''This comes off pretty easy,'' he said, a fond smile playing over his face. ''It's amazing, some of the things that are coming out - things I remember.
''It's going to take a lot of bubblegum.''
For about 15 years, the bus dubbed ''Furthur'' has rusted away in a swamp on the Kesey family's Willamette Valley farm, out of sight if not out of mind, more memory than monument.
That is where Ken Kesey - the author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and hero of a generation that vowed to drop out and tune in with the help of LSD - intended it to stay after firing up a new version.
But four years after Ken Kesey's death, a Hollywood restaurateur has persuaded the family to resurrect the old bus so it can help tell the story of Kesey, the Merry Pranksters and the psychedelic 1960s.
''I read his books back in high school and through college,'' said David Houston, owner of the historic roadhouse Barney's Beanery in Hollywood, Calif. ''I just always thought he was a fascinating and brilliant man. The story of the bus was always very compelling. To find out it had been just left to go - I really wanted to restore the bus and tell its story to the world.''
Houston hopes to raise $100,000, which he figures is what it will cost to get the bus running and looking good. The Kesey family will maintain control of the bus, taking it it to special events.
''People think of a bus as transportation,'' said Zane Kesey. ''No. It's a platform, a way to get your messages across.''
Last fall, a group of old Pranksters hauled the bus out of the swamp and parked it next to a barn to await restoration.
''One of the things that is really optimistic for me is it's got full air in the tires from Cassady,'' said Kesey, referring to Neal Cassady, who was the wheelman in Jack Kerouac's On the Road, and drove Further on that first trip. ''Honestly, if the tires had been flat, I would have said, 'Just leave it there.' ''
The restoration will be a tough job. On a cold misty day, Houston, Zane Kesey and former Green Turtle bus mechanic Mike Cobiskey climbed on ladders, peered under the hood, picked at paint, and crawled underneath to look it over, and what they saw was daunting. The body is badly rusted. The paint is peeled. The roof leaks. The engine, not original, and transmission have been underwater. The original bunk beds and refrigerator are gone, though the driver's seat remains.
''The most important thing is the paint,'' Cobiskey said to Zane Kesey. ''I'm sure you have a thousand pictures of it.''
''And no two are alike,'' said Zane Kesey.
''It's gonna go,'' said Houston. ''It can definitely run. It shouldn't drive across country. But certainly it should be a living, healthy, valuable piece once we are done with it.''
Fresh from the stunning success of Cuckoo's Nest, Ken Kesey bought the bus in 1964 from a family in San Francisco that had fitted it out with bunks as a motorhome. The plan was to drive it to New York for the World's Fair and a coming-out party for his new book, Sometimes a Great Notion.
''At first a bunch of us were going to go in a station wagon,'' said Ken Babbs, one of the original Pranksters. ''Then it was getting too big for that.
''Kesey went up and bought it. I think it was around $1,500.''
At La Honda, Kesey's home in the Santa Cruz Mountains south of San Francisco, they installed a sound system, a generator on the back, and went wild with the paint. Artist Roy Sebern painted the word Furthur on the destination placard as a kind of one-word poem and inspiration to keep going whenever the bus broke down. It wasn't until much later he found out he had misspelled it. Just as the bus was constantly being repainted, somewhere along the line the Further sign was corrected.
The day they were ready to go, Kesey recruited Cassady from a bookstore where he was working, Babbs recalled. Pulling out of the driveway with Ray Charles singing ''Hit the Road Jack,'' the bus ran out of gas. That was quickly remedied, and down the road they went, Cassady spewing the speed-talking rap-babble that inspired Kerouac's writing style.
The bus got stuck in an Arizona river. It stopped in Houston for a visit with author Larry McMurtry, who was with Kesey at the Wallace Stegner writing seminar at Stanford. The Pranksters jammed with a piano player in New Orleans and were ejected from a blacks-only beach on Lake Ponchartrain. Rolling through New York City, the Pranksters tootled saxophones and blew soap bubbles from the roof, and later stopped at Timothy Leary's Millbrook meditation center, where Kerouac sang a sad rendition of ''Ain't We Got Fun.''
After one last trip, to Woodstock in 1969, Kesey put the bus out to pasture, where it served as a dugout for softball games. The Smithsonian Institution expressed some interest in restoring the bus, but Kesey would never let it go. He towed it to the swamp in 1990 when he bought a 1947 bus for a whole new series of trips. Kesey's widow, Faye, had reservations about restoring the old bus, but did not try to stop it.
''I kind of liked it in the swamp covered with moss and becoming part of the swamp. But I talked to everybody who had been on it. To a man they all wanted to see it restored.
''If not, it can always go back to the swamp. Nature does a pretty good paint job, too.''
