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 at 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.