As bohemias go, Perry Lane was Arcadia, Arcadia just off the Stanford golf course. It was a cluster of two room cottages with weathery wood shingles in an oak forest, only not just amid trees and greenery, but amid vines, honeysuckle tendrils, all buds and shoots and swooping tendrils and twitterings like the best of Arthur Rackham and Honey Bear. Not only that, it had true cultural cachet. Thorstein Veblen had lived there. So had two Nobel Prize winners everybody knew about though the names escaped them. The cottages rented for just $60 a month. Getting into Perry Lane was like getting into a club. Everybody who lived there had known somebody else who lived there, or they would never have gotten in, and naturally they got to know each other very closely too, and there was always something of an atmosphere of communal living. Nobody’s door was ever shut on Perry Lane, except when they were pissed off.
It was sweet. Perry Lane was a typical 1950s bohemia. Everybody sat around shaking their heads over America’s tailfin, housing-development civilization, and Christ, in Europe, so what if the plumbing didn’t work, they had mastered the art of living. Occasionally somebody would suggest an orgy or a threeday wine binge, but the model was always that old Zorba the Greek romanticism of sandals and simplicity and back to first principles. aWolfe, Tom. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. New York: Ferrar Straus and Giroux, 1968. p.34
Number 9 Perry Lane. Just to the right of that telephone pole. That’s where Ken Kesey lived from 1959 to ’63 while he was enrolled in Stanford’s Creative Writing Center.
His neighbor, Vik Lovell, a Stanford psychology grad student, had an idea. The CIA was funding research. MKULTRA. Menlo Park Veterans’ Hospital. They wanted to know what happened when you gave people LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, cocaine, DMT, all of it. Kesey volunteered. Then he got a job there as a night aide.
Those night shifts, those drugs, that hospital, that’s where Cuckoo’s Nest came from. Published in 1962. Written on Perry Lane.
The parties. Jesus, the parties. Hawaiian luaus spilling into the street. Jerry Garcia and Phil Lesh playing music.g Black, white, brown, everyone together, which in 1960s Palo Alto was apparently too much for the cops to handle. Racially mixed gatherings. That was the crime.h
The Perry Lane Olympics. A naked woman on the back of a convertible, holding a toilet plunger with a burning rag jammed in the cup, riding up and down the lane like some kind of dionysian torch bearer. That happened.
August 1963: developers show up. Number 9 and the other cottages get bulldozed. Ranch homes go up. Clean. Respectable. Boring.
Kesey and the Merry Pranksters pack up and head to La Honda. The party moves on.
Perry Lane becomes just another address. The weirdness, erased.
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