The Grateful Dead started working on Go to Heaven in July 1979 but did not release the album until January of the next year. They were doing overdubs like madmen, and although I lost faith in the project, I did write lyrics and, in some cases, the melody line, to four of the songs, three with Bobby and one with Brent Mydland, who had joined the band in April 1979, after Keith and Donna Godchaux had decided to go out on their own.
One of the songs I wrote with Bobby was “Feel Like a Stranger.” The two of us had gone to see Huey Lewis in a club called Uncle Charlie’s in Corte Madera. The place was kind of a singles scene, and Bobby got the idea that he wanted to write a song about going out and getting laid. Despite the tall horse I was then on about Weir’s moral imperfections, I wasn’t exactly opposed to that concept myself.
The real problem was that Bobby wanted me to put all these low-falutin’ ideas into the song. We were having what rapidly became a seriously overheated discussion about it in Bobby’s house in Mill Valley. He didn’t like the lyrics I was coming up with because, as I recall, they were too “poetic.” And so I said to him, “If there’s one literate man left in America, then I’m writing for him.”
A gay guy who was Bobby’s friend was staying with him at the time. The guy was trying to sleep on the couch when our argument got totally out of hand and Weir ran upstairs and locked himself in the bathroom. I followed him up there and kicked my way through the door, and that was when we started throwing punches at each other.
It was the first and last fight we ever had, and I’m sure I would have been much less likely to attack him if I hadn’t been drunk. Can either of us fight? Generally not well and certainly not when we don’t want to hurt each other. Although I had been in bar fights, Weir may have never been in a fight before in his life. He was in a fight with me that night only because I was fighting him.
After silence had settled on the scene the next morning, I came back downstairs, and Bobby’s friend was sitting up on the couch. I could only imagine how wide open his eyes must have been the night before because of the totally erotic nature of the event that had taken place upstairs. “I didn’t know what I was going to do with you boys last night,” he said. “I was afraid I was going to have to spray a garden hose on you or something.”
My marriage to Elaine had many difficulties. One of them, as might already be evident, was that I was an alcoholic. I was not drinking every day. Like my father and like most ranchers and cowboys in Wyoming, I was a binge drinker. I would drink steadily for two or three days at a time. Although I would still be functional while I was drinking, Elaine became a full-on codependent, which I believe can be a worse affliction than alcoholism.
If you are an alcoholic, everybody says, “Oh, all you need is willpower. Pull yourself up and be a man and stop drinking.” But what they say about your wife is, “I don’t know how she does it. She’s a saint. She’s fantastic. How does she put up with him?” In truth, we were both into it up to our eyeballs.
Despite that, we were actually pretty happy until we began having children. I had reached a point where I was so determined to have kids that if we weren’t going to have them, I wasn’t sure I wanted to be married anymore. Partly because of my alcoholism and partly because the financial situation on the ranch was always precarious, Elaine was never sure about having kids.
As it turned out, Elaine gave birth to three daughters in six years, the first in 1982. I don’t know why but for some reason, Elaine and I were both convinced that our first child would be a boy. We hadn’t had an amniocentesis or anything like that done because we weren’t particularly interested in finding out what sex our child was until it happened. Our nickname for the baby was Bingo.
Our first daughter was actually goddamn near born on the road between Pinedale and Jackson Hole, which is a distance of about seventy miles. Elaine’s water broke and she went into labor and I was driving like Neal Cassady and just barely got to the hospital in time. At one point, it seemed that I was going to deliver the child myself in the parking lot.
We hadn’t prepared any names for a girl, and all of sudden we had to come up with one. I wanted to call her Liberty, and Elaine wanted to call her Jessica. So as you can see, the bargaining gap was not exactly small. Elaine finally accepted Leah as the name because in the Bible, Leah is a virtuous person who takes the rap for the wicked Rachel. I thought it would be good to give her a first name that would go with being a virtuous person and then back it up with a middle name that was not so virtuous. I picked her second name from the title of the first book of Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet. In fact, I named her after both Durrell’s Justine and the Marquis de Sade’s Justine.
The fact that Elaine would choose Jessica as our daughter’s name and that I wanted to call her Liberty made it clear to me that, aside from being sexually crazy for each other, we really did not have all that much in common. It was a lot like my mother and father’s marriage.
Despite all that, Leah Justine was joined by Anna Winter in 1984 and then by Amelia Rose in 1986. We were living on the ranch so there were always other people around, but our three daughters took up most of Elaine’s time. She was and is absolutely the best mother in the world, but as the fire between us cooled after the girls were born, I started to feel restless at home. And like my father I began to look elsewhere.
Even though I was not completely faithful to Elaine during this period, it was always my strong intention to stay married to her. So I made sure that whatever I did was a one-night stand that would not come back to affect our marriage.