Even back then, there was all this prissy bullshit about nature and what nature wanted. As far as I could tell, nature just wanted to be left alone as much as possible and otherwise it didn’t give a shit. For me, the most important issue was to vouchsafe the quality of life for the habitat. That was the only thing I wanted to focus on. I didn’t care if you were bait fishing or fly-fishing just as long as you were taking care of the habitat.
As a result I found myself constantly dealing with class warfare by another name. When Congress was about to pass a Wyoming wilderness bill that would have put additional land under federal control, a whole bunch of snowmobilers were distressed by the prospect that they would no longer be allowed to go into what would now be a designated federal wilderness area. So I came up with the bright idea of having an additional category of federal wilderness where people could snowmobile during certain months because all the wildlife would be asleep and the only animals who would actually get disturbed were cross-country skiers. But of course the skiers were very disturbed. That was what I meant by class warfare: The cross-country skiers were mostly young urban professionals, whereas the people who liked to ride snowmobiles were kind of rough and tumble and lower middle class.
In the end, Cheney got my new designation put into effect, but in the process, both the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society made me into their leading enemy. If you go to the middle of the road, chances are good that you will get run over.
Another ongoing issue at the time was that unscrupulous developers were dividing large chunks of motherless sagebrush into forty-acre tracts without granting a right of way to others. The entire state was rapidly becoming more and more yuppified because all these decisions were being made by the federal government in Washington rather than by locals in Wyoming.
During this period, I watched Wyoming change around me, and so I tried to amplify greatly the idea that what we wanted was “Wyoming on Wyoming’s Terms,” which had been a founding idea of the Wyoming Outdoor Council. By then, Jackson Hole had started to make Aspen look like a good start. When I was born in Jackson Hole, there had been only one doctor in the entire town.
But it was so beautiful there and you could ski and so it went. I always felt that the guy riding a bucking horse on the state license plate was anyone who was trying to stay on top of Wyoming.
TWENTY-THREE
GLOBAL SOCIOPATH
Dick Cheney wound up spending ten years as Wyoming’s only congressman. In 1989, President George H. W. Bush selected Dick to become his secretary of defense. That was when I realized that he was, in fact, a sociopath. It was an opinion I developed during the course of our battles over the MX missile–basing system that Dick did everything in his power to realize.
Unlike the U.S. Navy, the Air Force in the 1980s did not have any missile submarines but still wanted to have their own nuclear retaliatory weapons. It was like the Air Force–Navy football game and so the Air Force scratched its head and came up with the MX, an intercontinental ballistic missile that could carry ten to twelve 300-kiloton nuclear warheads, a little like its submarine-based cousin, the Trident missile, which had eight warheads of 100 kilotons each. To give you some basis for comparison, the nuclear bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima consisted of about 17 kilotons.
One MX could spray the entire Soviet Union with the most vivid kind of hell, and the idea was that they were going to build a thousand apparent MX missile sites, of which only a hundred would house actual MX missiles with nuclear warheads. They were then going to put all these missiles on railroad tracks and shuttle them from tunnel to tunnel and into these little bunkers that were scattered all around Nevada and Utah and southern Oregon and a little part of Wyoming and Arizona. Since there would be absolutely no way for the Russians to know where the real missiles actually were at any given point in time, they would have to figure out a way to destroy them all in order to feel safe about launching a nuclear first strike, which would have been impossible.
To make this happen, the Air Force was going to build railroad tracks all over the intermountain West. To construct the railroad tracks and the tunnels and the bunkers, they were going to use all of the water in the intermountain West. There is large amount of territory between the ridges of the Sierras and the Wasatch Mountains where there is no outlet, and so all the rain and snow that falls there has nowhere to go but down into the Carson Sink or the Humboldt Sink or the Black Rock Desert. This is a completely contained zone and so all the water that lies beneath the earth there is ancient water that is millions and millions of years old. They were going to pump this sacred aquifer dry.
I first got upset about the obvious folly of this from an environmental standpoint. Then I realized, “Jesus Christ, this doesn’t make sense anyway.” We already had eighteen Trident submarines with twelve missiles on them and each of those had eight warheads and no one could have ever even begun taking them all out. So what the fuck did we need with a hundred fully armed MX missiles as well?
As the father of a brand-new daughter with another on the way, the fact that the U.S. government was trying to come up with a way to make nuclear war seem somehow winnable or plausible or even thinkable was just anathema to me. I got really frantic about it. I started to get more and more engaged in nuclear weapons policy, and oddly enough, it turned out that as secretary of defense, Dick Cheney was now to a large extent the chief architect of American nuclear weapons policy. He was leading the charge to get all this approved in Congress while claiming that it would be good for the economy. In fact, his reasons for doing this were far weirder and much deeper.
I had always gotten along pretty well with Dick on all the other stuff we had argued about. We had been able to come to compromises, because basically we wanted the same thing on a lot of these deals, which was Wyoming on its own terms. But he was totally adamant about the MX missile–basing system and at one point, I found myself having a staged argument about it with him in his office in Washington.
Mary McGrory, a well-known columnist for the Washington Post back then, asked if she could come along with me to see Dick because she thought it might be interesting. She did, and Dick and I went at it hammer and tongs in front of her for about an hour and a half. I finally dragged myself out of his office bleeding and punctured in many places and she said, “You know, I’ve been covering this beat since Franklin D. Roosevelt was president and your man Cheney is the scariest person I’ve ever seen here.” She then wrote a column that basically said just that. Dick did not like this at all, but at that point, we were no longer on the best of terms.
And then it got even worse. My organization, the Wyoming Outdoor Council, filed an environmental impact suit claiming that the federal government had not taken into consideration one of the impacts from the MX missile–basing system, which was nuclear war. I thought this was a distinct possibility that no one could ignore. I mean, we were talking real environmental impact now.
I filed that suit on behalf of the organization, and the judge threw it out of court. In his view, the suit was spurious because we were not going to have a nuclear war. My question then was why even bother to build the goddamn thing if you were not going to have a nuclear war?
After that Dick called me up and said, “John Perry, you don’t have to worry about the MX-basing scheme anymore.” And I said, “Really? Why? Did you cancel the weapons systems?” And he said, “No, no. We’re going to go ahead and build them.”
By then, though, this weapons system had become pretty controversial even within the Bush administration. People like Brent Scowcroft, who was Bush’s national security adviser, didn’t like it, and so the tide had started to turn against Dick. I said, “So how are you going to base them?” And he said, “We’re going to put them in Minuteman silos.” I said, “But wait, you put them in a Minuteman silo and they’re like a sitting duck. I mean, you might as well line them up in Red Square. They’re completely vulnerable to b
eing totally taken out.”
And he said, “Not the way we’re going to do it. We’re going to put them on launch on warning.” That meant that as soon as there was a plausible warning of a nuclear first strike, the birds would go. As it happened, all the Minuteman sites were in Wyoming.
I said, “Did you ever see Dr. Strangelove?” And he said, “I don’t think that’s amusing.” And I said, “I wasn’t trying to be amusing.”
It took me years before I realized what Dick was actually up to, which was scaring the living shit out of the Soviets. Because once we started doing stuff like that, there was no telling what else we might do. In a way, Dick was adopting a system I had used back when I was driving in Mexico and there would be one paved strip down the middle of the road. I’d be driving on it and a bus would be coming right at me. The bus driver wanted to stay on that paved strip because the shoulders of the road were not nearly as reliable. I never wanted to get over either but playing chicken with a Mexican bus driver was not entirely a good idea.
I found that if I started weaving all over the road like I was muy borracho, the bus driver would pull over, and that was exactly what Dick Cheney was now doing. He was acting like he was completely out of his mind to get the Russians to pull over. Once Dick told me what he was going to do with the MX missiles, that was pretty much it for the two of us.
When Dick became the vice president of the United States under George W. Bush in 2001, all this provided the context for what he wanted to do in the Iraq War, which was pretty much his idea. Bear in mind that this was not a guy who had “feelings” in the usual sense of the word. Dick was motivated by what he considered to be the greater good, but for him the greater good did not have individual faces. It was far more generalized.
Dick thought that the only time the existence of a single world power like the United States had ever worked before was during the Roman Empire. And that was largely because the Romans had done stuff like using roadside crucifixions for decorations, which had served to keep certain kinds of enthusiasm from developing among the people.
This was what Dick really believed, but he hadn’t studied the religious aspects of the situation in Iraq and was completely stupid about the Sunnis and the Shiites. Dick was not a spiritual guy at all, so he couldn’t understand spiritualism in other people. But I think he really believed that if the United States dove into the Middle East and did something that was wildly irrational and crazy—like attacking a country that had not done us any harm at all—it was going to make everyone else in the world extremely wary of ever messing with us.
That the Iraq War might also have been good for Halliburton, the multinational oil corporation where Dick had served as CEO, is a common way of explaining his behavior in this situation. Never for a minute did I feel that he was motivated by that. Dick was motivated only by power.
Oddly enough, what I admired most about Dick was his ability to fly-fish. He was one of the most beautiful fly fishermen I have ever seen. Honest to God. Dick Cheney would go out on the New Fork River as it flowed through my ranch and toss out these impossibly long fly casts. Watching them snake through the air and then land precisely where he wanted them to go was poetic. He was absolutely an artist with a fly rod.
Apparently, Dick was a lot better at that than he was with a shotgun. But I also think he got a bad rap for shooting his friend in the face. Hell, that sort of thing can happen to goddamn near anyone. Just ask Bobby Weir.
TWENTY-FOUR
FEEL LIKE A STRANGER
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.”
* * *
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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 t
hought 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.
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