Dead Letters: The Painter

Filed by Fletcher Moody — Literary Correspondent

I was sent to La Honda, California, on April 23, 1965, to cover a police raid on the home of a novelist named Ken Kesey.

Kesey had written two novels by then, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Sometimes a Great Notion. The first had made him famous and paid for a log-and-stone house in a stand of redwoods in the Santa Cruz Mountains, where he kept a kind of permanent open house. The young people who came and stayed called themselves the Merry Pranksters. There was the bus they had driven across the country, painted every color at once. There were speakers wired up into the trees, parties he called Acid Tests, and a sign on the gate, lettered by hand, that read WELCOME HELL'S ANGELS. His mailbox stood out by the road. Someone local, who did not care for any of it, had put a few bullets through it.

The county had been watching the place for months. When they came, they came in force: sheriff's deputies, a dog, and a federal narcotics agent named William Wong, who by several accounts came through the front door at a dead run. They arrested some fourteen people. Most of them were young. None of them behaved as though it were the end of anything.

I came up the road on foot, because there was nowhere left to leave a car, and no one asked me who I was, which is usual.

Where Kesey was and what he was doing when they took him depends on whom you ask, and I am not in a position to settle it. The officers said he was in the bathroom, trying to put the evidence down the toilet. Kesey said the evidence had been planted, and that he and the two friends arrested with him had only been painting the toilet, and that the paint was only paint. I can tell you what I saw, which was the toilet, unflushed and freshly coated in a color I have no name for, a green with an orange coming up under it, and a brush laid across the top of the can. I want to be exact about this, because it is the kind of detail a man could be forgiven for inventing, and I did not invent it. They walked him out across the plank bridge over the creek and put him in a car.

The affidavit the officers swore out to search the house is a matter of record, and it is worth reading. Among its grounds for believing Kesey a dealer in narcotics, the document offers that he had written two books, one concerning the effects of marijuana and one the effects of LSD. The books it named were Sometimes a Great Notion and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. I have covered writers a long time, and I had not before seen a man's own novels entered against him as proof of his crimes.

What they carried out came to less than the affidavit had promised. A pint jar. Two and a half lids of grass. A disposable syringe. An airline bag. They wrote each item into a ledger and gave it a number, and they carried out his mail along with the rest, of which there was a great deal, sent to him from all over. I stood by the mail longer than the work required. Other people's undelivered letters are the closest thing I have to a hobby.

Toward the end, as the cars were going back down the road, someone in what was left of the crowd said a thing I have not since been able to put down. I did not see who said it. I turned to find the face. There were too many of them, and then there were none. The cars were already under the trees. For a moment I thought it might have been me.

What the voice said was, Tell them we were here.

I wrote it down. There is a place in my notebook for who said a thing, and I left it blank, and for once I did not go back to fill it. The blank has always been the failure. This time it was the truth.

There is still a streak of that green on the cuff of a coat I have had a long time. It has not come out. I have not tried very hard.

I got the quote. I just don't know whose it is.

— F.M.

Fletcher Moody is a literary correspondent. His column, "Dead Letters," covers the stranger truths of literary history. It appears when it appears.