Radical Chapters: Pacifist Bookseller Roy Kepler and the Paperback Revolution

10 The Sixties Begin

176 10 The Sixties Begin Ken Kesey needs his bus driver. Naturally, he turns to Kepler’s. And so begins the sixties qua sixties. It’s a June day in 1964. Kesey and his clan cavort on the farthest side of the Santa Cruz Mountains. The former Stanford writing fellow ’s first novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, had been a favorite of Roy’s, who appreciated the antiauthoritarian sentiments as well as its commercial popularity. With his book earnings, Kesey has removed himself from the Bay Area to La Honda. It’s hardly a town, more a deeply shaded place seventeen miles from Menlo Park. Kesey and crowd are burrowing in. They also have a bus, a 1939 International Harvester, and they have divined a new destination. Kesey et al. will be traveling east, bound for the 1964 World’s Fair and publication of his latest book, Sometimes a Great Notion (Perry 1990). On this particular June day, Kesey and his best friend Ken Babbs, another former Stanford writing fellow, need a steady hand at the wheel. “Kesey asked if anyone had seen Neal Cassady,” Babbs recalled in an interview. “Ron Bevirt said he just came from Kepler’s, and Neal was there.” Kepler’s: Of course! The entire circus had been drawn to the store. Kesey himself would pal around with Ira, the ex–college wrestler periodically challenging the slender pacifist to an arm-wrestling match that would have set a world record for brevity. Writer Robert Stone, a Stegner Writing Fellow who ran with the Kesey crowd, recalled that most of the Stegner Fellows would spend some time at Kepler’s, because it was the best bookstore around. Stone saw in Kepler’s reminders of The Sixties Begin  177 New York City’s legendary Gotham Book Mart and the 8th Street Bookshop. Even after Kesey moved over the mountains to La Honda, some of the crew would continue frequenting Kepler’s. Certainly it would be a fertile spot for Neal Cassady, the muscular motor-mouth known to Beat aspirants as the inspiration for Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. Kepler’s had sold many copies of the paperback. The store abounded with the books and magazines and, well, the girls that were purest nectar for Neal Cassady and his acolytes. Bevirt says he does not remember the episode, but Babbs has recalled it several times. So it could have gone: Bevirt exits Kesey’s La Honda homestead and heads east up Highway 84, winds his way over the crest at Skyline Drive, and then rolls down through the mountains until he’s at El Camino Real. In Kepler’s familiar environs, Cassady must be easy to find: a restless man in his late thirties, his raw energy throbbing. A while later, Babbs recalls, a smoking Buick, radio blaring “Love Potion Number Nine,” pulls into La Honda headquarters. His jeans hanging below his belly, a Camel cigarette from his lips, Cassady is reporting for duty. Kesey astounds him. The crew is traveling across country and needs a driver. Cassady is that man. “You mean we’d be making movies? I’d be a film star in my declining years?” Cassady says, in Babbs’s 2005 recollection. “There’s nothing I’d rather do for you,” Kesey says, according to Babbs. And with one or two more adjustments, the 1939 International Harvester known more popularly as Furthur or The Bus was on its way across the country, in a journey subsequently enshrined in 1968 by Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Which, in turn, like On the Road before it, would be sold abundantly at Kepler’s Books & Magazines, the place where characters sometimes came to life.  Maybe it happened, just like that. Maybe, more probably, some key facts are missing or have been somehow compressed. The point is, 178  Radical Chapters Kepler’s was right there at the beginning. Right there, when the two distinct themes that defined the sixties arose. Call them, with gross exaggeration, the political and the psychedelic. The political is the world of protests and peace activism, culminating in but not limited to the mass demonstrations against the Vietnam War. The psychedelic is the world of mind enhancement and artistic expression, epitomized by Ken Kesey’s acid tests and all that sprang from them. Both classic expressions of the decade found root...