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

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.
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    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