Drinking With Men : A Memoir (9781101603123) (3 page)

He told me that his marriage was falling apart. That he constantly worried about his health. That he was too young for heart problems, but he had them anyway. That he felt as though his whole life had added up to zero. He asked: “Will I ever be happy?” The cards, I answered bluntly, said no.

“But,” I told him, just like I told everyone else, “you have the power to change that.” He shook his head and glared at me with red, swollen eyes that said
No. I don't.

I did not want to believe him, but I held myself back. I had no business contradicting him, arguing with him, trying to make him feel hopeful. Maybe he was right. Maybe he didn't have the power. Maybe no one had the power. Maybe the days that lie ahead of us are set in stone and written in blood, and that was that. And it occurred to me that maybe I'd been the cynic: Something I had believed in had become a shtick, a gambit for attention. I hadn't thought it through. Maybe I'd even hurt people.

In the background, other passengers were caught up in conversation, laughing and drinking and carrying on. I could think of nothing more to say to the guy. Nothing reassuring. I felt small and foolish, incapable of any small comfort or kindness, and when the guy got off the train a couple of stops before mine, I was relieved.

•   •   •

I
sat awake in my bed that night and thought about him. I imagined him going home to a white-clapboard colonial, to an unhappy wife pretending to be asleep. I imagined him returning the next day to a job he hated and getting wasted again that afternoon. But of course at fifteen, I really
couldn't
imagine what it was like to be him, to live his life. And I realized I didn't want to be able to. I didn't want to be adult enough yet to understand where he was coming from. Reading tarot cards in the bar car had been fun until it got serious. Adults had problems I could not begin to fathom, that I should not wish on myself, no matter how badly I wanted to grow up. And they had things to say I wasn't ready to hear, and to which I was incapable of responding with any real empathy.

I didn't go back to the bar car. I missed the drinks. I missed the grown-ups. I missed their attention. But I was
not
one of them. For the first time in my life—but not the last—I felt sharply and unhappily aware that I was getting older. That I wasn't exactly a child anymore. I was in the borderlands, neither here nor there, old enough to see that I was too young for the bar car, even though I desperately wanted to be there. I had been little more than a pretender, but I had felt, at least for a little while, like a regular, and for reasons I didn't yet understand, that feeling mattered to me, and I sensed that it always would. But I knew I didn't belong there—not yet—although I could feel adulthood encroaching, real adulthood, which now seemed less about drinking and smoking and freedom and more about loss and fear and the sense that Death itself lay waiting somewhere just ahead.

2.

TWENTY-ONE SHOTS

Inglewood and Santa Cruz

M
y mother just had to go to a show and see it firsthand, I figured, and everything would be fine. She'd see that the people were nice, and no one really got hurt, and she'd stop worrying so much about what I was up to. So during the Grateful Dead's nine-night run at Madison Square Garden in 1988, I hooked her up with a pair of tickets. She invited her friend Eva. Ma showed up at the Garden in a dress and Eva in tight, ironed dark jeans and a blazer. They both wore good jewelry, sunglasses, heels, and full makeup. Two cosmopolitan New York ladies, out on the town, taking in dinner and a concert. I pointed them in the direction of their seats and called out, “Have a good show,” as they descended into the belly of the Garden. “Come back and hang out during intermission.” A real Deadhead didn't go to her seat. I stayed in the hallway with my friends, where the sound was fine and there was more room to hang out and dance and, if the spirit moved you, spin yourself into a trance.

Not three songs into the first set, I heard the
click-click-click
of their high heels returning to the hallway. “Ma, what's wrong?” I asked. She raised her sunglasses, just a little. I could see she was crying, and she said, “I can't talk to you now. I can't talk to you now. I can't talk to you now.” My mother understood the magic in saying a thing three times. “Eva and I are leaving,” she announced, avoiding direct eye contact with me. “We are going to have a drink. Then I am going home.” She took a rumbly tearful breath and continued. “And I will talk to
you
tomorrow.”

Some skinny stringy-haired kid slumped on the floor against the wall had been sizing up the situation. He looked at Eva and asked, “Hey, do you have a Valium?” She opened up her purse, shook a few pills out of a vial, and handed them to the kid.

He was clearly a genius. I, on the other hand, was totally fucked. I knew I was in big trouble with my mom, even if I did not understand why. I slept outside the Garden that night, in a pile of hippie kids under a pile of blankets, taking swigs from a flask of Jack Daniel's and trying to figure out what had made my mother cry. As far as I knew, the concert had proceeded without incident: no random acts of violence, no mass nudity, no college kid on a bad trip being hauled out on a stretcher. But I was sure she must have had her reasons, and I also knew that, in time, they would be revealed to me.

When I finally went home the next day, I found out what had upset Ma. We sat together in the living room and talked, and she was eerily calm. She didn't object to the odd joint now and again herself—she was no Puritan—but the sheer
quantity
of smoke at the show had freaked her out. I guess I'd just gotten used to it. Oh, and one other thing: the personal hygiene situation. Never before had she seen so many brazenly filthy people. “Do those people
ever
shower?” she asked, horrified. By then she'd seen me through a few bouts of plantar warts on my feet, but she didn't even know about the scabies outbreak during the previous spring's tour. Yet it is only in retrospect—twenty years on now—that I can finally 'fess up and say: Yes, yes, it is likely that in becoming a Deadhead, along with asserting my independence, forging my identity, following my bliss, blah blah blah blah blah, I was also deliberately torturing my mother (who wasn't easy to shock, so it took some doing). Back then I hadn't so much seen it that way. If nothing else, after her aborted evening at the Garden, my mother was sure I was smoking about a pound of pot weekly and not bathing a whole lot. The drugs and the dirty: this got to Ma. But, like many casual observers, what she didn't notice was that many of us were also drunk.

•   •   •

S
oon after I turned sixteen, with the encouragement of an unusually progressive guidance counselor who'd seen more than a few Dead shows himself, I dropped out of high school. Would it matter? I had already cut classes. A lot of them. And in the classes to which I'd bothered showing up, I was frequently overtaken by daydreaming. Or writing poems. Or worrying about the contras and the Sandinistas, nuclear power, the British miners, the Ethiopian famine, the sinking of the
Rainbow Warrior
, and how Ronald Reagan was ruining the world.

I don't recall ever doing my homework. I felt like I was wasting my time and my teachers' time. My mother, to say the least, was not pleased with my decision to drop out, but she understood that I was unhappy, adrift, and desperate to do something else, and she consented. I promised I'd get my equivalency diploma someday. And go to college someday. For now, I wanted to hit the road. I wanted to see the U.S. of A. I wanted to
live it
. I didn't even have to learn how to drive—there was always some other Deadhead with room for one more, one more who could pitch in for gas, for tolls, for the odd motel room or campsite.

Most of the jobs available to a teenage high school dropout with a limited skill set were in retail and service. That suited me fine. A couple of months of working in a bookstore could furnish the modest capital required to launch a cottage industry in tie-dyed apparel, handmade beaded jewelry, or vegetarian chili—or maybe even to get a plane ticket to the Bay Area for a big event like the annual New Year's Eve show. I'd get a job near home, keep it for a season, then pile into someone's rusty VW bus or sputtering van—someone, some friend, some stranger, no matter—and spend the next six weeks or so on tour.

It played out like that for more than a year, and then even that was not enough. I wanted to leave, period. No more three months on, three months off. No more bookstores, no more New York, no more Ma. And so, after an autumn of selling art books in Soho, I packed it in and left, with no intention of returning. I parlayed my final paycheck into a flight to San Francisco, where, just across the bridge in Oakland, a few nights of Grateful Dead shows awaited. I was not traveling light. I took an Army-Navy duffel bag crammed full of clothes and books, my tarot cards, a portable typewriter, and about a hundred bucks in cash.

On the flight out west, I sat next to a middle-aged man in a suit. I had on a favorite getup: a woven purple-and-green Guatemalan shmatte (a thing not so different from a dyed burlap sack, really) and a pair of tattered huaraches. The guy told me he was an actuary. I had no idea what that could possibly mean. He tried to explain. Anyway, he was a nice guy. We talked. He was going to some kind of meeting, he said. “And you?”

“I'm going to see the Grateful Dead.”

He smiled. “Oh, I saw them a couple times. Years ago. Back in college.” And then he got that glassy-eyed sweet-sad look, and sighed that sigh I knew from the guys in the Metro-North bar car, that sigh that says
Nostalgia is a bitch, and getting old is hard
.

“Then what?” he asked.

Then what?
I had no idea.

“I have no idea,” I said. Beyond a few days at the Oakland Coliseum, whatever else my future held was a mystery.

“Well, I sure hope you're careful,” he said. “I have a daughter almost your age. I'd be worried out of my mind.” By then I'd managed to get him to shift a mini bottle of Jack Daniel's—which I liked to think of as my signature drink, in homage to Janis Joplin—my way. The irony was not lost on me. There was plenty to worry about. The world, the big unpredictable one that is away from home, trembles with dangers—big ugly ones right out there on the surface, and other, more insidious ones pulsing just below. And for girls, it is fair to say there are more, and greater, dangers.

As much as I wished to believe in the Grateful Dead tour as a peaceable and equitable kingdom, it was not, and it did not exist in a protected magical circle. On an earlier tour, somewhere in upstate New York, my friends and I picked up a dead-eyed girl named Colleen. She was a little older than us, late twenties maybe. She wound up sharing a motel room with us that night. She stayed in the shower for about forty minutes, and then sat speechless on the bed bundled in towels and blankets for a long time. Another girl and I sat beside her, our arms around her, while she sobbed. And then she told us, even though we'd already figured out the essentials of what had happened: Just a few days earlier, she'd been raped in a campground. There were plenty of other Deadheads around, but nobody came to her rescue. Nobody pressed charges. Nobody took her to the hospital. “Everyone was fucked up,” she told us—like she had to apologize for them.

Although many people I befriended on tour shared my burgeoning commitment to progressive politics in a broad, vague way, the environment could hardly be called feminist. Gender lines, to my surprise and dismay, were strictly drawn. Girls were expected to wear long and flowing—that is, feminine—clothes, to be pretty in a kind of standardized long-haired, patchouli-scented way. Men were expected to drink harder, do drugs harder, and at the same time, effectively govern the community. In some sense, women—along with drugs and booze—were treated kind of like community property on tour, even as there were inevitably some who kept their stashes to themselves. It all seemed so hunter-gatherer to me, and it was reinforced, perhaps even encouraged, by some of the lyrics to some of our favorite songs: “We can share the women, we can share the wine,” Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir harmonized on “Jack Straw.” One of the band's great crowd-pleasers, “Sugar Magnolia,” is nothing less than a paean to an idealized hippie chick, hypersexualized but otherwise utterly undemanding, a girl with no interesting thoughts of her own, yet who is capable of getting her man out of all manner of countercultural scrapes.

None of that was on my mind as I flew west that day, drinking Jack Daniel's and talking to the actuary. All I knew—and this was enough—was that as soon as I got off the BART from SFO to the Oakland Coliseum, I would not be alone. My friends would be there: I would find Danny and Billy, a clever pair of pothead Jersey boys I'd first met at Madison Square Garden, in the same series of shows to which I'd made the mistake of inviting my mother. I'd find Marie, a college dropout who'd grown up on an Indian reservation in Wyoming, whom I'd met that summer at a show at Giants Stadium and who helped me hone my bead-working skills and riveted me with her true stories of the American West. Ben would probably be in Oakland, too, a sweet Canadian just on the brink of too much LSD consumption whom a former tour buddy of mine and I had picked up hitching on our way to a show in Atlanta (or Greensboro? Much of this time, many of these places, have blurred for the obvious reasons—time, youth, drugs, and drink). And Lee, another Canadian, one of the first boys I fell for, with long blond hair and messed-up teeth, hyper and troubled and extremely funny in an open, shameless way.

They were all there, waiting for me in the Coliseum parking lot like I'd counted on. My new family—a family composed, effectively, of children intent on being something other than children, if not quite adults. A family who, to my mother, when she ultimately met some of its members and saw pictures of others, looked like nothing so much as the Manson family. But they—
we
—were not that, nothing like that, not even close. We were not in the business of killing movie stars. We didn't want to hurt anyone—except, in a distant and abstract kind of way, our own families. We were mostly decent if slightly wayward kids who, for a variety of reasons, needed to leave the people who had raised us and who, many of us felt, had failed to understand us, and make a family of our own. Many came from messed-up homes. Some were fleeing abusive parents. (I didn't have it nearly as bad as many of my friends did, but I was tired of arguments with my mother.) We drank and danced, bartered bootlegs, got high and hung out, lived in vans and slept in cars under piles of stripy Mexican blankets in need of a good washing; we gave one another scabies and sometimes worse, and sometimes money, and often pot, and really whatever we had, sold trinkets and tofu stew, and for the most part, though not always, looked after one another. We stretched our young legs at truck stops along interstates, and at “scenic outlooks” dotting the highways. We camped alfresco
in woods and on beaches. “How many Deadheads does it take to screw in a lightbulb?” Lee asked me once. “NONE! Deadheads screw in sleeping bags!”
We were young. We had left our homes. We loved one another.

Three shows in Oakland and then—then—came the bigger question. Where to next? “Come to Vancouver,” Ben said. “I've got a place to live and good people. We'll find you a job. And it's beautiful there.
Really
beautiful. You'll love it.” The potential promise of a place to live, and even a way to earn some money: That was option number one, and it sounded all right. The alternative was to catch a ride down the California coast with Danny and Billy in the former's wreck of an old Dodge van for three nights of Dead shows in Inglewood, just outside Los Angeles. Danny had made a shitload of tie-dyed shirts—let it not be said that we were a uniformly lazy lot; this kid didn't lack for work ethic—and could use some help shilling them, and I also had some beaded jewelry to sell. So I'd have a few days of work. And then,
who knew?
And who gave a rat's ass? Not me. Sure, Vancouver sounded sensible. But sensible wasn't what I was after, really. What I was after was more shows. More fun.

On the way to Los Angeles we camped one night at Half Moon Bay, a place sacred to us, a homing ground on the shore, pitching our tents as close to the water's edge as we could manage. There were maybe a half dozen of us, and we ate hummus sandwiches on chunky health-food-store bread that smelled like freshly mowed lawn, and we sat by the fire, quietly telling stories and laughing under a huge starry sky. And for the first but not the last time in my life on tour, I felt a sensation of freedom that nearly overcame me, as though I were having an out-of-body experience of the kind I'd read about during a brief and miserable stint selling Time-Life's
Mysteries of the Unknown
series over the phone from a windowless midtown office bearing above the door the inspirational legend T
HROUGH
T
HESE
D
OORS
P
ASS THE
G
REATEST
T
ELEMARKETERS IN THE
W
ORLD
. (And also, I can report, one of the all-time worst.) At Half Moon Bay, freedom was what I felt, overwhelmingly—and also the thing that otherwise unhappy teenagers might just need most, the feeling that finally,
finally
, I had found my people, that they got me, that until then I had been a changeling in a world for which I had not been equipped, and now I was where I had always rightfully belonged. I shared a small tent that night with Lee, not doing much of anything—just talking, kissing, his breath warm on my neck and face, reeking of Molson.