Drinking With Men : A Memoir (9781101603123) (4 page)

The next morning we bought vegetarian burritos and headed south in a little convoy to LA, switching at some point from the majestic Pacific Coast Highway to the unpicturesque 5 for the sake of time. We pulled into the Forum parking lot, quickly scored tickets for all three shows, made a killing on shirts and jewelry. Such a killing that it wouldn't be necessary to sleep in the van, or in sleeping bags outside the Forum. We could get a motel room where we could shower and watch TV and drink beer and get high in peace and privacy. We were feeling so flush that on the last night of the Dead's Inglewood run, damn, we could even hit the motel lounge—a divey, tiki-ish little shithole of a bar. Perfect.

The culture, such as it was, of the Grateful Dead tour will always be associated more closely with drugs—marijuana and psychedelics, by and large, for which I did not lack enthusiasm—than drinks. But there was
plenty
of drinking on tour, and by then I knew where my deepest allegiance lay. A segment of tourheads drank with greater gusto than the rest and owed, perhaps, a spiritual debt to Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, one of the band's founders, a blues-drenched keyboardist who succumbed to internal hemorrhaging resulting from his alcoholism in 1973 at age twenty-seven (like Janis, Jim, and Jimi), and who, it has been said, never shared his bandmates' devotion to LSD, preferring Thunderbird and Southern Comfort.

I loved a good acid trip as much as the next Deadhead. In high school, I'd pretty much spent every waking hour stoned off my ass. But now, as a full-time tourhead, I had new and daunting responsibilities. I had a business to run—selling shirts and jewelry and other homespun commodities, doing tarot card readings, and trolling for “miracles,” the word in our lingua franca for free tickets. The sleaziest, most surefire method I knew for scoring miracles was to borrow a baby from a friend on tour who had a couple of them. If I set off in one direction with a baby strapped to my back and she took the other in another direction, the sorry spectacle of two sad-eyed teenage Deadhead moms could yield more tickets separately than one mom and two babies could.

And that was about as much tour math as I could manage. Mostly I was incapable of making transactions of any kind when I was stoned or tripping. I knew plenty of hippie hustlers who could exchange money, make change, do business on a few tabs of acid. I couldn't for the life of me figure out how they managed it. Hand me a ten-dollar bill when I was tripping and forget it: suddenly Alexander Hamilton was Neptune, rising from a roiling rainbow sea, floating forth unto the universe wielding his trident and making tulips grow from cracks in the sidewalk. And for that ten, if, say, I owed you five, chances were good that I'd blithely slip you a twenty, and instead of just acknowledging that I was too fucking high to make the right change, you might be all, “Hey, thanks, sister, right on,” as though I'd intended all along to redistribute the wealth in some well-meaning hippie way.

In fact, I needed money badly, more than ever. And high, I was incapable of making any. So, improbable as it may seem, becoming a full-time tourhead put an abrupt, uncalculated end to my most dedicated phase of drug consumption. But a few beers—in this way the parking lot scenes outside of Dead shows were no different from those at football games or any other locus of collective effervescence, and always had beer entrepreneurs toting huge coolers and barking “Ice-cold imports!” from aisle to aisle—and I was just fine. A few swigs of Jack Daniel's from a hip flask? Hell, even better. And that weekend in LA, with my crocheted, rainbow-colored Guatemalan satchel bursting with cash, I could buy all the Jack Daniel's I'd ever wanted. Danny and Billy and I and a few other friends we'd said could crash in the motel room with us hit the bar—with no idea that I was heading for the single drunkest night of my life.

•   •   •

T
he next morning, December 11, 1989, I awakened on a greasy, flattened stretch of carpet in that cheap motel room in Inglewood with a nearly rigid disk of my own shit stuck to my backside. I peeled it off in a single perfect pancake and thought immediately of a film I'd seen a year or so before in a high school social studies class—an elective beloved of all the stoners called Indian and Southeast Asian Studies. The film was about village life in India. I thought of the thin, dark-haired women in faded saris setting cow dung patties out in the sun to dry for cooking fuel.

The sunshine pushing through fissures in the dusty drapes looked and felt like early morning light—diffuse and uncertain. It was probably around six. I had been sleeping under a desk, which the top of my head grazed as I sat up. I glanced around and quickly calculated that more than a half- dozen dirty hippies were crammed into every corner and crevice of the room: a blond-dreadlocked guy on the floor in front of the TV, three or four kids sprawled across the king-size bed, someone laid out in the space between the bed and the radiator, a girl in a diaphanous purple dress curled up in a chair. I do not remember if I managed to get up, flush the shit, and clean myself up, or if I just drifted back into sleep, my head buzzing with images of emaciated cows and fields of marigold. I do not remember much from the night before when, I was told later, I drank some twenty-one shots of Jack Daniel's. Marie, who had left the bar before things got ugly, was furious with Billy and Danny, who, she said, had encouraged my recklessness because they wanted to see exactly how much I was capable of drinking.

“I lost count,” Billy said. Apparently we'd all gotten good and hammered, but I'd gone above and beyond. In
Inglewood
, for God's sake, which to New Yorkers is like saying you spent the drunkest night of your life in
Newark
.

“You kept going on about Irish mythology,” Danny added. “Ranting about gods and goddesses.”

I did?

Well, that was plausible. I'd been reading Yeats and Lady Gregory. And some moony New Age-y manifesto on the spirituality of the ancient Celts.

“It was pretty funny.” By which I knew he meant I'd made a complete ass of myself.

Huh.

What I
do
remember is this, and only this: a lame bar-trick parlor-game kind of thing, with which the waxy-mustachioed, Hawaiian-shirted barman in the motel lounge had dazzled and, I confess, stumped me. I still trot it out from time to time and, amazingly, it almost always trips people up—
especially
smart people, even after only one drink. For this you'll need a penny, a nickel, and a dime.

This can be quite dramatic. Hold on to the coins. Maybe shake them up in your palm for a few seconds, then blow on them. First you say, deadpan, “Johnny's mother had three children.” Then you slap the penny down on the bar with one decisive stroke of the thumb and announce, “The first one was Penny.”

Next, lay the nickel down and say, a little more casually, “The second one was Nicholas.”

Finally, slam down the dime, hard. And when you're good and ready, ask, with great intention, like you're interrogating a perp,
“Who was the third?”

Nine out of ten times, the poor idiot will say Dimitri.

Anyway, I remember nothing else—at least, the mind's catalog of images and sound has gone dark and quiet. But my nose and my sense of taste recall more: To this day, even the smell of Jack Daniel's—tinged with burnt cotton and vanilla—makes me want to retch. And that is precisely what I spent the earliest morning hours of December 11 doing, attended to by Marie. After the boys hoisted me up the stairs from the bar, I heard later, she held my head over the toilet, splashed water on my face and implored me to drink as much of it as I could, and watched over me to make sure I didn't die. On a few occasions, I've thought back on this and worked myself close to anger. Shouldn't someone have taken me to the hospital? Couldn't I have died? Well, yes. But I am never quite able to get angry. Partly because we were all young and had little idea what to do in such a situation. Partly because so much of the romance of tour life resided in its near-lawlessness, in its frontier-outlaw contempt and near-obsessive avoidance of authority, of The Man. Partly, I am also sure, because there were times back then when
I
certainly should have done something and didn't, and I want to excuse myself, too. On tour, we made excuses for ourselves, and for one another, a lot.

I fell back asleep under the desk. The next time I woke up, I was some three hundred and fifty miles north of Inglewood, in Santa Cruz, aware that I was lucky to be alive, lucky to have had people looking after me, even if we were all too young to know how to take care of anyone, ourselves included. I considered kissing the ground, the dark dusty asphalt of a strip-mall parking lot near Domino's Pizza, near Baskin-Robbins, near the Saturn Café—a legendary vegetarian joint with a solidly vegan-feminist clientele at the time. My head was heavy, pulsing at the temples and the back. At sunset we went to the beach, the sweet state beach with its natural bridges of enormous eroded rocks. We lit up a joint and watched the surfers, the students, the drifters who'd long preceded our own drifting to this place, who had probably arrived here much as we did, only years before, with no better plan, traveling the same tine in the same forked road: Santa Cruz or Vancouver, Santa Cruz or San Francisco, Santa Cruz or Humboldt, Santa Cruz or ____, Santa Cruz or ____, Santa Cruz or ____. Santa Cruz instead of anywhere else, especially instead of wherever they'd come from.

Danny and Billy and I lived in that van, parked on Mission Street, in front of the pizzeria where they worked, at least through Christmas, at which time Danny had managed to scrounge together enough money to return to New Jersey for the holidays. Billy was a Christian, but not a religious one. Still, Christmas was Christmas. And I was one of those half-assed New York Jews who grew up celebrating Easter
and
Passover—whose family, truth be told, preferred Christmas to Hanukkah, because Ma really loved chestnuts roasting on an open fire, and overstuffed stockings, and a nice Bûche de Noël and all that, without particularly paying Jesus any mind, though she was firmly of the opinion that he seemed like a totally okay guy. So even for me, yes, Christmas
was
Christmas, and sleeping in a van would not do, nor would eating discards from the pizzeria.

“We should at least get a room somewhere,” I suggested. “Sleeping in the van on Christmas just seems wrong.” Billy quickly agreed, even though we were both close to broke. We checked in to the cheapest motel we could find. At a convenience store across the road, for a small fee, we got a loitering grown-up to procure a few six-packs of Anchor Steam for us—the birth of the baby Jesus rated at least a classy regional beer.

“Should we get some Jack, too?” Billy asked, half-serious.

“Nah.” No fucking way.

We settled into our motel room with our beer and our Cool Ranch Doritos and those cheese crackers with peanut butter that cost a dollar for six packets—on account of welcoming the occasional junk food splash-out with great enthusiasm and, above all, on account of
Christmas
, we could dispense with our usual hippie health-food-store totally organic food pieties—and flipped on the TV, each of us claiming our own queen-size bed. Billy and I were friends, but not especially close friends, and without Danny we had little to say to each other. We idly watched the local news, then some cartoons, then some videos on MTV. When the clicker landed on the Yule log, we gave each other a look of faint despair. This was our Christmas, our sad, weird Christmas, and a motel room was nearly as shitty a place to be as the van. Doritos and beer were good, but shouldn't we go out for dinner?

“Shouldn't we go out for dinner?” I asked.

No argument from Billy. “Let's do it.”

We hit the strip—the pedestrian mall in downtown Santa Cruz—and checked the menus posted outside the restaurants. Every place was either too expensive or full, or both, or closed. We trudged up to Mission Street. The vegetarian café was open. Of course it was open, but it did not
do
Christmas. No twinkling lights. No tinsel. No Santas or reindeer or candy canes. But there were free tables, and it was better than our stash back at the motel. We ordered salads and lentil soup, and the conversation stayed sparse. I kept my thoughts to myself: I wished I were at home, not for good, just at that moment. I missed my family, imperfect as we were. I envied Danny, who at this moment was probably reneging on his vegetarianism and eating ham or turkey in the company of his relations, young and old; who was probably luxuriating in the flickering light of a Christmas tree; who was in the Northeast, where there was likely snow on the ground and maybe even children sledding, where Christmas was Christmassy, not like this warm West Coast horseshit. I envied Danny, who was having a
real
Christmas, so different from Billy's and mine, surrounded as we were by recalcitrant atheists picking at tofu and brown rice. What was I doing here? Why had I chosen
this
? And I imagined that Billy, my reticent, accidental Christmas companion, was thinking much the same.

We walked quickly back to the motel in the cooling California night, past palm trees and strip malls, past so many parked cars and so few people. I glanced into the homes of strangers, through casement windows framing repeated tableaux of families being families at Christmastime, families drinking egg nog and, I imagined, listening to Bing Crosby crooning “The Christmas Song” and Ella Fitzgerald elevating
“Jingle Bells,” wishing one and all—except for me, except for Billy—a swinging Christmas, as they tallied their holiday hauls. We returned to our motel room, to our matching queen-size beds, to our already diminished six-packs. We drank silently, a few feet apart, isolated by our unhappiness. I do not remember if Billy called home, but I know I did not. I had elected this estrangement and would ride it out. We resumed our channel-flipping. Fuck the news and its cheerful reports of Christmas near-miracles and charitable acts. Fuck the Yule log and all its stupid Yule logness.