The Night of the Living Dead

No wonder Dead Heads have lightening bolts through their brains. I'm still trying to pull mine out following Phil Lesh's 70th birthday show at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco a couple of weeks ago. I had never seen the Grateful Dead live, even when Jerry Garcia was alive. I figured it was time to catch two of the surviving members (Lesh and guitarist Bob Weir) before it was time for them to catch that train.

I went with my cousin and friend, Bill. While not a Dead Head, per se, he owns every recording ever made by the Grateful Dead (and all the live recordings of Further, Lesh and Weir's new band). The picture on his Facebook page is a picture of Jerry Garcia. He has a beard. OK, whatever, maybe's he is a Dead Head. But he's a sane one. He and I were probably two of only a handful of party-goes who were sober. Make no mistake, a Dead concert is a party where a band happens to be playing. While I've taken my fair share of acid, and maybe a few other shares as well, it hasn't been since the Carter administration. So the Dead party was the first time in more than three decades I was around that many people stoned on acid. Thousands of people tripping.

The drug Bill and I both like is adrenaline, so we opted to start the party down on the floor near the stage. Armed with our Diet Pepsis, we took position 20 feet from front-row center, except their were no rows, or any distinguishable pattern or order to the crowd. Just many tripping people with enough weed lit up to make Bob Marley cough. One guy, about 15 feet to our left, was toking off a huge bong. We would see fire, then a campfire size cloud of smoke drifted up to mingle with all the other bonfire smoke. After a while the stage was just an opaque outline somewhere in front of us. London has nothing on a Dead concert.

Forty-five minutes into the show, I wanted to ask Bill a question. Minutes passed. Then many minutes. Then I forgot the question. Then I forgot that I wanted to ask a question. Meanwhile, some guy trying to out-Hunter Thompson Hunter Thompson kept swaying in circles. When the arc of the circle ventured backward, Bill would provide a gentle nudge to keep the momentum going. It was like playing with a human tetherball, only in slow motion. Enough. Too much pot doesn't put me in a party mood, it puts me to sleep. Besides, my feet hurt.

After feasting on something called "Chef's Special" of greasy eggroll, rubbery chicken wings and a Chinese cabbage salad that looked like something out of a Louisiana bayou, we headed to the upstairs balcony, strangely licking our lips in delight of the food. If we hadn't left the floor when we did, I'd probably go back for seconds, surely.

The concert was sold out, and no seats in the balcony were available. But Bill was a veteran Dead Head. He had a plan. He led us out into the horseshoe shaped halls surrounding the venue to people watch. Suddenly screams behind us made us dodge for the sidelines as no fewer than six guys were carrying a prone body whose head was lolling around like a bobble-head doll. It was like they were carrying a casket, three on each side, except they were in a hurry. They ran into the medical area staffed by paramedics (So this is what Woodstock was like, I contemplated.) Naturally I followed -- hey I care what Tiger Woods has to say and I still want to find out what happened to that coed's body in Aruba, OK? A security guard asked me if he could help me, and I said yes, and asked if I could get a closer look at the fucked-up guy they just brought in. Escorted back to the halls we climbed up to the second floor to continue our venture down the rabbit hole.

At the end of the horseshoe we began to chat it up with a delightful woman standing guard at the entrance to both an up and a down stairwell. Bill is a big man. I'm talking NFL lineman big, and folks meandering toward the security guard eyed her "Security" T-shirt and radio, then glanced at Bill standing aside her and spun on their heals without bothering to ask. The thing about Bill is he's a Teddy Bear, a big, gruff-talking Italian from Rochester, New York with a heart of gold. Physically though, he can be intimidating. Since our feet still hurt, we took turns using the security guard's chair. Her work definitely became easier since Bill's arrival, and gladly shared her seat.

While Bill sat, I leaned against the wall, Pepsi in hand, and read a newsletter from some outfit called the "Wharf Rats" (a Grateful Dead song). A guy walked up to me and asked if this was where "the meeting" was being held. "What meeting?" I assured him. Then a woman walked up. Same question. Same response but with an edge on it this time. Then a third person. What the hell is this "meeting?" Who the hell meets at a Dead concert? Is there saccharin in this Pepsi? (the smoke inhalation from the floor was still hours away from working its way out of my system). Then I actually had a few minutes to read this newsletter. It seems the Wharf Rats were a bunch of sober Dead Heads. Sober as in AA sober. They have catchy slogans, like "One Show at a Time," and "Another Dopeless Hope Fiend," and "This is Your Brain on Hugs" ... you get the picture. Finally I did too. Sober middle-age guy drinking a Pepsi with the Wharf Rats newsletter in hand. I was being mistaken for the head rat.

Bill broke my haze with a shout of "Hey Chris!!" I glanced up and Chris Robinson, the lead singer of the Black Crows was ambling up the stairwell. He was a friend of the Dead who was doing the lion's share of vocals that night. He flashed a peace sign at Bill, who turned and nodded at me as if to say, "Dude, me and Chris, we're simpatico, man." The stairwell connected the stage downstairs with the back stage upstairs. Kind of a Up Stage where all the food and drink for the band was laid out. Here's what's trippy, even without acid: There were tons of skanky groupies going up and down (no pun intended) the stairwell. For Christ's sake, Phil Lesh just turned 70. Just what, exactly, was the trade off here? Despite my personality being ruled by a morbid fascination with who was currently banging Octomom, my curiosity was overruled by the revulsion at the images of 20-somethings having sex with the band. They may be grateful, but they were also undoubtedly dead in that category. Or they should be.

Finally we heard Phil Lesh announce they were going to take a break. The first set was over. "Get ready," Bill said to me. A mass of tripping drunk humanity flowed out the exits toward the bathrooms. You can't drink that much beer and whiskey and not have to get out of your seat to pee at some point. This was Bill's plan. We hover around like two turkey vultures until swelling bladders force folks to leave their seats, allowing us to swoop down to gorge ourselves on a fresh kill. Pride doesn't belong at a Dead party.

The thing about Dead Heads is they love to dance, this swirling, arms flaying kind of stoned ballet. Comfortably seated, we had a great view of a young hippie chick and her old man dancing in the aisle 20 rows below us. She swayed and spun and reached for the stars burning in her brain. It was a good time, but Bill needed to catch a smoke. This was a delicious irony. I had a good buzz going on just from being under the same dome as 20,000 burning pipes. But there was absolutely no smoking in the auditorium. So out we go to a designated smoking area outside the auditorium on Grant Street. Bill was sucking on his Marlboro (he picked up the habit when he was in the Navy) and we were chatting up Dead facts. This guy, maybe in his mid to late 30s walked up and identified himself as a gay Jewish acid head. I looked at Bill hoping he could connect those dots, but he looked as bewildered as I was. The lad began telling stories about ingesting horse tranquilizers and public nudity. Finally he looked at me (he said I looked like Boris Yeltsin) and asked if this was the corner old gay guys hang out at. Bill happened to be enjoying a long inhale of the calming nicotine and didn't immediately catch what the guy said. Then almost with an audible thunk he understood what Mr. Gay Jewish Acid Head Boy said, and his face froze. Suddenly he turned into Jerry Seinfeld and I George Costanza and blurted out "We're not gay! We're cousins!" (only by marriage, so there was no incest involved)"Not that there's anything wrong with being gay," he mumbled on. Bill is far from being a homophobe. He does not feel threatened by gay men. He is a good soul. It wasn't that our new friend was gay (certainly not because he was Jewish) but we both felt threatened by a guy who shoves PCP up his nose then crashes his car into a Popeye's chicken joint, steals a bucket of chicken then drives off only to abandon both the car and the chicken so he could run around San Francisco naked. Fortunately for him it was San Francisco and no one noticed.

Back in the party we walked up the stairs to the aisle and had to maneuver around Hippy Chick as she continued on whatever merry-go-round she was on. Then it hit us. Armpit. Hairy, smelly armpit. Now personally I don't have a problem with women who chose not to shave their underarms, or opt not to use deodorant. I just don't want to be around them if they've chosen the latter. Opus, my Lab mix, on the other hand loves to be around hippies. We couldn't get up those 20 rows fast enough. The music was good, and Chris Robinson's vocals were beautiful, gospel like.

Then it hit us. Hippie chick's odeur corporelle had wafted up 20 rows of seats, and her arms were still reaching for those stars. Just then another hippie road to our rescue. The guy sitting next to me (he had to be at least 6-foot-seven; his knees were up at his nose) fired up a pipe that easily contained an eighth-ounce of pot (or what I imagine would be an eighth ounce of pot). Smoke replaced armpit in our nostrils, not unwelcome in contrast. Time was lost and I began to wonder what did happen to the Maltese Falcon? Like I said, I get sleepy, and when I looked at my watch and saw that it was 1:30 Saturday morning I nudged Bill and pointed at my watch. He nodded and we both got up and headed down to the aisle. Hippy chick had been dancing from 8 p.m. to 1:30 a.m. and was showing no signs of slowing down. We gulped what air we could and edged past her and safely into the halls before exhaling.

Having a painful left knee from an injury a couple of weeks prior, which was just then healing, I took the stairs carefully, glad I was more or less sober. At the bottom this guy came up to my left, his breath smelling like the inside of a bourbon vat, and told me I was a rookie. That was a microsecond before his foot hit the beer-lathered floor and he took a face-first dive into the swill of more than five hours of slurping Dead Heads. I leaned down to his ear and gently whispered, "rookie."

Then I ran and hid behind Bill.

Alas, I finally notched a Dead concert, eternally grateful I didn't have to take a drug test any time soon.