He had an Exercycle in the corner of the living room with three-tenths of a mile on it and a deep layer of cobwebs. He had more spent stick matches around him than it would have taken to build a model of Chartres Cathedral. We tried to make small talk. It was so small that you couldn’t hear it. This was a dramatic change from the wonderful conversations I’d had with Garcia on many occasions, where we could talk with wild enthusiasm late into the night about any damn thing at all.
Playing conversational basketball with Jerry Garcia was one of the most entertaining sports I had ever engaged in, but there was none of that now. Finally, I blurted out, “You know, sometimes I think I wish you’d just die so we can all mourn you properly and get it out of our system.” I will not attempt to describe the look Jerry gave me as he got up, padded sadly down the hall into his bedroom, closed the door, and put a DO NOT DISTURB sign on it.
With Jerry, it always depended on what cycle he was in. I had watched his weather cycles for years to see if he was in the dark or the light. The sun would be coming out and everything was groovy. Then he would be all the way back down in the darkness. You could always see that coming from a long way off.
One of the few times he really got furious with me was after In the Dark had gotten really big in 1987. I used to put out a little semiannual newsletter, and I wrote an article in it about the irony of the anti-materialist Grateful Dead suddenly being incapable of staying anywhere but in a Four Seasons Hotel when they were on the road.
I walked into the studio on Front Street one day, and this was the closest Garcia ever came to wanting to hit me. He was so angry, and he said, “If it isn’t the author of the celebrated Barlowgram who thinks he can sit in the seat of judgment.” And I said, “It is funny, isn’t it?” He said, “Maybe you think it’s funny. But I think it’s fucking betrayal.” I said, “I try to call them as I see them.” And he said, “If you want to stay around here, maybe you should call them as they are.” And I said, “None so vigorous in their own defense as the justly accused.”
Jerry also pointed out just how much money I had been making by writing lyrics for the Grateful Dead. In his eyes, I was biting the hand that was feeding me. My response to this was that I would be biting the hand that was feeding me if I did not tell the truth. That just made it all even worse.
I turned around and walked out, and then I wrote him a long letter about how I wasn’t going to be intimidated by him or anyone else in the Grateful Dead who thought they could exercise authority over me. Silence fell on the scene, and nothing went on for a long time. When I saw Jerry again, it was as though none of it had ever happened between us.
The last real interaction I had with him was when the Dead were playing two shows at Giants Stadium in June 1995. As it happened, we were all staying at the Four Seasons Hotel, and I was teaching Weir how to Rollerblade. We had skated through the great neo-fascist marble hallways of the hotel on Rollerblades and as we went out through the front door, we found Jerry standing there in the sunlight.
It was the first time I had seen him in the sunlight in I don’t know how long. He was totally white. White as death itself. He was like a Fellini vision, or something out of an Ingmar Bergman film. He radiated this incandescent paleness, and his frailty was overwhelming.
Jerry looked at us and snorted. “If you guys get killed out there, I’m not going to your funeral.” I said, “Oh, I don’t know. I’ve been to funerals with you where we were there for less.” He said, “But I won’t go to yours.” And I said, “Jerry, I’ll go to yours.” He said, “Fine. Do that.” And off Weir and I went into the park, where we had a truly psychedelic experience.
Later that summer I was in Australia in August a few days before Jerry died when an interviewer suddenly said to me, “You know Jerry Garcia, right?” And I said, “Yeah.” And he said, “What’s it like knowing Jerry Garcia?” The question threw me for a loop, and I said, “I don’t know. I mean, the guy and his various manifestations have been so thoroughly embedded in every aspect of my life for so long that I don’t know what it would be like not to know him.”
The day before Jerry died, I had just come back from that trip and I was swimming in my mother’s pool in Salt Lake City. I was totally toasted from jet lag and floating around like a dead body. Suddenly, I started thinking about Garcia and the Dead in this completely mercenary way. I began thinking I was doing well enough now that even if the Grateful Dead went away, I would be all right financially.
Then I thought, “Why would the Grateful Dead go away?” The answer was that Garcia would die, and for me that became a whole different issue. Never mind the Grateful Dead. It was going to be a drag not to have those wonderful conversations with Garcia that were always like the Inner Galactic Olympics of the Mind. And I realized I hadn’t had one of those conversations with him in the past two years, because he had really been down into the heroin thing for that long.
And then at about six o’clock in the morning on August 9, 1995, my mother came in and shook me and said, “Wake up, John Perry. Your life is about to change completely.” She told me that Jerry had died. He was fifty-three years old.
I began thinking about something he had said to me back when there were always all these Hells Angels around the Dead. Jerry’s voltage was so high that the polarity reversal he generated created a lot of infection and heavy weather around him. He could go from being the very embodiment of enlightened affirmation to the darkest, most death-affirming person I had ever encountered. He knew this about himself as well.
In terms of the Hells Angels, I finally said to Jerry, “You know, being a decent human being is tough enough without constantly surrounding yourself with a lot of people who don’t even care whether they are or not.” And he said, “You know, you’re right about that, but good wouldn’t be very much without evil, would it?” Because of the way he’d framed this, it made complete and utter sense to me.
On a good night, what Jerry was always trying to do onstage was become utterly invisible and one with the music and the song and the rest of the universe as well. When Jerry had first started using a synthesizer attachment, he did this guitar solo that sounded just like Miles Davis, as Miles himself had always wanted to play. It was unbelievable, and I came up to Jerry afterward and said, “Man, you could have been a fucking great trumpet player.” And he said, “I am a fucking great trumpet player.”
Jerry could always honor the music in himself, because he saw it as an independent entity. But he was never willing to do that with all the other independent entities within himself. Like the soul that camps out in the body. For Jerry, the body was this thing that had been put on him like an electronic manacle. It was the thing in which he’d been exiled from all the sweetness and the light. For him, it was like being in prison. He always hated his body. He was locked inside it and he treated it accordingly. Just like a prisoner, he put graffiti all over the walls. He broke the toilet. He set the mattress on fire.
It may have been no way to live, but nevertheless, there were many other people who were doing it the exact same way. The other side will always have its way. If you’re going to manifest a lot of light, you also have to pay the bill.
Jerry also always had overwhelming personal charisma. Saint Thomas Aquinas and the original Scholastics defined charisma as unwarranted grace. Unearned, undeserved, completely gratuitous grace. So that was yet another burden he had to carry with him, both onstage and off.
Just as I had promised him, I went to Jerry’s funeral. It was held at a church in Belvedere in Marin County. Jerry’s widow refused to allow Mountain Girl to be there. Some of us thought that was heinous. Indeed, many of us thought that. It was all about who was going to get the money from Jerry’s estate, and at one point during the service I turned to Eileen Law and said, “There hasn’t been this much intrigue in one room since the Borgias.”
Four days after Jerry died, I went to the big memo
rial gathering held for him in Golden Gate Park. I was standing at the front of the crowd when Bob Barsotti, one of Bill Graham’s guys who had worked more Dead shows than I could count, asked me to go up onstage and say something about Jerry.
I told Bob I didn’t want to be up there, but he insisted that I say something. So I walked to the microphone and said, “They asked me to come up and speak and I’ve only got one word to say and the word is love.” And then I turned around and walked off the stage.
It took me a really long time to finally accept that Jerry was gone. Part of the problem was that I had thought about his departure so many times and said, “It’s coming” over and over again to myself that every time I experienced his death in my mind, I developed a little more callus against it.
The callus grew so thick that once Jerry actually died, I could not really experience it because I had developed this incredibly strong defense against it happening. And no matter how hard I tried to strip it away, I could not bring myself to shed a single tear for Jerry Garcia. Not one.
FORTY-ONE
TIMOTHY LEARY’S DEAD
After Tim Leary went public in January 1995 with the news that he had decided to die rather than fight the prostate cancer that was metastasizing rapidly throughout his body, everyone started coming to his house in Los Angeles to party with him. Tim had always had this incredible ability to set up an energy exchange with the field around him, and being surrounded by all these beautiful, joyous young acidheads so reinvigorated him that he began looking like he was in the bloom of health.
One day I said to him, “Tim, if you don’t get on with this dying thing, people are going to say this is another one of your media hoaxes.” He laughed but it was true, and at that point I think he actually began starving himself to death.
Even at the end, Tim was steady and consistent with the path he had chosen to lead. He realized that the very public way he was staging his death was not just a medicine show with a potent purpose but also the greatest theatrical demonstration he could make to address one of the chief pathologies of American culture. He was going to tame dying, which had disappeared into hospices and emergency rooms and was considered a shameful thing to do. As I have said, to die in America was to be a loser, and it was hard to mourn a loser.
Until the very last moment, Tim was the least spiritual person I had ever known. But when God decides to manifest himself in a human being in some major way, he always chooses someone who is completely undeserving of it in the human sense of the term.
Ram Dass and I were both at the house on the day Tim saw his soul for the first time. I had come to Los Angeles to visit Tim about ten days before he died, and Ram Dass just happened to be there as well. Timmy was pretty reduced, but he was still able to go out to clubs with me at night. We were both down at the Bar Marmont at three in the morning, still charming the ladies.
That day in the house, Tim, Ram Dass, and I were sitting at a round table in the garden. Tim was between us. At one point, he put his head down on the table and went to sleep. Ram Dass and I continued a marvelous metaphysical ramble over his head.
Then Tim woke up, sat up abruptly, and looked back and forth at both of us with something new in his eyes. It actually reminded me of what had happened when my father had been dying and was revived. He’d had exactly that same look on his face when he’d said, “John Perry, are you still alive?”
With Tim, it was as if the infinite black hole of anti-Catholic contempt that I had always seen in his eyes had suddenly been filled with spirit. I looked at Ram Dass, and I said, “Did you see that?” And he said, “Yes, I’ve never seen it before.”
This was a really big moment for Tim, because up to this point his whole faith had been in science, and the only immortality he could imagine would be the consequence of some extremely unlikely biological breakthrough that would be achieved in the unimaginable future. Tim had decided a while back that when he died, he would have his head sliced off and cryogenically frozen. This wasn’t something you can wait long after death to do, and so the equipment was already there in his house.
In order to make light of the grisly procedures that all this entailed, Tim’s people had draped a lot of ghoulish frippery on the equipment. That night, we were sitting around the nitrous tank and Timmy said, “Do you suppose that I don’t have to cut my head off and freeze it?” And I said, “Of course not. What are they going to do to you if you don’t? Kill you? Furthermore, I recommend that you don’t, because this great drama you are conducting on domesticating death and restoring it to its proper place in society will be diminished by what the media will do with you having your head frozen. My recommendation is that you skip the whole thing and hope for the best on the other side.”
Tim said, “You’re right. I don’t have to do that, do I?” And I said, “No, you don’t.” Tim said, “So it really doesn’t matter what gets done with my body.” And I said, “No, I don’t think so.”
I think because Tim had actually caught a glimpse of the spirit, he had been given the opportunity to look over the edge and feel some sense of possibility and solace that immortality was there in the old-fashioned way. The next day, when the people from CryoCare, who were an incredible bunch of bastards, came to remove their equipment at Tim’s behest, it was clear that some of them regarded me as his murderer.
At one point, Dan Aykroyd, who was a part owner of the House of Blues on Sunset Boulevard, offered Tim and the rest of us the use of the club for an afternoon and part of the evening. To demonstrate solidarity with Tim, who was by then wheelchair bound, we had all rented wheelchairs so the twenty-five of us could also go there on wheels, thereby causing no lack of consternation.
After that wonderful experience, I was driving Tim and two girls back home in my rented Mustang convertible. A song was blasting from the speakers, and both girls stood up in the back seat and began doing this shoop-shoop thing to the music like a pair of prom queens from hell.
The air was like a negligee, and the music was perfect. People were honking their horns in approval. It was one of those great life-affirming moments, and Timmy put up his hand to give me a high five. As I looked at his hand, I saw these flashing lights in the rearview mirror and I thought, “Oh no, here comes Timothy Leary’s last bust.” Because we were packing. Big-time.
Fully expecting that we’d all be arrested, I pulled over right in front of the Beverly Hills Hotel. This surfer cop with blow-dried hair came over to us from his squad car. Before he had a chance to say anything, I said, “Officer, I know what we were doing was wrong but you see, my friend here is dying and we were just trying to show him a good time.”
Tim looked at the cop and nodded with this sheepish smile on his face like, “Yeah, it’s true. I’ve just been caught at dying.” Never in his life had the cop had someone admit to him that they were dying. He didn’t even know who Tim was. Just an old dying guy. But an honest old dying guy.
The cop said, “I’d be lying if I said that what you guys were doing didn’t look like fun. But just because he’s dying doesn’t mean you girls have to endanger your lives. So sit back down and buckle up your seat belts.”
One of the sweetest things that Tim ever said to me was that when he left this world, the last thing he wanted to see was my face, and I continue to regret that I was not there when he died on May 31, 1996. However, I do have a wonderful video of Tim rising up out of the coma, looking around at a room filled with people who loved him, smiling, and saying, “Why not? Why not? Why not?” And then he lay back down and died.
Since then, I have made it my mission to take certain portions of Tim’s message and incorporate them into my own life by doing what I can with them. I still feel like it’s my job to do the dirty work of being the apostle. In my view, this is important work. It’s all about giving permission by making an example of your own life. That gives permission.
It’s also extremely c
omplicated because much of what Tim’s life consisted of was behavior that I would never want anyone to emulate, least of all me. He was a terrible son, he was a terrible husband, and he was a terrible father. He spread false mythology and propaganda about LSD that to this day I am still working on correcting. And yet, he probably introduced more people to the spiritual dimension than anyone since Jesus Christ.
Someone who didn’t know Tim very well who came to his funeral in Los Angeles said to me, “The way you’re all going on about this guy, you would have thought he had freed the slaves.” And I said, “That’s exactly what he did.”
FORTY-TWO
KENNEDY-NIXON
On November 23, 1996, I appeared at the annual event held to commemorate the anniversary of JFK’s death at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. John Jr. had asked me to explain how politics had changed in the computer age as part of a panel called “Presidential Campaigning from 1960 to 1996: From Televised Debates to the Internet and Beyond.”
Needless to say, I was definitely an oddity at this gathering. As I sat there waiting for the panel to begin, I could not help but wonder what my father, a true cow-shit-on-his-boots, rock-ribbed-Republican Wyoming politician, would have thought about my presence at this event. If my dad had lived long enough to experience virtual reality, he would have thought that this was where the Kennedys had come from.
Other members of the panel were veteran TV newsman Sander Vanocur, who had been one of the questioners at the Kennedy-Nixon debates; Kiki Moore, a former press secretary for Tipper Gore who was now a commentator on CNN; and Lisa McCormack, the publications and online communications director for the Republican National Committee. In other words, I was the token geek.
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