Berkeley, CA 2023
Prior to my April 14 departure to SFO from Bangor, ME, a lot of pressure was building. Looking back, I can point to the November 1st lockdown at school when I was escorted out of my classroom, AR-15 barrel pointed at my chest by a man in tactical gear. It was not a drill, and thank heavens the threat had been only that. In February, our small school was rocked by the subsequent deaths of a student and then a teacher the following week. No one was clear about the circumstances at the time, and the latter of the two remains unclear to this day.
Short on ceremony, we simply plowed ahead. In the case of our departed faculty member, her room was purged within a week, and a new teacher had taken her place. And, of course, March is a very busy month, careening down the calendar like a truck barely hanging on to snowy switchbacks. While I hadn't seen it clearly, on weekends, I'd been seeking oblivion, washing out the senses during those times when I wasn't flooded with work. Mid-month, I'd gone downstate to visit with my ailing mother, and at age 86, she brutally and unceremoniously cut me to the quick. Basically, she saw me as a degenerate like my father, a mannish boy in his 50s on the verge of losing everything. Her perpetual scowl said it all, and that hurt.
Two mornings before my departure, I sauntered into the guidance office to communicate student progress to one of our counselors when I overheard a conversation. Based on the context, the names and tone, I knew something was up. Later, I asked principal Haney what the deal was. "I couldn't help but overhear you talking," I said. "Did something happen to Drew?" He had been a student of mine when I first began working on Mount Desert Island. While it wasn't always easy, I had put a lot of effort into getting this kid through English so that he could graduate. Even though it had been over 10 years, that first group of boys really stuck with me. It was easier to remember them than students from 5 years ago, just prior to the pandemic.
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Staff Sergeant DaGraca. |
"Yeah," Haney said. "Drew died last night." He took a long pause while looking out the window and added, "Took his own life, actually." My stomach dropped, and my head buzzed. I had about 10 or 15 minutes before the start of Freshman World History, and I wandered off into my classroom stunned with tears streaming down my cheeks. Yes, he'd done some dumb teenager shit just prior to graduating, but who hadn't? I'd scolded him at the time, consoled him when a Class A Misdemeanor disqualified him from the Marine Corps, but he found his way into the service. In fact, he served with distinction in the 173rd and 82nd Airborne. Later, as a staff sergeant, he became a teacher, a drill instructor. I hadn't known that.
The next thing I knew, though, I was hailing an Über at drop zone D by the United terminal in San Francisco. It was four am Maine time to California's one, and I asked the driver to stop off somewhere I could buy beer. Dazed and edgy, disoriented, the lights over the Bay and freeway streaked past in smears. Up in the La Loma Park hills of Berkeley, I settled into my new VRBO quarters by two am local. On a balcony poised above the city, I cracked a beer and stared at the boulevards strewn across San Francisco Bay in amazement. It had been a push with the weekly grind and emotional chaos of loss, but I had arrived, glad and self-congratulatory that I had brought my down jacket and winter hat. I saw my breath between each sip.
Later that day, Saturday, I was slow to rise. I hadn't eaten since lunch on Friday, Maine time, and so I indulged myself with breakfast beer. Clocking in at 9% ABV, Sierra Nevada's "Big Little Thing" offers 250 calories per can so that two can make a meal. Fortified, I climbed the Berkeley hills, stopping just shy of Grizzly Peak. The views were stunning. My head was spinning. Hungry. Tired. Feeling battered. I wanted food. What to do? Distances seemed much vaster on foot than they did by map, and there was nothing in the VRBO fridge except for a beer or two.
Down the hill I went, lumbering, lumbering, my tie dyed socks chafing the ball of my left foot, new sneakers breaking us both in. Eventually, gaping at architecture, flora, fauna (I startled a spotted fawn), wandering in an overstimulated daze, I found a food truck on University Ave. and mowed down some excellent carne asada tacos. Muy bien. It was now three or four o'clock in the afternoon, Maine time, and I could feel myself going down. Sleep was stalking me, and I was fighting it.
Next stop, Trader Joe's for some pasta, marinara, spicy chicken meatballs, chicken thighs, bread, butter, eggs, lemons, limes, clementines, apples, cheese, and . . . tequila. For some reason, the huge Cinco de Mayo display and wall of Trader Joe's tequila seemed like a good idea. No gluten. No hops. No allergic reaction, right? I'd already hit the dispensary up for some edibles just off campus, and this would fortify me, I thought. Besides, it's California.
(Anastasio/Marshall)
© Who Is She? Music, BMI
Oh tequila I turn to you like a long lost friend
I want to kiss my Mexican cousin once again
We'll cover every emotion from happiness to sorrow
And the conversations I forget you'll tell me about tomorrow
When the phone calls start, am I in bed or in a hearse?
The things you tell me about myself can't make me feel any worse
Well I'm awful sorry you got pissed
Just have to cross you off the list
Of my true friends...
And tequila's where that starts and where it ends
Unfortunately, the Sierra Nevadas had already robbed me of any logic. Had I thought of this song or been reminded of the full spectrum "emotion from happiness to sorrow," things might have been different. But I'm in control, right? A couple of miles back up the hill to La Loma, sweating and out of breath, I plunked myself down on the porch with a tequila lime on ice. The Yeti travel wine cup made this poor choice seem fashionable, the edibles fogged the bay.
One can easily imagine the rest. It's a blur. Tie dye socks propped up on a chair. A view of the Bay. The sun creeps in and only begins to warm that side of the mountain by four-thirty or five, a late lingering light after the breeze has died down. Western jays and California towhee. Northern mockingbirds, song sparrows, and black phoebes. Hummingbirds streaming through the garden below. Yarrow and all manner of flowers. My eyes feasted on the colors and sounds. It was a solitude I'd longed for, and yet there was that yearning to connect. The number dials.
Late Sunday morning I re-emerged from the apartment shadows to walk, clear my head, move back down the hill, absorb light and air. Vision blurred, memory disrupted, angst in the pit of my gut, I was hungry but couldn't eat. Coffee was sour. Teeth clenched. I was in North Berkeley and then University Ave. Back around Oxford, Shattuck, MLK, Tenth St. It was like a television station with rabbit ears that tune in and tune out. The world seemed shabbier, less polished, frayed. Each grocery cart, each disheveled wanderer I saw, it could be me. My father. Destitute at my own ripe age of 55, saved only by his money, a forever-drunk, 1989, scraped knuckles and knees, coasting on fumes and drowning. How easily we can end up on the street.
The weight of desire leading to destitute desperation, the craving of something missing, the lonely heart hunting some thing that it doesn't have, turning corners, alleys, hunting vanishing points, dodging cars passing, the glare of the sun. . . . I didn't even remember that I'd awoken to 1993 in jail, that just one year prior I'd prayed that my legs would carry me over the Brooklyn Bridge, that I'd awoken on a BQE stoop, stammering. But here I was.
(Barlow/Weir)
© Ice Nine Publishing
By and by, the morning sun will rise,
But the darkness never goes
From some men's eyes.
It strolls the sidewalks and it rolls the streets,
Staking turf, dividing up meat.
The heart felt like a broken Venetian blind pulled down against the bright world, and my feet directed me to another resupply, another mistake, another shot at oblivion, another bad idea, the forgone conclusions of my mother. My father's ruin. And then, like a lens coming back into focus, it's hours later and I'm in the La Loma kitchen making coffee at four in the afternoon. Doing laundry. The oven is on, and chicken thighs are cooking. There is marinara simmering with meatballs, and I'm about to prepare some ravioli, burn the place down or burn myself with boiling water. Panic and calm. There's a drink on the butcher block table. There are footsteps upstairs. The hosts hear everything.
The camera loses focus again, and my friends have arrived. I'm self conscious, clearly breathing out a horrid bender, swollen and battered, broken, drowsy with insomnia. Drunks don't sleep, they slip instead into unconsciousness. It's dark, and I can see the city lights again across the Bay. How long have I been here? Why have I come? What is it that I'm missing? Why . . . the questions reel as I stare at the ceiling, darkness and jet lag, the hour I would normally wake for work on a Monday.
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(I came all the way across the continent to arrive . . . home?) |
Then it's coffee again. A shower. Phil has to head down to San Jose to meet someone on the Google campus. Lynne and Jeremy are coming by. Lynne is the driver dropping Jeremy off so that she and Phil can split. I make eggs. Toast. The construction crew has begun in earnest outside where a tech guy is converting an old elementary school into his luxury home complete with 10 car garage for his Ducati collection; and there will be a swimming pool. My host has briefed me. Earth pounders tamp down gravel, jack hammers, concrete mixers, the gamut. I am the picture of idleness, beside, feeling guilty without time to react. "We'll see you on line," Phil says, "just gotta pop down the Bay for a few hours."
I know how that goes, Bay Area traffic and the usual non-commitment of time, Phil's calling card since we were teens. "Sure," I say, and Jeremy and I are left to scratch our heads. I chow down some of the edibles after coffee and we go on a walking tour of North Berkeley, oddly absent of people. It's a common theme of mine walking in America: Where is everyone? Cars stream past, houses hanging on I-Beam girders lean over impossible hillsides, gorgeous gardens and gates. I take Jeremy down some of the alleyways I found on my hazy rambles, stunned I can remember anything, dying of cold in the heat of the sun.
Looping back through campus, admiring the redwoods and quiet students and simple campus life, after some pizza, Jeremy is serious. "We gotta get on line, dude." I'm whining inside because it's only two o'clock, but what else did I come here for, honestly? Telegraph Ave. isn't the bending telephone poles of Buster Foyt and the Fabulous Furry Freaks, it's all fairly ordinary, really. Not much to see, really. So we shrug off the city and head up to the Greek. A line? At three o'clock? Really? I never even did this for a Dead show, but what am I gonna do? Jeremy wants pole position, and Phil and Lynne should be back momentarily.
We wait. We wait online for hours. We wait online until it starts moving around five or six o'clock, maybe? One step. Two steps. I'm thinking of the Bill Graham line that Deadheads are the only group who would wait in a line to the moon and back and not complain. Must be a Bay Area thing. But we get in, despite the snafus with Ticketmaster wallet v. Ticketmaster app type stuff, here in tech central where no one can get steady service, and we wander over to spots on the wall between two levels in the bowl. "Should we take it?" Jeremy asks. We do, and reserve four.
Numbers painted on 120-year-old concrete are different than seats, but we have jackets to toss down and whatnot. I stand on my spot for a better view and find Jonathan Harris sitting right behind us. What? "Hey, dude!" I have to identify myself because context is curious, and Jon is on it! We chat for quite a while, and I start to realize that we have scored a plum spot indeed. "You might have people bump into you a bit," he says, but this is as close as I've been to the stage at a Phish show in a while. It's a lot of prepositions, and I'm sanguine. We're here.
The funny thing about going through a personal hell and keeping it locked inside is that it never manages to be contained. When Lynne and Phil finally arrived, Lynne kept talking about friends of theirs that they had seen in the airport in Mexico, a dude bringing another dude who was going through a divorce. "Man, that guy was going through DTs so bad he was shaking," Lynne said. Phil said, "Why didn't he just hit the airport bar?" Good question. Guilt. Hell. Personal angst. Who knows? It's all so subjective and internal and idiosyncratic that people either write book-length memoirs or novels or go weekly to a paid therapist or 12-step group or more.
When the band opened, and I was making my way back to my friends through the crowd, the song "The Curtain With" boiling with meaning. "Please me, have no regrets" was a line that had been plaguing me. Why can't I conduct myself in a manner such that I have no regrets about my own self? Anger. Regret. Sadness. Longing. Self-hate. All these emotions surface in me with terrible consequences, and I gazed far past the heads in attendance, far past the band on stage, wondering, gobsmacked, What have I become? Half the audience wasn't born when I started seeing this band, and here I am on the merry-go-round again.
During the song "Halfway to the Moon," I began to regain some fraction of internal composure. This was 2014. This was me and Nancy painting a deck, scraping, sanding, nailing, brushing, rolling, cranking music on a hot afternoon in Maine when NPR had a "first listen" of the new LP Fuego. We played it on repeat, and it seemed like a middle-aged anthem I could relate to. Now, it was an acknowledgement of death, well past 50, we are indeed half the way to the end. Am I making the best of it? Thankfully, Page is forgiving. It was comforting on a day when my own thoughts were not. Anxiety and depression kill that way when all it takes is looking at something from a different light, "if you look at it right."
At set break, a woman like a lightning bolt appeared before me and Jeremy. "I've decided no one is what they seem," Elisabeth said. "Everyone leads a double life," she said. "Yup, that's my theme for this week." When she made eye contact, she pressed in harder, tipping a bit, "Sorry for my partying." I wasn't sorry at all, feeling like a sack of shit for my own lack of control. "I can change your life," she said. When she discovered I was a high school teacher, she added that people are never what you think. Not knowing what I project or even show (an area for improvement), I started to get woozy. So, she knows the bender that I've been on and the guilt that is tearing me to pieces? She knows my weaknesses and failures?
It turned out, she was a Johns Hopkins educator looking to "change people's lives" with an amazing program at the university. I felt like subject A, but it passed, and so did she, back into the crowd. And then, Phil and Lynne returned, and the lights dimmed. What should they play when I'm feeling torn and despairing like Thomas Cole's portrait of manhood in the Voyage of Life, barely hanging on inside, time in the hourglass running out? My Soul. Nothing too complex, the power of this Clifton Chenier song comes in the repetition. "How do I sit and cry / Without a reason, I don't know why / It's my soul, woah it's my soul / I don't why people, woo it's my soul."
At times like these, emotionally distraught, opening little by little as entheogens crack the door to the basement, the repeated phrase of my soul can touch the depths. The despair is airing out, and it's common. There is value in that, knowing that such despairs are not unique to me. Trey knows this. Lived it. The Grateful Dead lived it, too, right here, at the Greek. It was as if my set break friend from the Johns Hopkins Instructional Resource Center had a nose for this despair, too. Without knowing it, she was like Rilke to me, imparting a message about the "Archaic Torso of Apollo," "You must change your life." My Soul.
And though it feels like a transition from the sublime to the ridiculous, Tweezer kicked in. At first glance, it's just the goofiness of absurd lyricism and pranks. The Fishman samples just jarring enough to remind us that this is precisely a song geared toward capturing the unfamiliar. This version, sounding murky and a bit underwater, began to unravel me as the samples melded together like random thoughts unleashed by the shattering of ego regulation. Stimulus pouring in and flowing out at the same rate, uninhibited by the cognitive barriers I have erected. Suddenly, it's off to the races. My flashes of thought reflected in the musical dashes right to left to right again, the sound rolling over the audience like a treadmill inducing release.
Of course, as the improvisation takes shape, there are mutterings of words, hummed passages, barely contained thoughts hissing through dancers' teeth and lips, sounds of feet scraping surface, fog rolling in, trees lit from below. The landscape takes new shape and form. The audience working demons out through dancing, three blind mice following the rambolings of Fishman's kit, funk and no filler. Bass slides into and out of the funk help gin up the dancing machine, and the tension, here, is of extension, no direction, finding a way despite the fog that won't quit rolling in, occluding. This is why I've come. The band hits the refrain, but it is not a reprise. New directions unfold, squeezing more angst out of me.
About half way through, this jam finds a dark, Zeppelin-like space. Our crew was calling for No Quarter. To me, it was as if they had drilled through the first few layers of bedrock and mantle to find my cache of decaying primordial goo. They were going to give it a good stir, too. All the desire and need, the drives to obliterate, it all swirled and boiled and slopped over the edges. It was a slow burn resurrection of items I had never wanted resurrected. Street shadows and broken glass dreams of blister-wandering for fixes to cover over empty spaces that can't be fixed over–stomach full and heart empty.
That's the catharsis of dancing. Combined with the set and setting, the intense and inscrutable emotional pathos of the moment becomes a lesson in self-reflection. I have a long way to go to right my ship on this journey with my soul, but these guys have it Simple. Right. Simply pulling the energy out of the hearts and minds of the audience and self, audience and band self, that many headed hydra hitting on a refrain at one point that musically expresses my despairing ambiguity, my noncommittal commitments, my half-lived life. They've got it simple? Maybe not.
The darker echo chambers of the one-hour jam had squeezed me out like a towel, and the set landed in the Velvet Underground anthem Rock 'n Roll. "It was all right." In the long run, I knew it would be. I'd been here before. Still, there were echoes of some new direction pulling me, some twilight clarity of a dull and rising awareness. During the Tweezer jam, Page's electric key flourishes let me know that everything would be all right, and here too, more reassurance. The end of Simple's nod to the Band's song Chest Fever was not lost on me: we carry the weight.
"Remember to love Keith," my sister had said to me once. I hadn't the foggiest idea of what she meant. More than a decade later, I was beginning to understand. It was starting to make sense. How does one do that, and remain loyal to all, and clear the head and heart to be a good person, a good soul? It sometimes gets very, very cold, and one does a journey like this alone and together. Together in aloneness? The sense of non-sentient beings being part of the collective consciousness, of the tree roots toe tapping, of the curbstones being aware of every sin and misstep, every move on the errant path, was alive and well.
The Miss You and Sand continued the themes for me. Loss in death and never having the proper chance to say goodbye, the sense of religion and self unraveling into self-deception. My Soul drifting like lost time and sand through the fingers, slipping away. "Wait a minute brother, watch what you're doing with your time." Jerry Garcia and Phil Lesh hadn't been too far from my thoughts all weekend as this was a bucket list venue, an opportunity I missed twice in the summers of 1987 and 1989. KPFA, where Lesh was volunteering sixty years prior when he met Garcia, was across from the Trader Joe's, the ghosts of Berkeley's Keystone, lurking.
The effects of such a shake up linger with me. The next day's show opened with Olivia's Pool, and I couldn't sort out which side of the joke I landed on:
(Anastasio/Marshall)
© Who Is She? Music, Inc. (BMI)
The terrible thing about hell
Is that when you're there you can't even tell
As you move through this life you love so
You could be there and not even know
But you say so what I'm doing just fine
The irony is that it's all in your mind
And that is why hell is so vicious and cruel
But you'll just go on an oblivious fool
Was I more like the narrator or the target of the sneer? All in the mind. Breathe for a change. Breathe. In and out. It's just a chest fever, all in your mind, let it go. What do we expect? Why expect so much of our own selves that we can never fulfill our own expectations? Building all the energy I could muster, day two's Seven Below brought me to the cool forests of Maine, the quiet hikes and paddles and health I'd always dreamed of, and yet I had to throw bombs in my own way, on my own life path, even though "I'm already there."
You're already there. Stay. Get back home where you belong / And don't you run off no more. Good to know you got shoes to wear when you find the floor, / Why hold out for more?
But I have a few more, just a few more to catch this summer ("until I do it again").
