Kesey Come, Kesey Go : The Merry Prankster Is Up to His Old Tricks in an O.C. Appearance With a ‘60s Feeling, and Once Again It’s . . .

“Ah ha! . . . Ah ha! . . . Ah ha!” One thing about Ken Kesey, the old Merry Prankster knows how to make an entrance.

Lumbering out in front of his applauding and hooting standing-room-only audience at Cal State Fullerton on Saturday night, the author and legendary ‘60s outlaw cult hero was costumed in a long brown fur robe with rubber bird feet and a snaggle-beaked Indian bird-face mask.

And with his arms outstretched like wings, Kesey cawed:

“Ah ha! . . . Ah ha! . . . Ah ha!”

But the old Prankster was up to his usual tricks. Turning around, he revealed that he had walked out backward--the front of the Indian bird costume was on his back.

“Our story this time,” he said in a crackly old-man’s voice, “is about Eemook, the crippled spoon maker, and how he thwarted the advances of the strange being that came one night to transfix the members of the Sea Cliff tribe.”

With that, Kesey began beating on a tom-tom as he made his way to the microphone and started reading his new children’s book, “The Sea Lion.” When he was done, he shed his Indian costume to reveal a black tuxedo with tails.

Donning a top hat and looking like an overstuffed penguin in red socks, he began reading his other children’s book, the whimsical “Little Tricker the Squirrel Meets Big Double the Bear,” complete with a variety of Kesey-rendered cartoon voices.

Fittingly, he concluded his readings by sending a rubber-band powered plastic bird fluttering and soaring over the audience.

It may be the ‘90s, but there was no doubt the spirit of this evening with Ken Kesey was firmly entrenched in the ‘60s.

Before Kesey came out, the audience of more than 250 had grooved on ‘60s vintage psychedelic music accompanying swirling psychedelic images projected on a screen. Some audience members were even wearing tie-dyed T-shirts.

They were Keseyites, come to witness the Chief Prankster do his thing.

As Kesey’s pal Mason Williams--the former “Smothers Brothers Show” writer and composer of “Classical Gas” who had driven Kesey and his wife, Faye, down from Los Angeles--said in his brief introduction: “I got him this far, but he’s going to take us further beyond.”

But it wasn’t until the reading was over and Kesey had changed yet again--into his street clothes--that the unannounced Part II of the evening with Ken Kesey began.

Taking a seat in the front row, surrounded by several dozen fans who had stuck around for autographs, Kesey, 56, discussed everything from his just-finished new novel to whether drugs help or hinder the creative process.

Kesey had left his Oregon farm to receive the Los Angeles Times’ Robert Kirsch Award the night before. The award honors a body of work by a writer living in or writing on the American West.

Kesey’s literary reputation was firmly established with his two novels--”One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” (1962) and “Sometimes a Great Notion” (1964).

That he has written two children’s books may seem out of character for the onetime LSD pioneer whose cross-country 1964 psychedelic bus tour with his band of buddies--the Merry Pranksters--was chronicled in Tom Wolfe’s “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.”

Not really, said Kesey.

“A friend of mine said, ‘Hey, you know both those (children’s) stories are the same story as ‘Cuckoo’s Nest.’ I said, ‘I know. I only know one story.’ That’s why I have to keep changing clothes,” he said with a laugh. “They’re always the same story, and the story has to do with how the small has to confront the large--we’re being badgered by a totalitarian evil consciousness--and what we can do about it.”

In his award acceptance speech the night before, Kesey had talked about the “writer as warrior.”

“I think it’s really going to be important for us to know who the warriors are in the next 10 years,” he said. “They’re not many of us, and we’ve got a big battle.”

As he sees it, “it’s the job of the writing warrior in America today” not to kow-tow to the powers that be: “I kiss no ass. I’m a writer. “

There are, Kesey said, “lots of places to battle because the evil forces are afoot in this country. When we can have such a celebration about killing 200,000 people (in the Gulf War), the country is in bad, fascistic shape.”

Kesey said his children’s book “The Sea Lion” was taken from the middle of his just-finished novel “Sailor’s Song,” which is set in an Alaskan fishing village in the future.

But the author, who worked on “Sailor’s Song” off and on throughout the ‘80s, fears that the book will not be as critically popular as his other novels.

“I was doing a . . . reading a few months ago and (Norman) Mailer was there and Jerzy Kosinski . . . and Shelby Foote--20 big-time writers--and I was thinking about this novel in terms of them: It’s not going to change them an inch.

“Writing novels for big people, all you’re trying to do is raise or lower yourself in their estimation. I’m either going to go up or down on the marketplace in New York, but I’m not going to effect any change,” as he feels he can do with young people who read his children’s books.

Holding a paperback copy of “Sometimes a Great Notion,” Kesey said: “I’ve really felt it more and more that I’ll never write another one of those. I’d love to, but it’s not just what you want to do. You only get three or four Super Bowl rings.”

Besides, he said, “it’s something you do when you’ve got that kind of stamina. That has to do with youth. It has to do with being able to get wired and stay up and work for 30 hours”--he laughed--”and I just can’t do that sort of stuff any more. I’d love to, but I can’t. So it (‘Sailor’s Song’) is nowhere near as good a book as this.”

Does the legendary LSD pioneer think drugs helped the creative process or hindered it?

“Yeah, I do . . . “ he said without directly answering the question. “As the old guy said in ‘Little Big Man’: “Sometimes the magic works; sometimes it doesn’t.’

“But I don’t think you can rely on it. If you could, we should be having some terrific work coming out of East L.A., it seems to me. So there must be more to it than just the drugs.”

What’s Kesey’s opinion of the “Just say no” generation?

“I’ve always kind of just liked to say, ‘Thanks,’ he joked, as the Keseyites joined in the laughter.

“What I feel is that nobody has any more right to tell me what to do in my head than they have to tell a woman what to do in her body. That is what this nation is based on: Freedom of the spirit.”