Why I Committed Suicide (10 page)

John and I just saw a kid wearing nothing but corduroy wandering around in front of the van. He looked so fucking cool that we got into a conversation about how cool corduroy really is. I think if I could only choose one fabric to be in for the rest of my days I would wear corduroy shirt, pants and a hat like this kid. The ultimate in comfort; just me, my baggy corduroy clothes and Jenifer and I’ll be content. Like Eazy E said “I’m the dope man, yeah boy wear corduroy.” I’m going to sign off now because the acid is starting to get intense. I’ll try to write about the show tonight at a later date. Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

The last two days here have been incredible. After two nights of intense shows I am in awe. At first, it was very strange going from the daytime shows to seeing the concerts at night, but last night was the best show I’ve seen so far. Sitting in the rear of the Amphitheater on the grass under a “fronda de luceros” and losing myself in the visuals and music has been
unreal
intense. Really a whole new experience to go with all the new things I’ve already seen so far. Every evening, the moon slowly rises in a huge ghostly pale glow from behind the stage shrinking as it climbs into the sky. It hangs over us protectively until it gets really dark outside, then the screens around the place light up with lasers and slides of different things that morph into other different things. I can tell that California is the Grateful Dead’s hometown because they pull out all the stops and really make an effort to overwhelm the audience. There are a lot of variations of the “Steal Your Face”—that’s the unofficial Dead picture of the skull with the lightning bolt in its brain that everybody knows. I think it’s symbolic of an awakening in the mind created by a member of the band long since passed.

I generally consider myself a very anti-sports person but I found myself cheering like a champion when a humungous “Steal Your Face” with the San Francisco Giants logo in it flashed onto the screens. Jim Spiece’s girlfriend, the long-nosed hippy girl who happened to be sitting next to me, said she “never understood why the Grateful Dead who seem to represent the antithesis of the sports fan lifestyle would use a sports logo. I remember thinking I would normally have wondered the same thing once, but when I saw that image up there, hovering above us all, I had finally figured it ALL out an instant earlier. It’s hard to explain about topics of love and alternative thinking on paper, some people just get IT and some don’t. I realized right then, at that moment, why I held certain prejudices about organized sports and I’m going to have to get these thoughts down on paper in the next few days before it’s lost forever. I used to think I rebelled against the money, corruption and stereotype of the typical alpha male, but rebelling by being a slacker and doing drugs is really its own form of corruption that invites prejudice toward myself. Maybe this world isn’t really “us against them” after all.

At both shows I tripped really hard, big surprise right? During “Space” (the half hour/hour long drum jam in the middle of each show) I really lost myself in the music and visuals. Being exposed to all this experience is changing my life forever. The LSD has peeled away the protective cover of my brain and the warmth surrounding me has been so positive it’s helping me really
see
things that have always been right in front of my face.

Ha, some Charles Manson-looking motherfucker actually managed to sneak a two foot bong into the show, but just breathing the air around here would get anybody high so I don’t see the point of attracting unnecessary attention to yourself. It’s a good way to get free weed I’ll bet. The rest of the band takes a break during the intermission, so the concerts end up being at least three hours long even though the set lists are actually pretty short. When you really get into the music and show, time seems to fly by too fast.

Last night’s show was definitely the best one yet. There’s no way for me to really describe the way the music is so perfect and how they seem to tune into the audience’s energy and feelings and give it life through their music. I’ll need to see if I can find a copy of that show to buy at some later date when one of the tech hippies has a nice clean processed copy for sale. The bonus of every show getting taped is that there will always be a copy available to me for posterity. I must try and buy one later to play for Jenifer, but it might be more fun to bring her to a night show in person.
Listen to me; I’m already planning another vacation with her so it must be serious. What am I saying? It IS serious.
J-J-Jane’s getting serious. The last few days have been great but I’m still walking around with the nagging feeling like something is missing.

All the mild advances I’ve been getting from the hippy girls that the two John’s are hanging out with are just rolling off of me like Teflon. The air sure is sweet out here in California.

LATER—more about what I realized in that split second.

When my family moved us down to Texas from the great white North that is Minnesota, I started third grade in a new school. Our first summer in Texas was right in the middle of 1980, the year of the greatest heat wave had since the great depression or some shit. All I can remember was that I spent all summer in the crappy rental house pool the company gave my step-dad as one of his incentives to move us all and learning to mull around with a slow gape-mouthed walk, literally stooping over and beaten by the heat. The grass went from lush green to a wilted deep brown seemingly overnight as sporadic patches of green only existed where someone would damn the water restrictions and succumb to watering their lawn. The television made a big deal about the water restrictions. Water restrictions?! What is that?! Have Texas the lakes dried up? I didn’t know that Minnesota, which practically has a nice clean and clear lake on every block, was an anomaly. I remember checking the calendar gauging the days and trying to determine when it would finally cool down. Watching as the calendar days moved to September and thinking,
“it’s going to be getting cold now, I should get out my sweaters’
’ Then into October, thinking, “we
usually have to wear our big coats for trick or treating
,” and I’m still wearing shorts. Finally, November, some relief should come for sure. Then Thanksgiving and I’m
still
wearing shorts. December? January? February? What the HELL!! There’s no winter here? The Polar ice caps are melting? The world is ending?
Hot, it’s hot, it’s hot it’s hot it’s hot it’s hot.
It’s like I’m living on Venus HOT! All the time. HOT. My body slowly started to adapt and change. I had pores open up in orifices of my body that it never fathomed actually having to use. It took some time for my body to get the signal down to the vacant unused sweat factories and get them to reopen but once they opened, a deluge of water was constantly having to go into me so it could pour from my prematurely induced sweaty puberty mechanisms. People talk about the awkwardness of telling their daughters about their first periods, well when the time came nobody bothered to tell me about the wonders and immediate URGENCY of wearing deodorant and that was
really
damn awkward.

In the Fourth grade I moved to another school in another part of the Dallas area, which might as well have been on the other side of the moon. Still to this day I can’t visualize myself in this part of the country and therefore have to ask a lot of gas station people for directions. Half of them gawk that I’m a MAN asking for directions in stubborn testosterone stereotype Texas where “real men” apparently don’t ask for directions; the other half can’t speak English and look at me with a blank look of ignorance that can only say “I hear you jibba-jabbering, but I walk across the street to my job at this gas station. I’m from butt-fuck Egypt and I can’t even give you directions to the freaking bathroom.” My other option factors in the anomaly that there is usually some sort of
gas-guzzling minivan-driving
soccer mom getting a fill-up outside most gas stations. A slightly overweight (but she’s dieting) big-haired, born-and-raised-in-this-10-square-mile-area (say that part really fast) of the city, who would love to give directions to me because she would be happy to talk to anyone that doesn’t speak in baby talk or talk down to her like her husband does and he works ALL the time anyway so she suspects he might be having an affair because all the kids she’s had, to make him not attracted to her plus she never even pictured having to stay in Texas, much less be driving a minivan full of brats that keep popping out of her, so she would love to talk to anyone who’s male and wants her opinion because her husband doesn’t pay attention or compliment her anymore.

So I usually just bite the bullet, drive around lost and find my way to wherever I’m going eventually.

Anyway, it was in the fourth grade when I was introduced to the fierce competition that always goes along with, and is encouraged heavily in, Texas sports. I probably thought at first that the extended summer had something to do with the drive for constant abusive outside activity to these slow talking folks, but after experiencing the summer seasons’ heated oppression it had to be something more primal that drove the natives, some sort of blood lust that would motivate them to worship high school football and fierce competition in general.

My favorite sport of choice in the fourth grade came from the enraptured feeling of pleasure I got playing kickball. Kickball: all the rules and physics of baseball without the legal liabilities of children hurtling small rock-hard objects at each other. I’ve always been moderately swift, moderately coordinated and uncharacteristically strong for a wiry white fella, so sports like baseball, volleyball, track and especially kickball were my bitches. In fourth grade Physical Education class Mrs. Keys would make us play kickball ALL the time. I became a kickball expert and knew how to exploit the weaknesses of my classmates to excel as much as anyone truly can in the pre-baseball sport.

One of Mrs. Keys’ children died when I was in the fifth grade. He was riding in the back of a pick-up truck and bounced out. I remember thinking that was a really terrible thing at the time and I remember my friend James telling my mother that at least Mrs. Keys had other children so it wasn’t a total loss. James with his amped up hyper-intelligence was always very pragmatic and callous because he was raised in a large Catholic family.

Anyway, we had a substitute for a while that led the P.E. class and she knew absolutely nothing about physical education of any sort. I’m sure it isn’t particularly hard, you either give the kids free reign or organize them into teams and let them beat the energy out of each other. This substitute had us playing kickball one time and when it was my turn I booted the ball way off into the distance, determined to go for the homerun. My competitive spirit was in full bloom and I was a blond-haired golden god who could run like the wind. It was close but the ball came in as I was rounding third base. I was running towards home plate and saw the kid catch the ball and try to get a grip on it to tag me out. Going full throttle I ran at him and as he prepared to tag my chest I went under him, hitting a patch of gravel, and sliding with my bare skin over the hot blacktop into home plate for the run. It totally fucked my shit up. I was crying and had to go see the nurse and tolerate her dabbing my entire fleshy leg in peroxide. I got patched up and sent back to the field only to find out that the sub had called me OUT, despite effectively avoiding the tag while sustaining my injury. I argued. I showed her my bloody leg. I practically pleaded with her as she just moved the game along to making my run’ count to no avail.

As I sat tripping in the field of the final dead show in California I had an epiphany watching the Grateful Dead’s graphic displays on giant television screens, while they played something or other I didn’t recognize. In that split second of time I remembered everything about what I just wrote down, finally realizing why I hated sports so much for all these years. What I thought was an unbiased educated dismissal of an entire community was actually only a response to an inadequacy from my past. I realized every bad sports memory I have was a device of my own creation as a result of my feelings from one single stupid incident. I would never have associated disliking sports with childhood trauma but once that thought was acknowledged I couldn’t turn away from the truth. I have been playa-hating, literally, for most of my life based on an elementary school memory so deeply rooted only the perfect combination of meditation and hallucinogens could have brought enlightenment to the surface. How can I hate something that simply is? All the experiences of my life have immersed me in the joy and complex simplicity of life so why am I devoting my angst and ire to something I have no control over?

So, I guess maybe I’m probably the only person in the world who learned to re-appreciate sports at a Grateful Dead concert.

The “Steal Your Face” with the San Francisco Giants logo in it. Everything finally made sense in that one instant, like I had made a connection to the world. It gave me a lot of things to think about. It helped let me give up my fear and wrong thoughts concerning sports. The bitterness left me. I even understood I didn’t need any more LSD. I had used it to get where I needed to be and now I have a bit of things to think about.