I’VE BEEN LIVING up in Sonoma County for the past three years, but I don’t spend all that much time there. For one thing, I don’t usually feel like drumming all the way back up there after a day in the San Rafael offlce. Plus I’ve usually spent half the night getting ripped with Jerry and John Kahn, bass player from the Jerry Garcia Band. Things are so bad even I’m a wee bit paranoid about driving.
So I get an apartment in downtown San Rafael. It’s a cool pad with a grape arbor in the backyard. Garcia and Kahn soon find out about it and the three of us begin hanging out there to do drugs. A cooler full of booze and dope, and not a soul to know we are there. Jerry loves hiding out.
I’m up to a gram of Persian a day, Garcia a gram and a half. So the Jerry Garcia Band now has another raison d’ñtre: raising major drug money. And we are, unfortunately, cash rich from all those small club dates.
Garcia’d get back from a Dead tour, take two deep breaths, and be playing at the Keystone or at the Stone in San Francisco two nights later. As soon as his gear arrived, bang, he’d be in downtown San Francisco playing as the Jerry Garcia Band. Out to Santa Cruz, hit San Jose, Palo Alto, come back to the city, take another deep breath, and get back out on the road to the East Coast!
In the early eighties, when the Dead aren’t on tour the Jerry Garcia Band plays almost every night. I go out with Jerry to most of these gigs, which are all over the Bay Area. When he decides to do an East Coast tour in June of ’82, I help put it together. We figure the best way to do it is to get a bus. I am getting weary of hair-raising scenes in airports with Jerry and his little tins.
We’re sick and tired of the commercial airlines. The situation is truly horrifying. We need . . . a new plan! Okay, we’ll fly across the country and then pick up a tour bus. That way we can go right to the motel; nobody has to know who’s checking in. The motel desk clerk never even sees the band. I just go get the keys, get back on the bus, and say, Just drive around to this wing; and here’s your keys, gentlemen, take whatever you need out of the bus because we’re locking it up for the night. Garcia takes only his briefcase, he never takes clothes with him. In the morning on our way to sound check I always have to say, Here’s your bag.
Copping Persian on the East Coast is impossible. We have to have it sent. I enlist my buddy, Marlow, to put it on the plane. Being strung out myself, I tell him, “I’m hiring you to look afier me and look after the mad and look after the merchandise, so don’t you go getting strung out.” Then I proceed to go away on tour with the Jerry Garcia Band and when I return I find Marlow wide awake in the middle of the night doing cocaine and — that’s right! — smoking Persian.
On one East Coast trip the Jerry Garcia Band has an unexpected windfall. We’re staying at one of those big New York City hotels — one of the few that will still take us — and I call downstairs and ask for the accounting. Our bill has supposedly been put on the credit card already and they tell me that they owe us money. I know this is impossible — it’s the first time it’s ever happened to me in twenty years of road managing — but, hey, I’m not gonna argue with them. Anyway, we’re frantic, we’re late, and we’ve got to get checked out of this hotel and make it to Philadelphia in time for sound check. They’re running around emptying cash registers in the lobby bar, then up to the mezzanine bar. Finally they present me with the twenty-one, twenty-three hundred dollars that they think they’ve overcharged me (maybe they haven’t looked in the rooms yet).
I waltz onto the bus, which has been waiting outside for a half an hour while they resolve this difficulty. When Garcia hears about my sack of money, he goes, “Let me SEE it! We’re gonna buy some STASH with this!” Needless to say, we almost miss the show in Philly.
Because of the huge money layouts for drugs, I know that I am under the gun at all times (and so does Garcia). We always deal very scrupulously with the take. We want to be fair to everybody and keep it as aboveboard as possible. We are making around $7,500 a night for the Jerry Garcia Band, $5,000 of which we give the band and crew. John Kahn gets $1,500; the other members of the band,say the gospel singers, $150 each; Parish, $500. Plus we have to pay for the schlepper, etc. Back in the car the bottom line is always: “How much do we have left over for DRUGS?”
“We’ve got a fat $2,678.”
“Whooaaaa!!!” That lights him up! But inevitably the next question is, “Can we cop tonight?” No rest for the weary, I guess. Then, drug business taken care of, we move on to life as such.
The Keystone, Palo Alto, circa 1981. It’s late. We leave way after all the waitresses have gone home. He’s a very generous guy, Garcia, and the waitresses always get tipped by us because Garcia fans are notoriously bad tippers. They order water and figure it ought to be free and don’t even leave a tip.
My head is ringing. Garcia plays his guitar in the Jerry Garcia Band way louder than in the Grateful Dead. We’re using the Dead sound system, but we are working clubs that hold 750 people, 1,500 tops, and the open-backed amplifiers just shred your ears.
Whenever we play a long-distance gig, Garcia puts his seat back and bang! goes straight to sleep. Then he starts to snore. Operatic snoring complete with bassoons and whistles. Taking Highway 280 from Palo Alto into San Francisco, you go by San Francisco State, down 19th Avenue into Golden Gate Park. After a hgh-speed chase home, you start hitting stop lights at San Francisco State College. As soon as I stop for the first one, Garcia is wide awake and looking around for a place for me to pull over.
There’s two places we usually stop: we either park by a pond one block inside Golden Gate Park or we go to the other side of the Golden Gate Bridge and pull into the view area on the Marin side — there’re always tourists stopped there and we can get away with it. Golden Gate Park is a little tricluer. The pond is the very spot where Jerry will get busted sitting in his BMW in 1985. They find twenty-three bindles with scraping; in them. He’s nodded out with the foil pipe and his tin box. Supposed to be on his way to the hospital for a rehab session, he stopped for a little self-medication on the way.
Now he’s awake he starts worrying about the supply.
“I’m gonna be out by the morning, Rock. What to do, what to do.”
I’ve either got to stay up all night or sleep a little bit and then drive to these rug merchant/car dealerddrug dealers (the Persians) in the East Bay. It’s a really long drive. I arrange to meet them in a parking lot at a Kmart but I’m so strung out I fall asleep in the car. They tell me later they were banging on the hood but I was out like a light. I wake up and look at my watch. God! It’s a quarter to three in the fucking afternoon and nobody’s showed up yet! It’s hot as a pistol in the car. I call the Persians and they tell me they came but couldn’t wake me up. Now I have to drive all the way over to their house in Walnut Creek and pick up the dope and then all the way back to Marin County over the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge.
I’m five hours late. Garcia is pissed. I’m pushing so hard to make time, I blow up my engine. I haven’t got to the bridge yet and steam starts pouring out of the air-conditioning vents. I’m going, uh-oh, smoke, I’m in trouble, I’m in trouble! Garcia is doubly furious because they’re expecting him at a band meeting on Front Street at three o’clock, and he doesn’t want to go to the meeting until the stash gets to his house. I’m half an hour away with my car blown up and no way to get back there. I call Jerry and he immediately dispatches someone from the office to come and get me and bring me back to the house so he can get high before the meeting. It’s now four thirty and the meeting is already an hour and a half late. The whole band is there plus the entire office. Everybody at Front Street around this big table, waiting for Garcia and me to show up. Meanwhile, Jerry’s still up at the house waiting for the stash. Now, some might have gone to the meeting all raggedy and jonesing and got through it somehow or other, but Garcia refuses to budge until he is high. Refuses.
Everyone knows perfectly well what’s going on at this point, but naturally I’m the one who has to take the fall. Often, admittedly, it is my fault! I try telling myself that doing this shit isn’t in my job description, but these days doing this is my job. I have by now lost any face I ever had with the band and crew, along with any vestige of self-respect.
June 16, 1982. We’re on the bus with the Jerry Garcia Band through the Jewish Alps of the Catskills on our way to an outdoor festival at Music Mountain in South Fallsburg, New York. Big old comfortable touring bus. Hidden safe with the goods in it. I get high, do the books. Jerry’s plinking in the back. Somebody is telling Jack Ellis dirty jokes they just got from over the phone at the last stop. Jonestown Kool-Aid jokes, gay cancer jokes. Jack is part of that underground network that gets jokes across the United States in a matter of seconds. Jerry is addicted to these jokes.
We’re doing a few East Coast dates with Bobby and the Midnites. Bobby’s band closes one night and we close the next night. Garcia likes playing the opening set because he can leave early and get high. At this particular outdoor event in the Catskills, Garcia is happy to let Weir close because that way he can go back to the bus and relax and enjoy himself and smoke and do a few lines.
At the Concord, one of those places where Bill Graham used to work, Garcia gets almost mystical. He takes me into the main dining room and with great reverence says, “Take a good look at this dining room, Rock. Bill Graham actually waited these tables! Mickey Hart’s grandparents, the Tessels, came here every summer and Bill Graham used to WAIT ON THEM!”
It’s the middle of the night. Um, Jerry, can we go now? We check out the showroom, which is where all the famous comics play. It’s all banquettes with a half-moon stage and beautiful lighting and velvet curtains and Garcia is swooning. ”Oooo, I’d love to play in a place like this!" I mean, it is nice, it is. Not like our clubs in California with their black walls and cement floors and when the lights come on it’s like we’ve been playing in a dungeon. The Keystone in Palo Alto used to be a supermarket, the Catalyst was a bowling alley. Just big ugly boxes.
Back home in San Rafael, our hideaway has been exposed. Not by wives, band members, or the DEA, but by predatory fans. When Garcia plays at Palo Alto these weird girls, Gretchens and Loreleis, recognize his car and follow us all the way home. After a few weeks of these strange things sitting outside on the doorstep every night, I rent a new place. One advantage of this house is that there are several ways to get up to it.
We move into the new “secret” place together. Garcia takes the downstairs apartment and I take the one upstairs. Jerry’s apartment is a sort of granny unit with a giant studio area when you walk in. It’s an office where Garcia keeps his record collection and has his computer set up. The adjoining room runs the rest of the length of the house back to a countertop lutchen at the far end. Jerry’s bed is just inside the wall of this room and mine is upstairs directly above it.
It’s a great time, if dark. Light rarely enters through the heavy black curtain. The carpet is coal black felt. The place is like an efficiency tomb. Quite appropriate, too, because, although we aren’t at first aware of it, we have entered the twilight world of the living dead — forget ship of the sun metaphors at this point — this is the afterlife, except that we are living it in suburban San Rafael.
Part of Jerry’s withdrawal from the world has to do with his desire to separate himself from his image. Fame, fortune, drugs, and time have ripped holes in all the great ones of the sixties, but not Jerry. To his fans he continues to be the same amiable, cool, bumbling Furry Freak Brother he started out as. So flawlessly funky and rumpled. A (barely) animated R . Crumb cartoon: the scruffy, dope-smoking Buddha.
Lesh and Weir have always been envious of Garcia’s Mr. Natural image, but Jerry’s come to hate it. It’s too much to live up to. Jerry can be just as cranky, crabby, and bloody-minded as anybody else and just as often. But Garcia’s become almost a living trademark for the Grateful Dead. There’s Cherry Garcia ice cream and Grateful Puffs snacks (complete with caricature of Garcia). With his beatnik disdain for self-promotion, thls is an uncomfortable place to be.
But if he no longer wants to be “Jerry Garcia,” there are plenty of people out there who do. There are more Grateful Dead imitators than you could ever imagine. There are professional Jerry Garcia impersonators buying cars and stereos and alligator boots. I get calls.
“Sorry to bother you, but we sold Mr. Garcia a Jaguar yesterday and he was meant to come back with it this morning to have it customized and . . .”
I run downstairs and ask Jerry if by any chance he’d gone over to Sausalito yesterday to pick up a Jaguar.
“Can’t you see I’m reading? And what in the world are you takng about? Say, you’re not holding out on me are you?”
There are new, alarming signs that things are beginning to go wrong. Jerry never takes a shower or changes his clothes, and becomes belligerent if anyone even mentions it to him.
“You don’t like the way I smell? Spray yourself with cologne.” It’s someone’s job to buy him T-shirts, get him clean clothes. At least I’m not doing laundry for him (yet). Nobody in the band will ride with him. He stinks to high heaven, he’s filthy and crusty. His hair’s all greasy and Rastafarian loolung. Horrible! Plus, he now has great smudges of soot all over his face and hands. Smoking Persian, the bottom of the tinfoil gets all charcoaly from the Bic lighter and Garcia’s so oblivious and stoned he’ll rub his forehead and show up at the airport with all these big black smears all over his face like a chimney sweep. Horrifying! I’m walking around with baby wipes so he can clear the soot off once in a while.
The band are staring at him aghast because at this point they’re all fashion plates. Weir smells like a lilac and has his Comme des Garçons sportcoat slung over one shoulder. Phil is immaculate. Kreutzmann looks like the cover of the L. L. Bean catalogue, the Northwoods guy with a plaid buffalo jacket and nouveau chaps. And here’s Garcia as grungy as a bag lady with huge finger swipes of charcoal down his face and stuff caked around his mouth and burn spots in his beard. Ugh! But do they say anything? Does anybody say anything?
They know better. They know that Garcia doesn’t give a fuck what he looks like and he especially doesn’t care what they think about it. They know that even the mildest rebuke will elicit a snarly “Hey . . . you . . . get offa my cloud!” The band starts renting their own airplane for long-distance gigs.
In the early days Jerry and I had hilarious times, but eventually drugs kill any socializing. Conversation itself has basically disappeared. All we ever talk about these days is what’s on television. Garcia’ll call me in the middle of the night and say, “Put it on Channel 36!” He loves science fiction, horror, old classic movies. “It’s BELA LUGOSI!”
Below me daily I hear Garcia plinking away, noodling on his guitar, and then all of a sudden, Ow-oooo-oooo-oooo! Thump-thump-thump! Garcia hopping around howling from a cigarette burn on his foot. It sounds like a fucking tribe of Indians down there.
I place smoke alarms on every wall. Right above his head, one on the side wall, one around the corner. They’re going off constantly. Forever! Every time, he burns his fucking slippers. And he insists on wearing those sheepskin moccasins. They stink to high heaven. When he drops a cigarette he kicks them off because it’s fallen into his slipper and burned his foot. But the slipper keeps smoldering, the cigarette burning the rancid, stinlung sheepskin. Chief Smoking Moccasin goes through several pairs a month.
Everything burns. The carpet, the bedspread, the chairs. It becomes such a fire hazard down there that I start buying him fireproof everything. Fireproof bedspread, fireproof carpet. But under the incessant cigarette bombing even such a miracle as the inflammable rug begins to buckle. After countless burning cigarettes and joints,it looks like an undulating topographical map warped into little hills and gulleys. A boiling mass writhing from the relentless assault of various incenlary objects.
By 1983, Jerry’s life is reduced to chord books, junk, junk food, Häagen Dazs, and cigarettes. Cocooning, he hldes from the band. At the gigs he locks himself in his dressing room. Afterward, we crawl back in our caves. We are like creatures sinking deeper into a tar pit that we have no desire to crawl out of.
Drugs isolate you; you go off and do them by yourself. I wake up and find Garcia fumbling through my sock drawer looking for my stash! He finds it, too, the motherfucker! Of course, I do the same thing to him when he’s holding. It’s the beginning of the end.
The Persian obliterates everything from our lives. It eliminates girlfriends, eliminates even the need for them. After Mountain Girl left in 1975, Jerry had a few flings. With a New York copywriter, with various models, with Amy Moore, the mistress of Texas oil millionaire Roy Cullen, and for a while he went with Debbie Koons (his present wife). But there were long periods when he didn’t have a steady girlfriend. For the most part, Jerry’s relationships heat up during periods when he is trying, not too successfully, to wean himself from drugs (usually when he has run out). Once back into the drugs, he can’t keep a girlfriend. He has no interest, and they can’t handle the stench.
Now seriously strung out, we focus all our energy on scoring. An overwhelming inertia crushes every plan beyond the day. Jerry’s increasing isolation is in direct proportion to his veneration and his role as leader, which he cannot abdicate. And because Jerry has no interest whatsoever in talking to the band, I become the go-between. Eventually people begin to think I am not allowing Jerry to speak to them. Kreutzmann is hitting on me to go see Jerry for him, Phil is asking me to talk to Jerry about this and that and could you arrange a meeting?
Jerry isn’t even showing up at the office. Previously, Jerry had always been involved; he lived at the office for long periods. Now he won’t leave the house for love nor money. Certainly not for photo sessions and band meetings. If the band wants to talk to him, they have to come to the house. Meetings are held in my living room. Even then there’s no guarantee Garcia is going to appear. Often he’ll just plain refuse to come upstairs. They twist my arm to go down and get him. He puts up a huge fight and then after agreeing, wants to get high (higher) before coming up. Meanwhile, the band members are upstairs twiddling their thumbs, knowing exactly what’s going on.
Jerry’s isolation threatens the end of the band, but the Gratehl Dead is by now a multimillion-dollar corporation. A huge amount is at stake, although no longer the soul of the band. The Dead have become just what Jerry always dreaded — an endless party rolling down the road, but essentially an oldies band. Part of Jerry’s descent into drugs comes from his horror at all this. The Dead are no longer innovating. They are basically just rehashing, and keeping the great corporate behemoth well fed. Jerry keeps suggesting the group disband for a year and try to reinvent itself rather than just grinding on like the other cash cows of rock — the Beach Boys, the Stones, the the Who. But the band doesn’t want to hear about it.
In desperation Kreutzmann delivers an ultimatum to Garcia from the band. ”Either you gotta quit this Persian shit or you’re fired.”
Garcia laughs: “Promises, promises! Okay, after careful consideration, I’m afraid I have to go with the Persian.”
“That’s it, Jerry? That’s all you’ve got to say to us?”
“Anyway, who you gonna hire? It’s a lot easier to find a drummer than it is a lead guitar player.”
Kreutzmann slinks out. He knows that without Jerry there is no Grateful Dead. Jerry is the Dead. His guitar, his personality. To most of the world, Jerry Garcia is an icon.
By the end of summer of ‘84, Garcia’s condition is worsening daily. He never sleeps or lies down. He sits in a chair with the guitar cradled in his arm and plays night and day, frequently nodding off. He lives on a diet of ice cream, M&Ms, Persian, and cigarettes. Constantly dropping cigarettes, falling asleep upright smoking. Setting fire to carpet, bed, shoes.
He feels guilty. His self-loathing has reached hellish intensity and I’m walking on eggshells pretending to be completely oblivious to what’s going on. I know I’m fucking up too, but I’m too far gone to stop. I just want to keep doing what I’m doing.
Part of the problem is Jerry’s uncanny ability to convince himself that our addiction is a temporary state of affairs. We’re just going through a phase — ha! This particular phase has been going on for almost ten years, pretty much nonstop. His sense of shame effectively precludes any discussion of the subject. I’m fully aware that one of the reasons Jerry and I remain tight is because I never bring the subject up. Jerry counts on this. But it’s a double bind because as long as I turn a blind eye I only worsen the situation. With both of us using, it’s become a mutual denial society from which there’s no way out. (Unless both of us want to quit at the same time, but since we never discuss the subject, how would we ever know!)
The gloom that pervades our sepulchral existence is in stark contrast to our radiant beginnings. Everything seemed possible, the world might just change in the twinkhng of an eye. Now it seems that instead of the incandescent future we envisaged we are —in the second term of Ronald Reagan — actually moving backwards in time. Any action on our part seems futile, the visions of the past mere pipe dreams. We fell out of paradise long ago. The Persian is just a convenient way of numbing ourselves to that fact.
This could be, I realize, just another junhe’s rationalization for his worthless state. But at this point it’s hard to tell, and too late to matter. We’ve gotten very good at finding excuses for our sorry asses. The mystic pursuit of the ourobouros has boiled down to chasing the dragon’s tail.
Garcia’s feet have become too swollen for him to walk. He can’t tie his shoes, can’t even get into his size 13 hightops (he normally wears a size II). I am panicked. What if Jerry gets deathly ill on the road? Dr. Weisberg isn’t going to be able to fly out and deal with it in time. Jerry is horribly bloated, he’s got chronic swelling in the ankles, and he has absolutely no desire to look after himself. He’s not eating right, he’s pounding down piles of Haagen Dazs ice cream. I know it’s only a matter of time before he gets seriously ill and collapses. I call Dr. Weisberg.
Dr. Weisberg is alarmed. Garcia’s body is dangerously toxic. His cholesterol level is 900! He has critically high blood pressure and his kidney is close to failing. Jerry intensely resents my intrusion, even though Dr. Weisberg’s prognosis is that Jerry is near death. He stares daggers at me. I know it’s over. Ifwe stick together we’ll both be dead within a year.
Weisberg recommends that Jerry check himself into the hospital, but he doesn’t. A year later, in January of 1985, he is busted for freebasing cocaine in Golden State Park. In his briefcase: twenty-three bindles containing traces of heroin and coke. In July of the following year he lapses into a diabetic coma for three days and almost dies.
So Kreutzmann takes me down to a rehab in L.A. I check into the Westwood Clinic, which is filled with quasi-celebrities withdrawing from one thing or another. I’m supposed to take six months off. After that, according to Jerry, I can come back. I’m only in detox for twenty-eight days, then I go home and get stoned. Just one more time, I tell myself, and strangely enough it turns out to be the truth. I never touch the stuff again.
I can feel a lot of resentment toward me after I get out of detox. I know there are many who want me out of the Grateful Dead family by hook or by crook. It’s clear they want to protect Jerry, and see me as endangering him. Meanwhile, Jerry is out of the hospital but still using.
Steve Parish thinks I’m a bad influence (true) and calls me up on charges of thieving from Garcia and the band (false). He has only one specific allegation: that I stole money from the hotel that time in New York City when we were supposedly overcharged and they returned money to us.
I am hauled in front of the Court of Higher Nonsense, which is a full-on Grateful Dead meeting with all the secretaries and everything else and Parish accuses me of stealing from Garcia — the hotel money and all kinds of other money. I have no idea what he’s talking about. Under other circumstances I might even find a farce like this amusing, but I quickly realize this is not the right tack to take. I try to summon up a serious (yet innocent) face.
“I’ve never taken anything from anyone,” I mumble. I figure this is not the time to mention Jerry’s and my raiding each other’s stashes. “I dare you to come up with any evidence that I thieved from Garcia or the Grateful Dead,” I say in a stupidly highhanded manner.
As I’m leaving the meeting, Kreutzmann gives me a “Good riddance, Scully!” which I take with a large grain of salt. I know he’s on cocaine and boozed up nasty as a motherfucker.
I go off to Lake Tahoe and come back a month later,just in time for the next official Dead meeting. They haven’t found anything and I — not too brightly — demand an apology, in writing no less. I quickly realize that the only thng I might get in writing today are my walking papers.
Hunter comes to my defense. A wonderful, crazily impassioned speech. You know, sort of: “This man has devoted twenty years of his life, blah blah. How can you discard someone like this, blah blah?” What he’s so shocked about I don’t know. Just business as usual, baby.
They offer me six months with pay to get myself straightened out. Then I can get my old job back again. But six months come and go, and somehow I see no reason to return. The thrill is gone.
September 24, 1985.2:15 A.M. 1-5 Exit 19 (Lost Hills). I’ve driven all the way from San Francisco to L.A. and almost all the way back again. Twenty-two hours on the road. The muffler fell off somewhere back there and for the last 150 miles inexplicable wobbles and rattles, weird inner skull music from the unearthly didgeridoo hum of the three pairs of skis on the rack.
A fine drizzle of gravitational waves. What the hell is that? A small suitcase with yellow eyes hurtling toward the car. A-a-a-ayiiiii! . . . a Fire Troll! Fuck, I almost hit him. What’s he doing out there? Poor misguided soul, no one’s going to pick him up out here. Then a sickening thud. God, I really did hit something. I get out of the car. Oh no! It’s a coyote. Now I really am doomed.
I’ve hit a coyote, dropped my muffler, had a fight with my girlfriend, lost my job with the Grateful Dead. . . .
Three A.M. I’m not more than twenty miles from home and I am lost. Jesus, I’ve only lived here for twelve years, where the hell am I?
God, and there’s some poor bastard out in the middle of the road waving his arms. Shit, it’s Jerry! What the hell is he doing all the way out here in the middle of the night? His car musta broke down. God, am I glad to see him!
I left under such strange circumstances — didn’t even get to say goodbye properly — this is a perfect opportunity to say a few things that I didn’t have a chance to say.
I’m not going to hit him with all my grievances — at least not right away. I’ll break into it gently. Maybe a joke or two to start out.
“Hey, man, what’s got twelve fuckin’ arms and, you know, plays guitar or something, and died? Give up? Squid Vicious! Yeah, well. Look, I don’t know how to say this but. . .”
“Hey, if it’s about the Dead disco album, again, man. . . .”
“Look, it’s not that I’m bitter about getting kicked out. . I’
“You’re not with the band anymore? Since when?”
“Oh, c’mon, Jerry! Don’t you remember the Court of Higher Nonsense and all that?”
“Well, man, see now, I thought when you called the doctor you wanted to get thrown out. I mean, why else would you call a doctor?”
Fuck, nobody there! The seat next to me is empty. Don’t tell me I dreamt the whole thing. Well, it wouldn’t be the first time. At least I got some stuff off my chest, y’know? Oh well, maybe these imaginary conversations all feed into the Akashíc Record somewhere out there in the cosmic ozone and — eventually — seep into the sleeping brain of the Great Barcia.
I’m somewhere over in the Chinatown hills, though how I got here I don’t know. Must have blacked out back there somewhere. Hell, maybe I shouldn’t have stopped at that redneck bar for a nightcap, but after that “Ghost Rider of Polonio Pass” business with Jerry I had a serious case of the shakes. I had to have something to steady my nerves.
Four A.M. I’m toasted to the max. Further action would be futile. This must be the place I’m meant to stop. I’ll park here and catch a few winks and then I’11 be in better shape to drive home.
I awake to the hustle and bustle of morning traffic. Infernal heavy metal orchestra tuning up. The slightest rustle of sound is picked up by a satanic goblin inside my head who takes a stack of pots and pans and throws them down an endless airshaft. And then I hear a ringing like the sound of Doomsday itself. The Great Bell of Beelzebub clanging for all the wrung-out souls in creation.
Ba-kriiiing!! Ta-drung!! Ba-daaang!! Ka-driiing!! Td-klaaang!! The fiend! He’s beating on his cable car bell, throwing himself into a Sun Ra hammer and kettle solo. I come awake with a start, roll down my window and look back. About ten feet away is a cable car, and I am sitting right in the middle of the track.
I take the emergency brake off and roll miraculously down the hdl into the gas station on the corner. Well, at least I have one angel left.
My brains are scorched and my life a total disaster, plus my battery is dead. I am a miserable sinner, O Lord, I have squandered my days in riotous living, but I have learned my lesson. My life from now on will be one of abstinence and prayer. Right there on the corner of Jackson and Hyde I make a resolution to myself that the next ten years are going to be different. But I forget to say how.