Mother American Night Read online

  EIGHTEEN

  CASSIDY

  Cassidy Law was one month old when I first met her in 1970 on a flea-bitten little ranch called the Rucka Rucka that Weir had out in the headwaters of the Nicasio Valley in west Marin County. He was living out there with Cassidy’s mother, Eileen, the patron saint of the Deadheads, his girlfriend Frankie, Rex Jackson (after whom the Rex Foundation was named), and Sonny Heard, also known as the world’s most hated person.

  The Rucka Rucka was thirty-seven acres of pure dust. There was a ranch right across the highway where all the horses came down with hydrophobia. I mean, can you think of anything scarier than a rabid horse? Weir had an absolutely useless hammerhead Appaloosa stud and a psychotic peacock that would attack you whenever you came out the front door. Bobby kept a two-by-four right next to it so you could fend off the peacock. But he advised you not to kill it. Just hit it.

  By the time I got to the Rucka Rucka after my Easy Rider motorcycle journey across America, I was in the right raw mood for the place. I remember Eileen holding her beautiful baby girl and hearing the chords Bobby had strung together on the night that Cassidy had been born. Crouched on the bare boards of the kitchen floor in the late afternoon sun, he whanged them out for me, and they rang like the bells of hell in my head for the next two years.

  At the Rucka Rucka, Bobby and I put together the melody scheme of “Cassidy,” but I wrote the lyrics in February 1972 while bulldozing snowdrifts out of stockyards on the ranch in a cloud of whirling ice crystals. Hypnotized by the steady howl of the bulldozer’s engine and the repeating chords of “Cassidy,” I thought a lot about my father and what we were and had been to each other.

  For some reason, I also started thinking about Neal Cassady, who was then four years dead but still charging around America on the hot wheels of legend. Somewhere in there the words to the song arrived, complete and intact, and I found myself singing the song as though I’d known it for years.

  My father was then in a hospital in Salt Lake City. It looked like he was going to die, so I knew I had to be there with him. My good friend Alan Trist, who ran Ice Nine Publishing for the Dead for years, had been staying with me on the ranch, and he decided to come along with me. It was snowing like crazy, but we were in my Chevy Blazer and I knew I could always put it into four-wheel drive if I had to.

  When we got to La Barge, Wyoming, a godforsaken town about sixty miles south of Pinedale, we learned the road had been closed because of all the snowdrifts. I decided we just had to bomb our way through. It got extremely hairy. There were no other cars on the highway and I couldn’t see the lane markers, but I could see the reflector posts. And so I drove in these conditions all the way from La Barge to Interstate 80. Alan is very English in the best sense of the term. At one point, he said, in his classic fashion, “You know, it occurs to me, Barlow, that we could die out here.”

  When I finally managed to get to my father’s bedside in the hospital in Salt Lake City, he was actually doing pretty well. The thing about my dad was that he had seven brothers and all but two of them died of the same genetic degenerative cardio ailment. What happens eventually with this condition is that the person suffering from it goes into ventricular fibrillation. One of his brothers had dropped dead that way at seventeen. There was one living brother who hadn’t made it there to see him yet, and I felt like that was the reason my father didn’t die that night. By then, he had already made his peace with it and was well prepared to do so.

  I stayed there with him, and the next night at about four-thirty in the morning, his heart monitor went steady and my father died. I would have let him go, but because I knew he wanted to see his brother, I ran to get the nurses and they got the doctor to hit him with the paddles.

  It takes a while for someone to return from death. Longer than two minutes, shorter than three days. So there was a period when I was looking deeply into my father’s face for what seemed like a long time waiting for him to come back. And then he opened his eyes and looked up at me with a radiant smile and said, “Why, John Perry, are you still alive?”

  I could tell that my father had been somewhere because he had a completely different light in his eyes. The next day, his heart self-regularized and went back to beating normally. And so I was inclined to think some kind of miracle had taken place that would allow me to go out to California so I could work with Bobby.

  I did this and then spent the next five days or so writing the balance of Bobby’s solo album Ace. Jerry Garcia and Phil Lesh were working with David Crosby on his solo album in the same studio, and so Ace is essentially the Grateful Dead studio album of that period, because both Jerry and Phil as well as Bill Kreutzmann are on many of the tracks.

  My father finally passed and so I had to head back to Salt Lake, but Bobby still needed one more song for the album. I stayed up all night with Frankie Weir, who fed me Wild Turkey and cocaine and made me write the fairly dreadful “Walk in the Sunshine.” I also wrote a song based on Pär Lagerkvist’s The Dwarf called “The Dwarf” that included the lyrics “I’m not a tall man / I’m a small man.” It was about a horrible little Renaissance court dwarf who had no one’s interests at heart. I gave it to Bobby, and so he was greatly relieved when I showed him the only slightly less terrible “Walk in the Sunshine,” and I was free to go.

  My father was sixty-eight years old when he died on February 24, 1972. We buried him in Pinedale on February 29, 1972, a leap day. The funeral itself was a little tricky because the cemetery was covered by four feet of snow. There was a service in the high school auditorium that about 1,200 people attended in a town where only 1,200 lived. My father was widely mourned. People came from all over Wyoming and beyond.

  I didn’t speak at his service, which seems funny to me now. I think I was in a daze. To a large extent, I was just letting it all happen around me. A lot of people seemed to have a passionate interest in having the service done in a certain way, and I was okay with whatever they wanted. But for some reason I didn’t want to get too involved myself.

  I took it all pretty hard, because after the stroke had taken out the rational part of my father’s brain, there was all this stuff going on in the irrational part that was really lovely. I felt I’d had what now seemed an all-too-short time of actually knowing who he was and being able to talk to him about things that were not absolutely material and literal. What he had always wanted to talk to me about before the stroke was money, business, cattle, and water. But once the filter was gone, he was willing to talk to me about what it really meant to be alive.

  He apologized for having made fun of me when I told him that I was still trying to find myself, because he had now finally found himself. And he told me that he loved me, which he had never said before, and I told him that I loved him. That this did not make either of us uncomfortable was truly amazing to me.

  NINETEEN

  JOHN F. KENNEDY, JR.

  In the summer of 1977, John F. Kennedy, Jr., was about to turn seventeen years old. He was out of Secret Service protection and didn’t have constant babysitting anymore. He was like a gigantic golden Lab puppy and needed a lot of running room, which was not something he could find at home on 1040 Fifth Avenue. As a consequence, he was being a pest and doing shit like mixing up five gallons of wallpaper paste and then pouring it down the mail chute.

  His mother was anxious because there was no man around to control him. Her real fear was that John was going to get himself into serious trouble because he was always pushing the envelope. She decided that he needed to be placed in a slightly secret location far from public view and came up with the very Democratic idea of putting him with the Youth Conservation Corps in Yellowstone National Park. But that did not work out well. The other kids were all from the inner city but not from the part of the inner city that he was from. It just wasn’t happening for him, and the press had picked up on the fact that he was there.

  But his mo
ther still did not want to bring him in from the cold. Both of his families, the Bouviers and the Kennedys, had a practice of tossing their sons out at a certain point without much ceremony. She decided it might be a good idea to put him on a ranch somewhere. So she called up Representative Teno Roncalio, who was dear to her heart because while serving as the chairman of the Wyoming delegation, he had essentially handed the nomination for president to John F. Kennedy by delivering the state to him at the 1960 Democratic National Convention.

  Teno, who had helped raise me, was a badda-bing Rat Pack guy. He was a ladies’ man to the max and drove the first Corvette Stingray I ever saw. My father basically apprenticed me to him when I was twelve or thirteen years old, because I wanted to ski all the time and my dad didn’t want to learn how. Teno was always going off skiing and liked me, and so he became like an uncle to me.

  John’s mother called Teno and said, “Do you have a friend who has a ranch that John could work on?” And Teno said, “I’ve got just your guy.” As it happened, at the time she had that conversation with Teno, her daughter, Caroline, was going out with my good friend Tom Carney, whose family owned a ranch up the Green River from the Bar Cross.

  Tom was having dinner at Jackie’s apartment that same night and she said, “Do you know this John Perry Barlow?” And he said, “Do I know him? He’s a co-conspirator.” I think he also mentioned to her that I was a Grateful Dead lyricist. He said he thought sending John to the Bar Cross was a good idea, but part of what he was thinking was that having John there would make it easier for him to see Caroline when she came to visit her brother in Wyoming that summer. Which, of course, it did.

  So I was sitting at my desk one night when the phone rang, and I picked it up to hear this breathy voice on the phone saying, “Hi. This is Jacqueline Onassis.” And I said, “In the highly unlikely event that this isn’t a joke, what can I do for you?” And she said, “It isn’t a joke. I have something I’d like to discuss with you.” A couple of days later, John was on the Bar Cross.

  My first impression of him was that he was incredibly good-looking and had a kind of thoughtless grace that was great to see in someone his age. In some respects, John was a lot younger than his years but also had a wise-fool quality in that he was permanently rambunctious but charming as well. He was also exquisitely beautiful but very sweet-natured and funny. Really hilarious. And not full of himself in any way. Not a preppie guy at all.

  I stuck him in a bunkhouse that was partially filled with irrigation water, but he was cool with that because it was dry where he was sleeping. The hands on the ranch thought it was funny, but they were all oddities of their own sort. They saw that he was very green indeed, but many of them were also kind of green. I had found that I could hire kids from urban and suburban areas and they would work like hell and not necessarily be good at it at first, and so John fit right in.

  John was physically powerful and fearless, and I could put him to anything and he would do it and then do it again when he didn’t get it right the first time. He was not a great horseman, but cowboying is not dressage.

  He stayed on the ranch for about two and a half months, and his sister, Caroline, came around quite a bit as well. During that summer, John and I took acid together for the first time. He had already taken a little but never as large a dose as three hundred micrograms. He liked it, though, and we had a terrific time together. We went driving because back then what I liked to do when I was tripping was get in my truck and see how far I could go in directions where you weren’t supposed to get very far at all.

  Another thing John and I did while we were tripping was drop explosives down one of the uncapped gas wells that were all around. I had gleaned from The Blaster’s Handbook where I could get these canisters made out of plastic that were about two inches in diameter and eight to ten inches long that packed a pretty good charge. I’d prepare the charge with a lit fuse, rather than an electrical one, then I would set it so I could drop the charge down the holes, some of which were four or five miles deep, and it wouldn’t go off until the canister itself was at least a mile and a half to two miles down.

  When it did go off, the sound that would issue forth from the belly of our earth at this particular kind of tickling was just extraordinary. If anything came flying back out of the hole, it was a sign that I had done something wrong. I either didn’t have enough of a fuse on it or I hadn’t taken into consideration that there were gas pockets down there. I definitely did not want to start a gas-well fire. That would have been kind of a dead giveaway.

  * * *

  —

  About a year later, in November 1978, there was a big party at Le Club in New York City to celebrate John’s eighteenth birthday and Caroline’s twenty-first birthday as well as to commemorate the fifteenth anniversary of John Kennedy’s assassination. Eddie Hill, who was then John Jr.’s roommate at Andover, came up to me that night and said, “Mr. Barlow, I have to tell you the Grateful Dead are more important to me than my family, my religion, and my school.” And I said, “Hey, man, you had better reexamine your priorities.”

  That night, I got a crash course in what it was like to be a Kennedy in New York City. The paparazzi were everywhere and as people were coming out of the birthday party, there was a fracas when one of John’s more jock-y friends from Boston decided he was going to engage in fisticuffs with some irritating guys. The next day, the story was all over the New York Post and the Daily News.

  I first got to spend some significant time with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis when I drove out to Peapack, New Jersey, to have Thanksgiving dinner with her, a boyfriend candidate, John, Caroline, and my wife, Elaine. It was just us, and Jackie and I hit it off immediately.

  At one point after we had gotten to know each other better, I asked her, “What is it like to be so goddamn famous? It must be weird.” And she said, “I realized Jack was going to become a big deal, and it took a while for me to understand the consequences that might have on me. Because, as you see, I’m really kind of shy. But I wanted to be with him and if that was the price, I was willing to pay it. I then came to see that people were making a big deal out of me, too. At first, I liked this. But then it made me feel like prey.

  “Gradually, I realized that all this stuff in the press really wasn’t about me. It was actually a comic strip that had a character in it that looked like me and did some of the things I did but wasn’t me. It was something they were making up. And I read it quite avidly for a while, and then I realized that it was making me sick so I stopped.”

  She was a truly extraordinary human being, and one of her greatest accomplishments was the ability to tear people’s gaze away from the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day balloon the media had made of her and bring their attention to the person she actually was, who was even more remarkable.

  TWENTY

  HEAVEN HELP THE FOOL

  I was living on the ranch on my own and started bringing out these thoroughbred girls I had known in New York and Los Angeles to keep me company. They would break a fingernail and that would be that: Goodbye, Bar Cross Ranch. Having all these temporary frontier housewives on the ranch wasn’t working out very well, and so I finally concluded that it was impossible to operate a large cattle ranch in Wyoming without conceding that a man and a woman had to run it together. That was just the way it had to be. There was a natural division of labor that required two people to fulfill.

  I knew I needed a woman who was tough enough for the position, and I thought about all the girls I had ever been romantically involved with. I even went so far as to make another list that included some with whom I had never had a relationship.

  I had begun my career in the study of women at Fountain Valley. I was still a virgin then, but I guess you could say that technically I had lost my virginity about a year before I went there. In those days, there were cathouses all along the Union Pacific railroad line. I went down to one in Evanston, Wyoming, w
ith a bunch of my miscreant friends and that was that, but I never thought of it as being the real thing. I later learned that Daniel Ellsberg had lost his virginity in the same kind of cathouse in Laramie.

  Toward the end of my sophomore year, I fell into a high school romance with a “townie” in Colorado Springs. I had gone into the city one afternoon with some friends and we were just killing time when I met Judy on a bus. In our way, we loved each other an awful lot. Both of us were still really virgins, and so we went at the process of crossing that divide together. I was sixteen at the time and she was a very heated-up Southern Baptist, which lent a certain something to it all.

  I spent the summer after I graduated from Fountain Valley working in Colorado Springs as an independent contractor for the sale of frozen confectionaries. In other words, I drove a Popsicle truck. It was a little pink Jeep with a surrey roof and a small mechanical music box that played the same hugely and poorly amplified lullaby about every eleven seconds all day long. Sometimes that song still comes back to me in a dream. Most of the time, extreme rendition could not force me to repeat it.

  As a marketing aid, I was wearing chaps and a cowboy hat, and I would show up wherever I pleased so I could constantly surprise the kids. I always wanted to work in the sections of town where the families did not have enough money to afford a big refrigerator but could afford Popsicles, especially as they were being sold by a mythological fellow like me. That summer, I made serious bank.

  One day I was driving past the front yard of the house of Judy’s best friend, Elaine Parker. She was out working on her tan, and it was working. Elaine had dark eyes and dark hair and the kind of skin that could really take a tan. She asked me in for some lemonade and from that day forward, I knew one thing about Elaine Parker and me. We were good at that.