. So much for paradise.

A few seasons later we bused our way out to IFIF's digs in upstate New York. Maybe the stars were wrong. Or it could have been the way we came barging up to the Millbrook mansion on a sleepy Sunday morn in a gaudy vehicle belching green and orange smoke while Neal Cassady's voice blared from the rooftop speakers. Dr. Leary was upstairs, we were informed, sleeping one off. We left before he woke.

So here we were for one more try, in the visitors' tank at the federal pen in San Diego, waiting for the stone-faced warden to decide whether or not to allow our visit. I was no stranger to pulling time, but mine was six months at a work camp in the redwoods. While we cooled our heels, I could only imagine Tim's predicament: a middle-aged West Point alum and discredited Harvard instructor serving a sentence in this skyless scene. No wonder he let the Weathermen talk him into that swashbuckling escape the year before from San Luis Obispo, where he was pulling hard time on a fall he took for his daughter.

Now imagine being whisked to Algiers, where you are surrounded by fugitive Black Panthers, white-bread revolutionaries and Algerian police. Then picture this: a mysterious siren comes swinging to your rescue, sweeps you off your feet and promises to deliver you from your nightmare by marrying you. For a honeymoon, she wants you to meet her folks at their estate in Afghanistan. The folks, though, turn out to be four U.S. narcs with cuffs and extradition papers.

So what I really want to ask Leary is this: Do you hanker to wring your wife's treacherous neck? Finally, after three-quarters of the visiting hour has passed, the prisoner is escorted in. After devoting most of our talk to Spit, I finally get up the gumption to ask my question. "By the way, Tim, I don't mean to pry, but ... what's happening with your new, you know, since you last saw ..."

"With my new spouse the Spy? I see her a couple times a week." Seeing that Babbs and I are dumb struck, Dr. Leary laughs and says, "I certainly don't hold it against her. She likes this espionage action. It gets her off. Who am I, of all people, to put down somebody else's turn-on?" And that's my little flower for Tim. Give 'em while they can smell 'em.

Ken Kesey is the author of One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest.