07/05/81 Zoo Amphitheatre, Oklahoma City, OK

"Go on, my friend, do anything you choose."

     Dave 

The Dead

     I was blinking back the tears. My new generation had made it okay for a man to express
honest emotion but my redneck boyhood did not allow a man to cry in public.
     Jerry Garcia, bless his fuzzy face, was making love to the neck of his guitar. The fluid
that oozed forth as screaming bended notes was mixing frantically with the carnival tinged
air.
     I was blinking back the tears. I needed to be stoned. A Grateful Dead concert was not a
fit place to be crying but definitely a place for being stoned.
     I had shunned the hawkers working the line outside the concert.
     "Blues?" they had questioned but they had no instruments.
     "Reds?" they had questioned but I saw no Communists.
     "Trip?" they had questioned but they held no tickets.
     Did anyone actually ever buy dope from the crazies in the line outside of a Dead concert?
Where did those guys come from? On which planet did they live? Did they have mothers?
     I was blinking back the tears. I was in mourning for a love that had died, for a marriage
that had failed, for a lawyer who was making too much money off of me.
     Through the haze of my grief my ex-college roommate had proposed the solution to my
problems, his problems (whatever they were), his solution to the meaning of life and to the
questions of the beginning of time.
     His solution was The Dead.
     "The Dead are in concert, Dave. Let's go?"
     "The Dead, yeah, man, The Dead," I said grooving on the innate
existentialism of it all. The Dead.
     I, unlike millions of my brothers from the Sixties, loathed meetings, gatherings of more
than 4 or 5 people, and every pop cultured media event I was supposed to dig because Andy
Warhol or the New York Times said I should.
     I mean, I was an Individual. I even had a March to the Beat Of A Different Drummer
poster on my wall. At least I did until I saw a duplicate of it in the poster section at the K-Mart. I
promptly took mine down. Burned it, I did.
     I stayed home from Woodstock when the whole east coast was hitch hiking to New York.
I left May Day when I saw the crowd in the DC Bus Station. The tear gas in the air may have had
something to do with it, too. If more than five people were in one place I immediately started
looking for narcs.
     So, then, there I was, in an outdoor arena, my paranoia escalating by the second, blinking
back the tears from the ache in my soul, while the Grateful Dead were carrying on their exotic
party of sound right in front of me.
     My ex-roomie reached into his right pant leg and came up with a plastic baggie filled
with what looked to be twisted animal turds.
     "Eat about five pieces of these, Dave. Maybe six."
     My eyes shimmered their gratitude. Appearances can be very deceiving sometimes and I
knew that what I was reaching for was not dried animal excrement but dried Nirvana,
instead.
     Nirvana, in this case, was spelled M..U..S..H..R..O..O..M..S.
Mushrooms. Pscilocybin Amanitas. Food of the Gods.
     "Thank you, Lord," I mumbled, "I will never use your name in vain again."
     The dude on the blanket next to me saw me trying very hard to chew the dried
mushrooms and swallow them down. He offered me a wine skin filled with what I gasped to find
out was tequila. I squirted the tequila down my throat washing down my mouth full of 'shrooms.
The tequila exploded my insides and made me feel very, very warm.
     "Here, you do the rest," I said to the Tequila Man as I offered him the last two pieces of
mushrooms.
     "No, man. You do 'em. You need them more than me."
     He was right. He was also polite.
     Etiquette. The man had dope etiquette.
     One of the things I really hated about the seventies and the Age of Disco was that as dope
expanded into the mainstream of America people forgot the politeness, etiquette and
brotherhood
(sisterhood, too, you libbers) that went along with it.
     Stoners, true stoners, had manners. One should always pass a joint so the next dude in
line can grasp it easily. One should never slobber on a doobie. One should always offer a
burgundy wine when smoking at home. One should never ask for a number (A look is enough
among friends.) One should never, ever share dope with a buddy when there is not enough to
adequately stone the both of you. One person ripped is better than two people almost ripped.
     The Tequila Man had seen the amount of 'shrooms in my baggie, casually estimated my
body mass and deduced that what I had eaten was probably not enough to trip me out and that I
needed what was left to do me in.
     "You need them more than me," he reiterated. A very polite man indeed. I chewed up the
remainder and sloshed a little more tequila to knock them down.
     "God bless you," I said, thanking him.
     A Grateful Dead concert is more than a concert. It is a circus, an orgy of sound, a
Saturnalia of Being.
     Like, wow, man.
     Dead Heads, as so many tee-shirts proclaimed, were the strangest among the strange. The
mythology goes that the Dead Heads were direct descendants of the Diggers. The Diggers were a
group of crazies from Haight-Asbury district of San Francisco who collected clothes and food
for all the zoneheads who migrated to Frisco to find peace and love and music that Time
Magazine said was there. Bless the Diggers. Bless The Dead and bless you, Tiny Tim.
     Mushrooms can take several hours to come on. The Dead play forever when they concert
and there was plenty to do in the meantime.  I watched Dead Dancers.
     Dead Dancers differ from dancers at all other concerts in two distinct ways. The first is
that they are totally uninhibited and unlike the chicks who do a drunken swaying and arm
waving dance on some behemoth's shoulders at a Doobies or Stones concert they dance the
Dance of Creation and Free Expression. They dance the Dance of The Dead. The second
distinction for Dead Dancers is that they dress differently than any other dancers in the known
Universes. Dead Dancers wear feathers, stoles, headbands, bandannas, tie died shirts, beads,
spangles, serapes, holy jeans, leather skirts, bikinis and hats beyond description. Dead Dancers
wear no bras, panties or underwear of any style. As their Dead Dancing heats up they begin
shedding their wrappings and since Garcia and Bob Weir play long enough there are nearly
always Naked Dead Dancers.
     The Dead geared into "Wharf Rat," a particular favorite of mine, and gave Brent an
unusually long solo. Did this really happen? Was it really happening? The Universe was
spiraling out of the scales he was creating. He was such an immense man for the delicacy of the
sound webs he wove.
     Next to me a bikinied girl with stringy dirty blonde hair was tapping her little finger to
the beat as she lay stretched out across an Army blanket. The muscles in the creamy flesh below
her elbow undulated wildly. I stared for what seemed to be at least an hour but could have been
one of those instant forevers. The dance her tiny muscles made across her skin was tantalizingly
erotic. I loved her in that moment and in every moment since. My eyes beheld flesh and I double
D dug it.
     I don't think I was maintaining anymore. Had I been out in the World people would have
been staring and pointing. Momma would have gathered there children close and hurried them
away. Teenaged girls, safe in their Mustangs, would have been laughing as they roared away. I
know they would have been because I have been in the World before when my head was inside
out.
     Among Dead heads, however, I was not at all unusual. As I began my ascent into Plane 9
it was easy picking out those around me who were also taking off. Shroomers were obvious. We
all had wings coming out of our ears. The acid heads had paint brushes for hands and laser eyes
that translated everything into ripples. The potheads oozed warmth and nodded wisely whenever
the trippers among us fell into a puddle or out of a dream.
     Suddenly, some lifetimes later, I looked up to see and hear The Dead doing Merle
Haggard's Momma Tried. When I was younger my father, a devotee of George Jones, Wee
Willie Nelson, and the young Merle Haggard had force fed me country music. Now, so many
years later, Merle was coming back to me.
     I cried.
     This time my tears were from strange and utter joy.
     Bless The Dead.