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

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.
    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