I am determined to learn how to accept love, which I think may be the secret of life. If you can accept love, you can do damn near everything else. Giving love is easy and so most people go about thinking that they’re fully capable in the love department because they can give it. But as I have learned, that is not the case, and how could it be? If you don’t accept it, where are you going to get love to give?
My mentor in this regard is the only person I’ve ever met in my life who can seamlessly accept love: Gilberto Gil, the great musician and former minister of culture in Brazil. For him, it appears to be effortless. Since I would say that he is the most beloved person in the most loving country on the planet, it’s very lucky for him and them that he can accept it so easily.
On April 16, 2015, Gil was performing at Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco. On my way back from Huntsville, Texas, where I had been lured to give a speech, I spent hours tramping around the Atlanta airport in a brand-new pair of cowboy boots while waiting for a flight that would get me back home in time for Gil’s show.
For years, I had been getting my boots from the Olathe boot company in Kansas. They were made of Norwegian elk leather, which is especially pliant and so could accommodate a bunion I have on my left foot that somebody once said should be in the Boone and Crockett big game trophy book of bunions if there had ever been one.
I already had about ten pairs of these boots that had been kept in walking condition by a wizard in San Francisco who said he could restore any cowboy boot that had ever been made, and, by golly, he could. But I had not been to see him for a while and in an act of desperation, I bought a pair of Norwegian elk boots from another company. Although they were not pliant, I said to myself, “How bad could they be during a short trip?”
Although I arrived in San Francisco too late to see him perform, Gil and I did then go back to the Mark Hopkins hotel, where the two of us sat up all night long talking in the lobby by ourselves. It was a rich moment, and an ironic one as well, because at the time, I had no idea whatsoever that I was about to embark on the greatest experience I could ever imagine in terms of teaching me how to accept love.
Having worn a gigantic hole in the index toe of my left foot by walking for hours through the Atlanta airport in those brand-new boots, I woke up the next morning, which also happened to be the twenty-first anniversary of the worst day of my life, with my right shoulder on fire. From past experience, I knew right away that I had contracted a staph infection in my blood and it had taken refuge in a major joint.
I went to Stanford Medical Center, where they said, “You’re not running a fever, and since your white blood cell count is not elevated, we don’t think you’ve got a staph infection. Take these pain killers and sleep aids and go home and see if it doesn’t improve over a couple of days.”
I went home. I took the pain killers. I went to sleep and when I woke up, all four of my major joints were on fire, both shoulders and both knees. I called my friend Dr. Beth Kaplan, who was then an emergency room physician at San Francisco General Hospital. She came down and checked me out and said, “You’re dying. We’ve got to get you the fuck out of here.” Which I then confirmed by puking up about a quart of blood.
They came and took me back to the Stanford Medical Center by ambulance. At Beth’s insistence, they did this hideous thing called lavage where they opened up my joints and used a stream of antiseptics and antibiotics to clean out the infection. In the process, they also cleaned out all that was left of the cartilage in those joints.
They also installed a PICC line, which caused me to contract a second bacterial infection that set up camp in some hardware in my back. Suddenly, I couldn’t walk. I was also not producing any red blood cells, and so they transferred me up to UCSF in San Francisco, where they stabilized my bone marrow.
While I was at UCSF, the doctor who had installed that hardware cleaned out the bacteria that had attacked it. I had no way of conveying to him that I was on an heroic amount of blood thinners to prevent a pulmonary embolism, and in the process, he created a hematoma that put a large blood clot about the size and shape of two golf balls between my spinal cord and the epidural sheath. They had to open me right back up at four o’clock in the morning to get it out of there. I had gone under the knife with him several times before, so I just had to be positive and trust him.
Before he did this, he said, “John Perry, I gotta tell you. I don’t know what I’m going to find when I get in there, but I think unfortunately that there is a pretty good chance that I’m not going to be able to save any of your functions below T11.” In other words, I would be paralyzed from my belly button down. I said, “You mean I’ll never dance again?” And he said, “I’m not sure, but I think if you had one working eyelid, you’d still dance.” Which remains one of the best compliments I’ve ever received.
So I went in there knowing there was a good chance that I was going to come out unable to walk again. When I woke up in the recovery room, my doctor was standing at the end of my bed and he said, “John Perry, move your toes.” I did. And he started to cry. Because he had no idea if I was going to be able to do that and this was the only way to find out.
I was recovering from that when they decided they needed to be on the outlook for pulmonary embolisms, so they installed a filter in my vena cava to remove all the phlebitis-style clots from my bloodstream. In what I later learned was yet another iatrogenic failure, they displaced something that lodged itself in what had previously been my main coronary artery.
Later that evening, I was in the middle of an extremely stressful phone conversation with my business partner, who had been instrumental in getting us the money for our pure water project, when I started feeling pain in my chest. I didn’t know what to do about it at first and finally said, “I believe I’ve got to get off this call, I may be having a heart attack.”
And in fact, the lower two ventricles of my heart had just stopped dead in their tracks and I had no heartbeat. So they hauled me off from the company of my daughter Leah and several other folks who had a pretty hard time taking in this spectacle. They took me to a side room and hit me with the paddles. Just like on TV. Nothing. They hit me again with the paddles with twice as much voltage. Nothing. Then they hit me the third time with so much energy that they burned my chest. But it still didn’t start my heart.
Then an amazing thing happened. A young resident grabbed my arm, yanked me off the gurney, flung me to the floor, and jumped on my sternum with both of his knees. And my heart kind of went, “Well, if you’re going to be like that about it, I guess I’ll start beating again.” It was like the cowboy heart reaction. “You hit me, you son of a bitch!”
If people code out for eight minutes like I did and then come back, they usually do so as a different person than the one who left. But I guess my brain doesn’t use all that much oxygen because I appeared to be the same guy, at least from the inside. For eight minutes, however, I had not just been gratefully dead, I had been plain, flat out, ordinary dead. It was then I decided the time had finally come for me to begin working on my book. Looking for a ghost writer was not really the issue. At the time, my main concern was to not be a ghost before the book itself was done.
What amazed me most about this entire incident was that after so many years of thinking I really understood what happened when you died, I had not seen a goddamn thing. No upwardly sweeping rivers of light, no angels, no cherubim, no seraphim, no celestial beings. It all just went black. I’d gone down the tunnel of eternity and it had turned out to be nothing more than a cheap carnival ride to nowhere.
When I told my old friend and songwriting partner Bob Weir about this, he looked at me and said, “Well, it could be that you just weren’t dead enough.”