Drinking With Men : A Memoir (9781101603123)

by Schaap, Rosie

  “Then what?” he asked.

  Then what? I had no idea.

  “I have no idea,” I said. Beyond a few days at the Oakland Coliseum, whatever else my future held was a mystery.

  “Well, I sure hope you’re careful,” he said. “I have a daughter almost your age. I’d be worried out of my mind.” By then I’d managed to get him to shift a mini bottle of Jack Daniel’s—which I liked to think of as my signature drink, in homage to Janis Joplin—my way. The irony was not lost on me. There was plenty to worry about. The world, the big unpredictable one that is away from home, trembles with dangers—big ugly ones right out there on the surface, and other, more insidious ones pulsing just below. And for girls, it is fair to say there are more, and greater, dangers.

  As much as I wished to believe in the Grateful Dead tour as a peaceable and equitable kingdom, it was not, and it did not exist in a protected magical circle. On an earlier tour, somewhere in upstate New York, my friends and I picked up a dead-eyed girl named Colleen. She was a little older than us, late twenties maybe. She wound up sharing a motel room with us that night. She stayed in the shower for about forty minutes, and then sat speechless on the bed bundled in towels and blankets for a long time. Another girl and I sat beside her, our arms around her, while she sobbed. And then she told us, even though we’d already figured out the essentials of what had happened: Just a few days earlier, she’d been raped in a campground. There were plenty of other Deadheads around, but nobody came to her rescue. Nobody pressed charges. Nobody took her to the hospital. “Everyone was fucked up,” she told us—like she had to apologize for them.

  Although many people I befriended on tour shared my burgeoning commitment to progressive politics in a broad, vague way, the environment could hardly be called feminist. Gender lines, to my surprise and dismay, were strictly drawn. Girls were expected to wear long and flowing—that is, feminine—clothes, to be pretty in a kind of standardized long-haired, patchouli-scented way. Men were expected to drink harder, do drugs harder, and at the same time, effectively govern the community. In some sense, women—along with drugs and booze—were treated kind of like community property on tour, even as there were inevitably some who kept their stashes to themselves. It all seemed so hunter-gatherer to me, and it was reinforced, perhaps even encouraged, by some of the lyrics to some of our favorite songs: “We can share the women, we can share the wine,” Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir harmonized on “Jack Straw.” One of the band’s great crowd-pleasers, “Sugar Magnolia,” is nothing less than a paean to an idealized hippie chick, hypersexualized but otherwise utterly undemanding, a girl with no interesting thoughts of her own, yet who is capable of getting her man out of all manner of countercultural scrapes.

  None of that was on my mind as I flew west that day, drinking Jack Daniel’s and talking to the actuary. All I knew—and this was enough—was that as soon as I got off the BART from SFO to the Oakland Coliseum, I would not be alone. My friends would be there: I would find Danny and Billy, a clever pair of pothead Jersey boys I’d first met at Madison Square Garden, in the same series of shows to which I’d made the mistake of inviting my mother. I’d find Marie, a college dropout who’d grown up on an Indian reservation in Wyoming, whom I’d met that summer at a show at Giants Stadium and who helped me hone my bead-working skills and riveted me with her true stories of the American West. Ben would probably be in Oakland, too, a sweet Canadian just on the brink of too much LSD consumption whom a former tour buddy of mine and I had picked up hitching on our way to a show in Atlanta (or Greensboro? Much of this time, many of these places, have blurred for the obvious reasons—time, youth, drugs, and drink). And Lee, another Canadian, one of the first boys I fell for, with long blond hair and messed-up teeth, hyper and troubled and extremely funny in an open, shameless way.

  They were all there, waiting for me in the Coliseum parking lot like I’d counted on. My new family—a family composed, effectively, of children intent on being something other than children, if not quite adults. A family who, to my mother, when she ultimately met some of its members and saw pictures of others, looked like nothing so much as the Manson family. But they—we—were not that, nothing like that, not even close. We were not in the business of killing movie stars. We didn’t want to hurt anyone—except, in a distant and abstract kind of way, our own families. We were mostly decent if slightly wayward kids who, for a variety of reasons, needed to leave the people who had raised us and who, many of us felt, had failed to understand us, and make a family of our own. Many came from messed-up homes. Some were fleeing abusive parents. (I didn’t have it nearly as bad as many of my friends did, but I was tired of arguments with my mother.) We drank and danced, bartered bootlegs, got high and hung out, lived in vans and slept in cars under piles of stripy Mexican blankets in need of a good washing; we gave one another scabies and sometimes worse, and sometimes money, and often pot, and really whatever we had, sold trinkets and tofu stew, and for the most part, though not always, looked after one another. We stretched our young legs at truck stops along interstates, and at “scenic outlooks” dotting the highways. We camped alfresco in woods and on beaches. “How many Deadheads does it take to screw in a lightbulb?” Lee asked me once. “NONE! Deadheads screw in sleeping bags!” We were young. We had left our homes. We loved one another.

  Three shows in Oakland and then—then—came the bigger question. Where to next? “Come to Vancouver,” Ben said. “I’ve got a place to live and good people. We’ll find you a job. And it’s beautiful there. Really beautiful. You’ll love it.” The potential promise of a place to live, and even a way to earn some money: That was option number one, and it sounded all right. The alternative was to catch a ride down the California coast with Danny and Billy in the former’s wreck of an old Dodge van for three nights of Dead shows in Inglewood, just outside Los Angeles. Danny had made a shitload of tie-dyed shirts—let it not be said that we were a uniformly lazy lot; this kid didn’t lack for work ethic—and could use some help shilling them, and I also had some beaded jewelry to sell. So I’d have a few days of work. And then, who knew? And who gave a rat’s ass? Not me. Sure, Vancouver sounded sensible. But sensible wasn’t what I was after, really. What I was after was more shows. More fun.

  On the way to Los Angeles we camped one night at Half Moon Bay, a place sacred to us, a homing ground on the shore, pitching our tents as close to the water’s edge as we could manage. There were maybe a half dozen of us, and we ate hummus sandwiches on chunky health-food-store bread that smelled like freshly mowed lawn, and we sat by the fire, quietly telling stories and laughing under a huge starry sky. And for the first but not the last time in my life on tour, I felt a sensation of freedom that nearly overcame me, as though I were having an out-of-body experience of the kind I’d read about during a brief and miserable stint selling Time-Life’s Mysteries of the Unknown series over the phone from a windowless midtown office bearing above the door the inspirational legend THROUGH THESE DOORS PASS THE GREATEST TELEMARKETERS IN THE WORLD. (And also, I can report, one of the all-time worst.) At Half Moon Bay, freedom was what I felt, overwhelmingly—and also the thing that otherwise unhappy teenagers might just need most, the feeling that finally, finally, I had found my people, that they got me, that until then I had been a changeling in a world for which I had not been equipped, and now I was where I had always rightfully belonged. I shared a small tent that night with Lee, not doing much of anything—just talking, kissing, his breath warm on my neck and face, reeking of Molson.

  The next morning we bought vegetarian burritos and headed south in a little convoy to LA, switching at some point from the majestic Pacific Coast Highway to the unpicturesque 5 for the sake of time. We pulled into the Forum parking lot, quickly scored tickets for all three shows, made a killing on shirts and jewelry. Such a killing that it wouldn’t be necessary to sleep in the van, or in sleeping bags outside the Forum. We could get a motel room where we could shower and wa
tch TV and drink beer and get high in peace and privacy. We were feeling so flush that on the last night of the Dead’s Inglewood run, damn, we could even hit the motel lounge—a divey, tiki-ish little shithole of a bar. Perfect.

  The culture, such as it was, of the Grateful Dead tour will always be associated more closely with drugs—marijuana and psychedelics, by and large, for which I did not lack enthusiasm—than drinks. But there was plenty of drinking on tour, and by then I knew where my deepest allegiance lay. A segment of tourheads drank with greater gusto than the rest and owed, perhaps, a spiritual debt to Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, one of the band’s founders, a blues-drenched keyboardist who succumbed to internal hemorrhaging resulting from his alcoholism in 1973 at age twenty-seven (like Janis, Jim, and Jimi), and who, it has been said, never shared his bandmates’ devotion to LSD, preferring Thunderbird and Southern Comfort.

  I loved a good acid trip as much as the next Deadhead. In high school, I’d pretty much spent every waking hour stoned off my ass. But now, as a full-time tourhead, I had new and daunting responsibilities. I had a business to run—selling shirts and jewelry and other homespun commodities, doing tarot card readings, and trolling for “miracles,” the word in our lingua franca for free tickets. The sleaziest, most surefire method I knew for scoring miracles was to borrow a baby from a friend on tour who had a couple of them. If I set off in one direction with a baby strapped to my back and she took the other in another direction, the sorry spectacle of two sad-eyed teenage Deadhead moms could yield more tickets separately than one mom and two babies could.

  And that was about as much tour math as I could manage. Mostly I was incapable of making transactions of any kind when I was stoned or tripping. I knew plenty of hippie hustlers who could exchange money, make change, do business on a few tabs of acid. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how they managed it. Hand me a ten-dollar bill when I was tripping and forget it: suddenly Alexander Hamilton was Neptune, rising from a roiling rainbow sea, floating forth unto the universe wielding his trident and making tulips grow from cracks in the sidewalk. And for that ten, if, say, I owed you five, chances were good that I’d blithely slip you a twenty, and instead of just acknowledging that I was too fucking high to make the right change, you might be all, “Hey, thanks, sister, right on,” as though I’d intended all along to redistribute the wealth in some well-meaning hippie way.

  In fact, I needed money badly, more than ever. And high, I was incapable of making any. So, improbable as it may seem, becoming a full-time tourhead put an abrupt, uncalculated end to my most dedicated phase of drug consumption. But a few beers—in this way the parking lot scenes outside of Dead shows were no different from those at football games or any other locus of collective effervescence, and always had beer entrepreneurs toting huge coolers and barking “Ice-cold imports!” from aisle to aisle—and I was just fine. A few swigs of Jack Daniel’s from a hip flask? Hell, even better. And that weekend in LA, with my crocheted, rainbow-colored Guatemalan satchel bursting with cash, I could buy all the Jack Daniel’s I’d ever wanted. Danny and Billy and I and a few other friends we’d said could crash in the motel room with us hit the bar—with no idea that I was heading for the single drunkest night of my life.

  • • •

  The next morning, December 11, 1989, I awakened on a greasy, flattened stretch of carpet in that cheap motel room in Inglewood with a nearly rigid disk of my own shit stuck to my backside. I peeled it off in a single perfect pancake and thought immediately of a film I’d seen a year or so before in a high school social studies class—an elective beloved of all the stoners called Indian and Southeast Asian Studies. The film was about village life in India. I thought of the thin, dark-haired women in faded saris setting cow dung patties out in the sun to dry for cooking fuel.

  The sunshine pushing through fissures in the dusty drapes looked and felt like early morning light—diffuse and uncertain. It was probably around six. I had been sleeping under a desk, which the top of my head grazed as I sat up. I glanced around and quickly calculated that more than a half- dozen dirty hippies were crammed into every corner and crevice of the room: a blond-dreadlocked guy on the floor in front of the TV, three or four kids sprawled across the king-size bed, someone laid out in the space between the bed and the radiator, a girl in a diaphanous purple dress curled up in a chair. I do not remember if I managed to get up, flush the shit, and clean myself up, or if I just drifted back into sleep, my head buzzing with images of emaciated cows and fields of marigold. I do not remember much from the night before when, I was told later, I drank some twenty-one shots of Jack Daniel’s. Marie, who had left the bar before things got ugly, was furious with Billy and Danny, who, she said, had encouraged my recklessness because they wanted to see exactly how much I was capable of drinking.

  “I lost count,” Billy said. Apparently we’d all gotten good and hammered, but I’d gone above and beyond. In Inglewood, for God’s sake, which to New Yorkers is like saying you spent the drunkest night of your life in Newark.

  “You kept going on about Irish mythology,” Danny added. “Ranting about gods and goddesses.”

  I did?

  Well, that was plausible. I’d been reading Yeats and Lady Gregory. And some moony New Age-y manifesto on the spirituality of the ancient Celts.

  “It was pretty funny.” By which I knew he meant I’d made a complete ass of myself.

  Huh.

  What I do remember is this, and only this: a lame bar-trick parlor-game kind of thing, with which the waxy-mustachioed, Hawaiian-shirted barman in the motel lounge had dazzled and, I confess, stumped me. I still trot it out from time to time and, amazingly, it almost always trips people up—especially smart people, even after only one drink. For this you’ll need a penny, a nickel, and a dime.

  This can be quite dramatic. Hold on to the coins. Maybe shake them up in your palm for a few seconds, then blow on them. First you say, deadpan, “Johnny’s mother had three children.” Then you slap the penny down on the bar with one decisive stroke of the thumb and announce, “The first one was Penny.”

  Next, lay the nickel down and say, a little more casually, “The second one was Nicholas.”

  Finally, slam down the dime, hard. And when you’re good and ready, ask, with great intention, like you’re interrogating a perp, “Who was the third?”

  Nine out of ten times, the poor idiot will say Dimitri.

  Anyway, I remember nothing else—at least, the mind’s catalog of images and sound has gone dark and quiet. But my nose and my sense of taste recall more: To this day, even the smell of Jack Daniel’s—tinged with burnt cotton and vanilla—makes me want to retch. And that is precisely what I spent the earliest morning hours of December 11 doing, attended to by Marie. After the boys hoisted me up the stairs from the bar, I heard later, she held my head over the toilet, splashed water on my face and implored me to drink as much of it as I could, and watched over me to make sure I didn’t die. On a few occasions, I’ve thought back on this and worked myself close to anger. Shouldn’t someone have taken me to the hospital? Couldn’t I have died? Well, yes. But I am never quite able to get angry. Partly because we were all young and had little idea what to do in such a situation. Partly because so much of the romance of tour life resided in its near-lawlessness, in its frontier-outlaw contempt and near-obsessive avoidance of authority, of The Man. Partly, I am also sure, because there were times back then when I certainly should have done something and didn’t, and I want to excuse myself, too. On tour, we made excuses for ourselves, and for one another, a lot.

  I fell back asleep under the desk. The next time I woke up, I was some three hundred and fifty miles north of Inglewood, in Santa Cruz, aware that I was lucky to be alive, lucky to have had people looking after me, even if we were all too young to know how to take care of anyone, ourselves included. I considered kissing the ground, the dark dusty asphalt of a strip-mall parking lot
near Domino’s Pizza, near Baskin-Robbins, near the Saturn Café—a legendary vegetarian joint with a solidly vegan-feminist clientele at the time. My head was heavy, pulsing at the temples and the back. At sunset we went to the beach, the sweet state beach with its natural bridges of enormous eroded rocks. We lit up a joint and watched the surfers, the students, the drifters who’d long preceded our own drifting to this place, who had probably arrived here much as we did, only years before, with no better plan, traveling the same tine in the same forked road: Santa Cruz or Vancouver, Santa Cruz or San Francisco, Santa Cruz or Humboldt, Santa Cruz or ____, Santa Cruz or ____, Santa Cruz or ____. Santa Cruz instead of anywhere else, especially instead of wherever they’d come from.

  Danny and Billy and I lived in that van, parked on Mission Street, in front of the pizzeria where they worked, at least through Christmas, at which time Danny had managed to scrounge together enough money to return to New Jersey for the holidays. Billy was a Christian, but not a religious one. Still, Christmas was Christmas. And I was one of those half-assed New York Jews who grew up celebrating Easter and Passover—whose family, truth be told, preferred Christmas to Hanukkah, because Ma really loved chestnuts roasting on an open fire, and overstuffed stockings, and a nice Bûche de Noël and all that, without particularly paying Jesus any mind, though she was firmly of the opinion that he seemed like a totally okay guy. So even for me, yes, Christmas was Christmas, and sleeping in a van would not do, nor would eating discards from the pizzeria.

  “We should at least get a room somewhere,” I suggested. “Sleeping in the van on Christmas just seems wrong.” Billy quickly agreed, even though we were both close to broke. We checked in to the cheapest motel we could find. At a convenience store across the road, for a small fee, we got a loitering grown-up to procure a few six-packs of Anchor Steam for us—the birth of the baby Jesus rated at least a classy regional beer.