Drinking With Men : A Memoir (9781101603123) Read Online Free PDF Page A

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