Mother American Night Read online

  I had never met any of the Dead before, but that night I talked a lot with Phil Lesh, whose eloquent and wide-ranging interests impressed me enormously. I actually felt a great deal more immediate compatibility with him than with Weir, who now seemed utterly different to me. I very much wanted to create a relationship with the Dead, but I didn’t know how to go about it. So I began thinking, What can I do for these guys to demonstrate my own mojo so I can be part of their thing?

  After the show that night, Weir and I walked around the Village trying to catch up on things. We were sitting underneath the arch in Washington Square at about four-thirty in the morning when this pale green Ford Falcon pulled up, and it was like a thousand clowns got out of the car. Kids from Long Island. Bad kids. About ten of them.

  They immediately surrounded us and started dancing around yelling, “Kill the pig! Drink his blood!” Obviously they intended to beat the crap out of us. Weir looked up at them and said, “I sense violence. And you know whenever I feel violence in myself, there’s a song I sing that has always had a calming effect on me. Let me see if you would like to sing it with me.”

  These kids were completely blown away. Suddenly, Weir had gone meta on them. This was not a concept on Long Island. He started singing “Hare Krishna,” and they were actually singing it with him, and I was thinking, Jesus, do you suppose this might work? I was singing along literally like my life depended on it. Then, at a certain point, one of the guys went, “Fuck this!” He gave the signal and they went right ahead and beat the crap out of us.

  Although I still considered what the Dead were doing to be heresy, I wanted to give them something, so I said, “Look, I happen to know where Timothy Leary lives. How would you like to go up there and see him?”

  On the sparkling June morning that I drove the Dead up to Millbrook, I stopped by my favorite record store on West Sixth Street in Greenwich Village and picked up Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. I had heard it the night before during intermission at Café au Go Go, and I was thinking, “The Dead are pretty great but Jesus Christ, if you want to hear LSD music, this is it.”

  I also picked up Phil Lesh and his amazing date for the weekend, a girl known as Essra Mohawk, whose real name was Sandy Hurvitz. She was a musician who had appeared with the Mothers of Invention and been given the nickname “Uncle Meat” by a member of the band, which was how Frank Zappa would then always introduce her to the audience. She had a smart little mouth on her and was terrific.

  My girlfriend, who at the time was going to Bard, was with me. She had been with Bobby and me the night before when we got the shit kicked out of us. I was in such bad shape that she was concerned about my ability to drive, but it was just a beautiful day, and the Taconic State Parkway was never more glorious.

  So it was the four of us and Weir and his beautiful, quirky French girlfriend in my car and news was pouring in on the radio about the Six-Day War in the Middle East. I hadn’t been to Millbrook in nearly a year but the guy at the gate recognized me so I just drove right up to the main house and said, “These are my friends, the Grateful Dead.” And they said, “Fine.”

  The most significant aspect of our visit was not my offering of the Dead but that I had brought up Sgt. Pepper’s. They had not yet heard the album at Millbrook, and so there was a big ritualistic ceremony to listening. It was one of those sixties scenes where there was a lot of cheap printed Indian cotton around and brass lamps and the smell of incense and patchouli oil and cat piss. After the record was over, Tim Leary stood up and in this incredibly pretentious, sententious mystical voice, said, “My work is finished. Now it’s out.” In a funny way, he was right. Because from that point forward, it was all going to take care of itself.

  We all stayed there for several nights, and it was a total collision of two different worlds. At Millbrook, they were still doing the Indian thing and sitting meditation, and the Dead looked at it like, “What is this horseshit?” They had a fine nose for that sort of thing and saw right through it all real fast. Now I saw through it as well, and I was a little embarrassed that I had brought them there.

  Mountain Girl had come up with Jerry and the rest of the band separately, and the real point of contact between the Eastern Orthodox and the Western apostasy was when she and Tim talked. In her way, she was quizzing him. Back then, she always interrogated everyone. Mountain Girl was running the dozens on Tim, and he pretty much passed the test. She thought he was a little vague and slipping and sliding, and in those days, Mountain Girl was really hard on slipping and sliding. She has always had an extremely keen nose for bullshit and was a lot tougher on it then than she is now.

  I distinctly remember telling Tim about the beating that Weir and I had received in Washington Square Park the night before. We were in the kitchen in Millbrook, and he kept shaking his head in this completely phony, caring way. It was total bullshit and I knew it. It was sort of incumbent on him to tsk-tsk and he was doing a great job of it, but I knew better. I knew he didn’t really give a damn.

  Leary had no idea what it was like to get beaten up in Washington Square at four-thirty in the morning. He kept trying to understand what I was saying, but his persona was coming up with, “Why must there be this violence among us? Why can we not rise above these base things?” It was just complete horseshit, and it really did put me off him.

  What Millbrook had been for me before was something different from what it now seemed to be. The whole scene was a big disappointment. I saw it all as pretentious and self-serving and basically exploitive. Everyone there was really getting off on the fact that they were hip enough to be using a substance that had the power to irrevocably alter the human brain.

  Everyone at Millbrook was in the “prana receptive state” echo chamber, and the Grateful Dead were out to kick ass and have fun. They recognized one another as members of related but entirely different tribes. Unlike the people who lived at Millbrook with Tim Leary, the Dead were saying, “Katy, bar the door. Let’s kick the television. Let’s really kick the shit out of the television! Let’s turn the television into a refrigerator and see if that works.” After that day I turned my back on the Eastern Orthodoxy and began doing my own thing in the Western apostasy, and I had nothing more to do with Tim Leary for years.

  EIGHT

  SUMMER OF LOVE

  I didn’t know all that much about what was going on in San Francisco until I got out there in June 1967. I stayed on and off in the Grateful Dead house at 710 Ashbury, and it was a weird scene indeed. By then, various people had gotten so far out on the edge that if they had gone any further, they would have been institutionalized.

  All of it both repelled and attracted me, but I was really put off by the scene on Haight Street. Whenever I walked down Haight during the so-called Summer of Love, I was accosted by hostile, wild-eyed young men saying, “Grass, acid, speed? Grass, acid, speed?” I would rather have dealt with insurance salesmen. These guys had no money and were so stoned that they didn’t care; people were eating dog food straight out of the can.

  By 1967, the flag saying “Come here and do whatever you fucking well please” had been up long enough that everyone who was inclined to do so had showed up. In many cases, they were the last people in the world that you would have wanted to see doing so. The Gray Line buses had already started making regular trips down Haight Street so all the tourists could look at the freaks. The Dead had this big Red Chinese flag at 710 Ashbury, and one day Weir, who was then in another universe, got naked, grabbed the flag, and ran down the street alongside the bus. He gave them a show. There were a lot of people who were inclined to do that in order to say, “You came to the zoo. Here’s one of the animals exhibiting native behavior.”

  Bobby had set up camp on a pestilential brown couch on the second floor of the Dead house. The room had once been a library but was now home to the stereo and a huge collection of communally abused records. He had a paper bag a
t the end of the couch in which he kept most of his worldly possessions.

  Bobby was always the kid in the band and because I was the kid’s kid, I took a fair amount of shit from everybody. The Dead were always very hard on Bobby, like the kids at Fountain Valley had been. We had both thought it was going to be a whole new deal for us after school, but no, here it was all over again. So we were bonded by that as well.

  In the house at 710 Ashbury, Jerry Garcia was definitely at the center of the scene, and my interactions with him were always somewhat uneasy. When I first got together with the Dead in New York, Garcia had wanted to ride out to the Guild guitar factory in Westerly, Rhode Island. He knew the son of the guy who owned the company and wanted to take the tour and get specs on guitars. We all rode out there in my car.

  He and Mountain Girl were in the back seat, and she was pretty hot in those days. At one point, I looked up into the rearview mirror and found Mountain Girl staring back at me with a distinctly salacious look. This look was intercepted by Garcia, and he went into a black mood. He didn’t say anything about it at the time, but he gave her three kinds of hell about it later on. From that point on, Garcia always treated me poorly because he thought I was trying to steal his girlfriend, and so he became immediately unknowable to me.

  During that summer, I met Augustus Owsley Stanley III for the first time. The Dead house at 710 Ashbury was far too funky for Phil Lesh, the professor, so he kept a separate place up the street. He lived there with this incredibly beautiful girl named Florence Nathan, now known as Rosie McGee, who was always wandering around naked. I’d come by and there’d be Florence with no clothes on. She’d say, “Phil’s not here right now.” And I’d say, “Tell him I came by.” She’d say, “He’ll be back.” I’d say, “Well, all right…I’ll wait,” and then we’d sit around and talk.

  I was up there one day when this feverish little man came in. He was clearly older than me but somehow seemed ageless. He was wearing a blazer with brass buttons on it and I said, “That looks like it needs a pocket patch. You need a coat of arms. A family crest. Some damn thing.” And he said, “You know, I was thinking exactly the same thing at this very moment! And here’s what I was thinking. I was thinking about a big O made out of flame wrapping itself through the indole ring.” Luckily for me, I just happened to know that the indole ring was a six-membered benzene ring fused to a five-membered ring containing nitrogen that was found in psilocybin and LSD.

  “Right?” he said. “Through the indole ring and radiating in various directions. What would you think of that?”

  “That sounds pretty good,” I said. “Is one of your initials O?”

  “I’m Owsley,” he said.

  “So far that doesn’t mean a great deal to me,” I said, “but it looks to me like it’s about to.”

  Owsley, whom everyone called Bear, was around all the time that summer. I got a lot of acid directly from him during this period, and all of it was very good because it was so clean. However, his personal trip with everybody was adversarial. I was not a rival, but he did see me as a good sparring partner. I don’t know if he would have said that I was as smart as him, but he might have said that I came closer than most.

  The most dominant memory I have of the Dead performing that summer was when they played the American Legion Hall on the south shore of Lake Tahoe. Weir got so excited that he threw the microphone stand off the stage. Not on purpose. It was all just part of him finding himself. At one point after that show, I ended up with Bobby in a Land Rover full of tools and two girls whom we were trying to get to do it with us in the cold, gray dawn in a forest clearing. It was a nadir.

  After we got done with that, I had to drive the Grateful Dead truck back to San Francisco because the band was flying to Toronto to perform with the Jefferson Airplane. I asked Bear if he had anything that would help me stay awake behind the wheel, and he handed me something that turned out to be STP, a psychedelic substance first synthesized by Alexander Shulgin. STP supposedly stood for “Serenity, Tranquillity, and Peace,” but I had never heard about this stuff before. I thought it was just some kind of upper.

  What I came to realize was that coming on to this drug completely unprepared was a major mistake. I somehow got back to the city, but as I began driving across the Oakland Bay Bridge, the bridge and I were both breathing violently. After I managed to get to the other end, I pulled over, parked the truck on Fell Street, and walked back to the Dead house.

  That Bear himself hadn’t given me a heads-up as to what I would experience on STP was just the way he was. Insofar as Owsley was concerned, there was a right way and a wrong way to do everything. If you did anything in any way but his, you were pretty much an idiot. But if you wanted to be an idiot, that was up to you and he wouldn’t be surprised that you chose to do so. He even had it down to where if you smoked dope in anything but Chantecler rolling papers, you were an idiot because he had analyzed them all. What made it worse was that you knew he had, and that he was probably right. He had put far more energy into it than I would have ever wanted anybody else to do, so I had to go with it. I began paying careful attention to all of his many pronouncements.

  I also met Neal Cassady that summer. On nearly a nightly basis, Neal would hold court in the tiny kitchen at 710 Ashbury. He would carry on five different conversations at once and still devote one channel to talking to people who weren’t there and another to the kind of sound effects made when the human cranium explodes, or that ring gears make when they disintegrate.

  As far as I could tell, Neal never slept. He would toss back Mexican Dexedrine green hearts by the shot-sized bottle and grin and cackle while jamming on into the night. Despite such behavior, he seemed at the ripe old age of forty-one to be a paragon of robust health. With a face out of a recruiting poster and a torso, usually raw, by Michelangelo, he didn’t seem quite mortal to me.

  Neal and Bobby were perfectly contrapuntal. As Cassady rattled on incessantly in the kitchen of the Dead house, Bobby would just stand there completely mute while spending hours preparing his macrobiotic diet and then chewing each bite no less than forty times. While Neal talked, Bobby just chewed and listened.

  Whenever Neal got really high and was flying on Dexedrine, he would take off his shirt, put on a pair of headphones so he could listen to a jazz record on the stereo, and begin juggling a forty-ounce ball-peen hammer in the air while singing scat. Bobby would lay there on the couch watching with his eyes wide open, and it seemed to both of us that what we were seeing could not be real. It was like Neal had become a vision that Bobby was creating.

  I have a vague recollection of driving someplace one night in San Francisco with Neal and an amazingly lascivious redhead. The car was a large convertible, quite possibly a Cadillac, made in America back when we still made cars out of solid steel, but its bulk didn’t seem like nearly enough armor against a world that kept coming at me so fast and close. Nevertheless, I took comfort in the thought that, having lived this way for so long, Neal Cassady was probably invulnerable. And if that were so, then I was also within the aura of his mysterious protection.

  As it turned out, I was wrong about that. About five months later, just four days short of his forty-second birthday, Neal was found dead next to a railroad track outside San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. He had wandered out there in an altered state and died of exposure in the high desert night. Exposure seemed right to me. He had lived an exposed life. By then, it was beginning to feel like we all had.

  NINE

  HARVARD YARD

  Although I knew I hadn’t been in San Francisco for the pinnacle of the magic, that was okay with me. I tripped while I was around the Dead and went to the Fillmore and spent time in Golden Gate Park. I didn’t take acid with Weir that summer. To the best of my knowledge, I have never taken acid with Weir. He doesn’t actually like the stuff. It’s not his drug.

  Nonetheless, by the time I got back to
Wesleyan in the fall, I was pretty crazy. I didn’t chill out in San Francisco or get some vision of peace, love, and flowers. Instead, I decided to become a suicide bomber. If you put it into the context of those times, I think everybody I knew then was completely freaked out, each in his own individual way.

  As a freshman, I had helped organize the Students for a Democratic Society chapter on campus. The following year, I became the first sophomore to ever be elected to the College Body Committee, a five-man student governing board much like the Politburo in the Soviet Union. As a senior, I ran for student body president.

  I represented the anti-jock faction at the school. There were about seventeen candidates on the ballot, and the jocks were so fucking stupid that they thought if they listed me as number seventeen on their ballots, I would stand no chance whatsoever of winning the race. Thanks to them, when the voting ended, it turned out I had fulfilled the necessary requirements to be elected.

  This was a time when everyone was big on participatory democracy, and during the next year, a group formed with the goal of completely changing the system of student government, which was not terribly representative at the time because it involved only the five members of that student governing board. So the group decided to try putting together a student legislative body and a constitution.

  I kept trying to help them with this process, but they didn’t want my assistance. Meanwhile, the other students on the College Body Committee all graduated during the course of the summer, leaving me as the only member. That was when I became the de facto student body president, because everyone on campus was waiting for this spiffy new student-government constitution to be created. Actually, I became the de facto dictator of the student body.