It actually took me quite a while to realize that I was just a hick in a hick town. The fact that most of the other kids were always rough on me had a lot to do with that. As far as they were concerned, I was the princely son of Norman and Mim Barlow, and many of them resented my parents for acting like they were the only exception to the one-class system in Sublette County.
The tough times started in elementary school in Pinedale, and then in middle school; a lot of physical shit went down as well. I wasn’t getting beat up regularly but periodically. Once will suffice. When you find yourself in that kind of situation, you can turn yourself into a victim, and I actually became extremely de-socialized.
By then, I had seen James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause at the Skyline Theatre in Pinedale, which was a really special place. The upper part of the walls had a painted skyline with silhouettes of horses, cattle, teepees, trees, and all kinds of Western scenes, illuminated from behind by multicolored neon light that was so beautiful.
After I had seen Rebel, James Dean became the spirit that I modeled myself after. The movie had a huge effect on me. And it also turned out that I could actually comb my hair just like his.
I never did get to watch American Bandstand because we didn’t have a television, but there was a rock ’n’ roll radio station within range: XERF from Ciudad Acuña in Coahuila, Mexico, broadcasting over a 150,000-watt transmitter that made them sound like they were coming from some alien planet. I could pick up their signal on this little Sony transistor radio that my parents bought me in 1961 at the Seattle World’s Fair.
A DJ called Wolfman Jack played music and aired ads for Don’s Record Parlor in Eagle Pass, Texas, just across the border. Wolfman Jack was playing what in those days was still called race music. No one else I knew who was my age was listening to this stuff as avidly as I was. I was actually buying records from Don’s Record Parlor. By the time I was fifteen, my friends and I would be driving around at night with the car radio set to Wolfman Jack, and we’d all be bumping and grinding to this music.
I finished my freshman year at Pinedale High School with a straight F average. A root vegetable could have done better. But I didn’t give a fuck. I was in such a spiteful little mood back then that I was intentionally giving the wrong answer to questions both in the classroom and on tests.
By then, I already had a reputation. The very first thing I did on the day I turned thirteen and a half in 1961 was take my wages from the ranch and buy myself a little Honda motorcycle. Suddenly, I was free. I could go wherever I wanted whenever I wanted. Nobody could tell me what to do.
Almost immediately, I fell into a motorcycle gang, because all the other kids in my Boy Scout troop also got themselves little bikes. There were six of us, including a guy who later became the sheriff of Sublette County. We rode into this swampy area and built a clubhouse that you’d never guess was there until you were right on top of it. We would sit there and smoke Benson & Hedges cigarettes that I had stolen from my mother’s freezer, where she would keep them around for guests. Back then, Benson & Hedges said quality, complete with a gold box.
We also undertook a lot of petty vandalism of which I’m not particularly proud. The motorcycles had been sold to us by an impassive, harmless gentleman named Herb Molyneux, a chainsaw salesman who had branched out into motorcycles. But he didn’t offer us very good service, and at some point, we got cross-threaded with him. One night, we went into his place and raised hell with all the stuff he kept parked out back. Then we got into blowing up Coke machines. We found out that you could strategically place three M-80s inside a Coke machine in a way that would take out every single bottle in there as well as the coin mechanism. We weren’t looking for money. We just wanted to fuck up the machines.
Over the course of time, we blew up every single Coke machine in town. Everybody knew we were the ones who were doing it, but they couldn’t prove it and so there was no way for them to stop us. Finally, someone came and had a word with my father, who had just decided not to run for governor but was returning to his seat in the state senate. My father was told in no uncertain terms that if he wanted to go on holding that seat, it would be better for all concerned if he got his wayward son out of sight. And so we started looking for a school that was outside the sprawling confines of the great state of Wyoming.
The first school we picked was Suffield Academy in Connecticut, but they wouldn’t let me in, which was completely understandable as I hadn’t exactly had a distinguished academic career up to that point. We kept looking and found the Fountain Valley School in Colorado Springs, the go-to place for aristocratic kids from Wyoming who were also the sons of cattle barons. I was delighted to be going there, because I felt like I needed some kind of an upgrade in my life.
When I started at Fountain Valley, my parents flew us all there on the original Frontier Airlines, which was aptly named because it was truly a frontier experience. All their planes were DC-3s, a fantastic aircraft. I don’t think any plane has ever exceeded the DC-3’s safety record or capacity to take abuse and keep on flying. But it was a plodder. It had a service altitude of around sixteen thousand feet, which in mountainous terrain is kind of tricky, and flew so low over the mountains that you could actually count the antelope.
Frontier Airlines also had these really hard-bitten stewardesses. They weren’t part of the larger aviation world, where stewardesses were sex symbols and there was a chance you might even be able to take one home. Because it was always cold in the plane, these stewardesses would come up and offer you an insulated foam cup filled with steaming hot bouillon. Whenever they gave it to you, you knew you were about to encounter severe turbulence. The bouillon was scalding hot and never cooled off until after it had ended up on your balls.
At Fountain Valley, Robert Hall Weir was rooming right across the hall from me. I met him in the first class I attended. I felt this presence behind me at my desk because the floor was shaking, and when I turned around, there was Weir with his foot just going bang bang bang against the floor. He had restless leg syndrome, which tends to attach itself to those with high math skills. In those days, he had reasonably short hair and a mono brow, and he wore these thick horn-rimmed glasses that gave him a look somewhere between genius and serial killer. He put out this vibe that I had a frequency setting for. It was not a vibe I had previously encountered, but it slotted right into something I had been looking for without even knowing it.
By then, Weir had already been bounced out of several private schools in California. He had a guitar, and we became fast friends because I loved listening to him play. I got him the Alan Lomax collection of American folk songs, and he learned them all. It was obvious to me that he was good at this and also that he wasn’t much good at anything else.
Our bond was inflicted upon us by the shared experience of always being the goat. There was just something about the two of us that caused the other kids at Fountain Valley to give us merciless hell. I’d had some experience with this in Pinedale and was sort of prepared for it, but it was tougher to handle in a strange new environment because I was still just not good socially. Back then, I’d be hard-pressed to push two nouns against a verb in the presence of another human being.
Midway through the year, they finally figured out that Weir was dyslexic. Their response to this was to move him into a room with a guy who was very dyslexic. He was also the son of the CIA station chief in Saigon. Later he became a Green Beret and went off into Thailand like Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now and recruited Hmong people for his own private army.
By the time they diagnosed his dyslexia, Weir was already acting out at every opportunity. At one point, the two of us flushed a lit M-80 down the toilet and raised hell with the plumbing. In biology class, Weir initiated a spitball fight, the spitballs being the internal organs of frogs.
That any of this was tolerated for even a second had a lot to do with the school itself. Back then, Fountain Valley specialized in admitting bright miscreants and was quite progressive. The school had been founded in 1929 on a large, beautiful ranch owned by a wealthy family in Colorado Springs. There was an architectural theme to the school, but the main thing was that we were all out there in the wide open spaces.
To say the least, the faculty was interesting. There was Mr. Kitsen, who had once water-skied in a tuxedo. I would not have been surprised to learn he had actually done that more than once. One of the English literature teachers was gay, and they somehow found out he had been buying gay material and canned him for that. Even then, I thought that was kind of cruel. We had a biology teacher we called Old Fartin’ Martin Brown. He had once flown a tiny acrobatic airplane into one of those huge dirigible hangars at Moffett Field by Highway 101 south of San Francisco. As soon as he flew into the hanger, Martin Brown realized that the other door was closed and somehow managed to turn his plane around and fly back out.
The way Weir remembers it is that the school finally said that one of us had to leave. Since I certainly had not yet approximated my academic potential and had been a major behavioral problem, there was definitely some discussion about throwing us both out. But in the end the administrators decided to keep me.
After I learned that Weir had been kicked out of Fountain Valley, I wanted to spend more time with him so I convinced my father to hire him to work on the ranch that summer. My father had never seen anyone like Weir. Bobby would jump off his tractor while it was still running to try to catch a field mouse, and the tractor would end up in a ditch. He did that more than once.
Weir was there for forty or fifty days and loved it. We did stuff together that marked the beginning of full-on adolescence. I had this 1964 El Camino (still do) and we could make it to Pinedale, which was fifteen miles away, in ten minutes. Pinedale had a drive-in run by this hip guy in his twenties and his really hip girlfriend, and they had created a kind of country beatnik hangout, with lots of rockabilly on the jukebox. Weir would bring his guitar along, and the girls from Pinedale would be all over him. But Bobby was not yet the draw for women he later became. Back then he was a Christian Scientist who was saving himself for marriage. Part of him was still a good boy.
I eventually became so vexed at what I considered to be Fountain Valley’s unfair treatment of Bobby Weir that I decided to go live with the Weir family in Atherton, California, where we would both attend this bizarre experimental school called Pacific High School. That year, the school project was making a submarine. Ambitious, right?
But at the last minute, I got a phone call from one of my summer school math teachers, a guy who had actually lived in the Haight-Ashbury before it became a big deal and was an aficionado of slant-six engines. He said, “You know, you’ve already cut and run once. Cut and run twice and you’ve got a pattern. And it’s not a pattern that will serve you well.” I could see the wisdom of that, so I went back to Fountain Valley. That decision was a real defining moment for me; after that I started to step up academically.
Fountain Valley had an associate dean named David Banks who had a lot of moral authority, and he basically explained Kierkegaard’s categorical imperative to me so that I understood it: “What would the world be like if everyone behaved like you have? Is that a world you would wish to inhabit?” He applied that principle to running the school, and it had a hugely moderating effect on my behavior.
Weir and I did not see each other again for a long while, but we did write letters back in the days when people did that. I can still see his handwriting because he put little circles over all of his i’s, just like the girls would do. He wasn’t effeminate. Just an artist, I guess.