I also remember when this site had content.

What do you remember?

Weekend schmeekend, I have been whacked out of my gourd on percocet for like 4 days now, so it doesn’t matter what day of the week it is. And no, before all you heads who think I just stumbled into a scrip and am taking a holiday from reality rush to judge me (god damn I hate that – will you guys please stop that), I must state unequivocally that there is medical need. Seems one of my choppers went horribly south last week. Some little infective agent snuck under a crown and started a pain party in my jaw. So I, with great trembling of spirit, dialed my dentist’s digits.

Ah, my dentist. I chose him a while back as he offered this new thing called “sedation dentistry”. Seeing as I am not a huge fan of the whole dentist experience, the word sedation seduced me in ways that I could not resist. I could not really afford it at the time, but my fears played skeeball with my financial reasoning and off I went. Now sedation dentistry involves pills, not anesthesia. I believe the pills are called “halcyon”, but I am not sure. One wakes up, takes a pill every hour until one is blissfully catatonic in the chair of despair. This is why you need a ride to and from, which I had obtained. Of course, owing to my terror, I had also instructed the surgeon to give me nitrous, novacaine… basically everything he had on hand. This was a mistake.

I awoke in my house some six hours later, a bit sore and definitely confused. But I had had the work that needed to be done done, so I figured all is well. Well, all was well until I went in to the dentist’s office a couple of days later to arrange for payment, where I was met with a chorus of barely restrained laughter by the reception staff. Upon inquiring “what the fuck?” in so many words, the truth came out. Apparently somewhere between the third halcyon pill and the nitrous I some how morphed into a fucking rock star who simply could not be kept in his chair. When left alone, my repeated tendency was to wander the halls shouting “You call this a party! For $2500 I could throw a better party than this!” and such things. Sigh.

To make matters worse, my ride decided to stop at Integral Yoga on the way home to fetch me some sort of holistic healing mumbo jumbo that she was always on about. This was a profound error in judgement on her part. I was told to wait in the car, which of course I did not. So, with my rockstar persona still in full effect, but with the added bonus of blood streaming from bits of gauze in my mouth, I entered the ashram-mart and well… lets just say that I tested their mellow. I still feel the urge to be extra polite in that joint. Jesus beezus. But where was I? Ah yes…

So I have a toothache, and I called my dentist and guess what? He is on vacation for a week! So I hunt the intertubes for a dentists, and after this barren board came up with absolutely zero help, I decided to pick the one closest to my house on google maps. This proved to be interesting. I called and they saw me that afternoon! Cool huh? So I scoobied on down to the joint, filled out my paperwork and as I did I started to notice something. The receptionist was a generic receptionist, all office and sticky paddy and whatnot. But behind her I saw one of the hygienists. God damn! She was like a swimsuit model or something, all tall and blond and radiant. And of course, flawless teeth. I took note as my gender demands that I do, and then went back to ticking off boxes of horrid maladies that I do not have. And then I saw her again… but wait, it wasn’t her! It was another totally slamming blonde marching around in a lab coat. By the end of my paperwork and xray, I had counted at least four unbelievably beautiful women manning the joint – all generically so, but en masse, quite the phenomena.

At last it was time to meet my new dentist, who at this point unsurprisingly, was a young man that looked like he walked straight off the set of a soap opera… chiseled jaw, perfectly groomed and of course teeth that looked like they were back lit by halogen lamps. What the hell is this place? Stepford dentistry? I sat there musing the fact that here I was in a brand new office park, the only tenant being the dentist – and perhaps a back room where they were genetically breeding the staff, when Doctor Mandible Von Torso gave me my options. We could save your tooth, but it will run about $3K, and it might not work. Now with a kid in college, and another about to drive up my car insurance tab, $3K, well, it isn’t in the cards – be they visa or master. How much for the straight yank, frank? Bout $150. Done deal. Body parts are cheap, ya know?

So then Dr. Van Torso has to double check his prognosis with “The Main Dentist”, who turns out to be the guy whose name is on the sign. I found this odd, but whatever. Then Von Torso says to me This is gonna be great, did you know you are my second patient. Don’t worry though, I have done plenty of residential work at UVa, and a lot of extractions in prison!” Yeah. Maybe, just maybe you should keep that little tidbit to your self. Lord. I asked about the availability of Nitrous, which I personally love, and was told that they didn’t believe in it? Come again? I assure you its real… you can buy it. No. They don’t use it. What if I bring my own? No dice. So to allay my phobic reaction to all things dental I am, you guessed it, going on the halcyon ride again. God help us all. Especially this time, when I will be in a joint that actually looks look the back stage at a rock concert, what with all the hotties running around and the psychedelic paintings on the wall.

As a footnote, on Saturday, I received a handwritten note from Dr. Von Torso thanking me for, and I quote, “having faith in him”. Really? Really? I don’t even know where to start with that one. I want science and drugs, not faith. But it seems faith is the scrip im getting…

So tomorrow, when you are just waking up, or maybe enjoying your mint-half-cap-skim-venti-mocha-wacko-cino with foam on the side, say a little prayer for yo. He’s gonna need it. And if you want to stop by midday and draw penises on my face, I am pretty sure I will be powerless to stop it. Should be a wild ride, and who knows? I could end up looking like Brad Pitt! Yeah, yeah I know… but as long as I am having faith and all that. Peace.

So yesterday at one in the afternoon, zipping along the 250 bypass just prior to, fittingly, the Barracks road off ramp, I hit a 150 lb black bear at 55 miles per hour. I didn’t even have a chance to break. I knocked the poor beast probably eighty feet, went into a good long fishtail skid amidst airbag smoke and confusion. I managed to get over to the side of the road about ten feet from whee the bear ended up. And there we were. The bear was still alive, but clearly fucked up bad. I felt HORRIBLE. I have been waiting to see a bear since I moved to Virginia, just not this close. So what to do? Well I didn’t know if the bear was just stunned or what, but it kept trying to get to its feet. So I went over to the side of the road and tried to get oncoming traffic to slow down and/or move over to the fast lane. I was also waving my arms like mad trying to get someone to stop and let me use their cell phone. A good five minutes passed. Probably a hundred cars passed. No one slowed . No one stopped… the bear was making these horrific noises and flailing about. Finally this old man stopped in a tiny car, handed me his cell without asking anything and proceeded to try to get traffic to slow down while I dialed 911. I know, I know, I should have a cell phone to call help. But I have always preferred calling for help the old fashioned way… by flapping my arms and yelling. I guess that doen’t work so well anymore.

Another five minutes, the bear is still wailing and flailing, and here comes the fire truck. Fire men pull up and hop up on their truck on the bumpers and shit, all looking all around. Im thinking what the hell, and I ask them as much. They say that maybe momma bear is probably around and pissed. I am thinking, if there is a reason for three burly firemen in big ass outfits to be up on a truck, then maybe you guys could, oh I don’t know, invite me and this old guy up on the truck? I told them I’d been there a while and hadn’t seen any signs of momma (as if I had even really considered that being mauled by momma was an additional option in this cavalcade of tragedy). So they got down an started putting up traffic cones.

Then the Ablemarle PD shows up. Nice guy. Heavily armed. Lots of equipment. And after a brief overview I start to kind of ask him if he might “put the bear down”. It was making the most awful sounds. He looked at me and told me that “this gun wouldn’t kill that bear”. Now Im no gun fetishist, but Im pretty sure that a 9mm would kill the already mortally wounded animal. And if it really wouldn’t, then Im pretty sure the shotgun in the trunk would. But what do I know? I figured he was avoiding some sort of weapons discharge paperwork. Won’t someone think of the paperwork!

Then a landscaping crew showed up, decked out in hunting cammo and such. They started to tell tales of bears they’ve killed hunting and habits of black bears and on and on. At this point the bear is trying to flop itself down the embankment. I can’t stand to listen to its cries anymore and I start to walk up the road to check the place of impact, maybe find my hood ornament, and also just to put some distance on the whole circus of death. I also didn’t wanna be right there if it got ‘put down’.

That is when two animal control jeeps pulled up from opposite directions. One guy pulls up on the medium and wanders down into the “woods” to deal with the bear. But the other woman pulls over way back up the road, where I am. We ended up walking back towards the circus that was ensuing by my broken car. I casually mentioned that the last thing I expected to pop out of the bushes behind a shopping mall was a bear. She said that bears use this part of the bypass to cross “all the time” and that it must be part of their “migration route”. Again, Im no animal behaviorist, but Im not sure if bears do ‘migrate’ per say. And even if they did, and this stretch of 250 was some sort of orsine artery (which I have driven four times every day nearly every day, for six years, miraculously missing the flocks of bears crossing the road) don’tcha think you’d put some sort of ‘bear crossing’ sign, or some such? I am pretty sure that this woman had just seen march of the penguins the night before or something. All the time. Migration. Yep. Sounds good.

As we then passed my beloved, crumpled honda she stopped looked at it and said ” I thought these cars were supposed to be safe.” Safe? Safe for what? I just hit a 150 lb animal at 55mph and Im here talking with you about it. I loved that car and it had done its job, and here “March of the Bear Cubs” was casting posthumous aspersions. Oh the humanity.

Well the bear finally died on its own, with one last painful moan and then it was paperwork time for everyone. The clipboards were brandished, the numbers jotted, the boxes ticked – heck, the cop who was drawing out the accident diagram even had a litle stencil for animals, which he carefully etched onto the front of the little car diagram. It looked kind of like a tapir riding a golfcart. I asked if he had different stencils for different critters, but no, he said, he didn’t. Damn budget cuts, I thought.

So in this flourish of proto-beauracracy the landscapers came over and were chatting with me, all casual like. ‘I reckon’ this and ‘I can tell you what’ that. Then one finally asked “so… you want that” casually gesturing towards the dead bear, as if it were the last portion of mashed potatoes. I wasn’t sure if I understood him correctly. I glanced at the officer who volunteered that, as the driver, I had “the first rights to the carcass”. First rights to the carcass? You know, if they have made up rules about this, then that can only mean that there have, in the past, been fights over such things. “You may have knocked that bunny into the fast lane, but Im pretty sure it was my grill that killed him.” Tune in next week on RoadKill Court”. Carcass rights, eh? Well at least I know I have them should I ever hit something that I would really treasure. And what exactly did anyone there think I was going to do with the carcass anyway? I had no more car. Was I to sling it over my shoulder in the 100 degree weather and mosey off down the bypass into the horizon like the end of some western feel good movie? Yes, I said. I waive my rights to the carcass. You can have the bear. May has well have been early christmas as they tossed on the back of their trailer and drove off, thanking me. Upon reflection I have wondered what their intentions were. Food? Decorations? One of my coworkers has since told me that I could have sold the “gall bladder to the chinese for thousands”. Oh yeah? And how exactly does that work – ebay? “Winning bidder pays shipping and provides removal of the gall bladder?” Whatever.

So then it was done. I caught a ride with the sixty year old tow truck guy with profound psoriasis who proceeded to point out every female human that we passed with some qualitative observations (mmm look at those nice thick legs!). In between the rounds of pornographic pageant judging he told me that yes, bears are something, but when you’re driving what you really got to look out for is turkies. Turkies? Yes. Turkies. “They’ll come through the windshield and really fuck you up, fuck you up bad”. So I guess now when my post traumatic stress disorder abates slightly I will, while driving, be greeted by phantom suicide turkies popping into my peripheral vision. I tell you one thing, next thanksgiving, Im not leaving the fucking house.

So here I sit, waiting to see if my car is indeed totalled officially, wading through paperwork, and wondering if I will ever pull myself out of debt. I had just paid it off and just changed the oil! I am trying to shake the thought that, if there is a god, that somewhere along my life’s path I must have done something so terribly wrong that now he is throwing bears at my car. It has come to that, has it? I can’t for the life of me figure what my transgression might be, but believe me, if I do, I’ll stop. Please, just no more flinging wildlife. And by the time I finally figure that out, maybe all my coworkers will have stopped calling me “Grizzly Adams”.

So after living in two feet of frozen matter for months, the weather turned near 80 and my fridge had gasped its last gasp. It was sad, but I knew what I had to do. Head to sears, or lowes, neither of which gave me a warm fuzzy as having dealt with both has nearly put me in the fifth floor of the old hospital on several occasions. Damned if I do, damned if I don’t, so I went with lowes as they have a free delivery, free haul away policy. So tuesday after work, I headed up the ribbon of hurt that is 29 north, pulled into the skirt of the big box and strode tentatively, yet resolutely to the appliance section.

It was immediately apparent that 90% of the fridges were out of my league in both price and size, so I asked the red vested kiosk attendant to please direct me to the bargain aisle. Basically, my choices were three, all around 4-500 ducats. I opted for a non descript white fridgedaire. When dealing with the semi geriatric attendant, I had mentioned that my previous fridge had had an ice maker, and was thus hooked to a water in in my house. My new ghetto cold box had no such luxury. “Will this be a problem?” I enquired, even though somewhere in my soul I must have known this to be a foregone conclusion. “No, not at all.” Fine people, I knew this was not true, i did, I really did, but I was so bloated and emotional from having my financial period so early this month… well I guess I just wanted to believe. An irrational choice, to be sure, but I made it.

Why irrational you may well ask. Well, lets just say Lowes has had me pitch three opportunities to gain my customer satisfaction and had swung wildly at each. Three strikes, they should be out, yeah? Yet there I was, tossing yet another softball across the plate. Oh and what strikes they were!

The first came when I needed to re-carpet the rental unit upstairs. Now the upstairs has a very peculiar geometry to it, and I had dutifully mapped the whole bastard out on graph paper. I had worked out a way to use the minimal amount of carpet to cover the entire two rooms scheduled for thick, sound muffling berber goodness. This proved to be quite the conundrum for the crack team of carpet layers that were sent to do the deed. I was at work when I got the call from the carpet guys which distilled down to the following: “There are two ways we can put this carpet in. One way will have enough to cover the area, the other will not work. Which way do you want us to do it?” I pause to let that sink in. Ok so that would not be so bad really, I mean perhaps we all cant be the sharpest staple in the staple gun, no worries, but the thing that irked me is that since the “correct” layout was not specified on the work order, they made me come all the way home and “sign off” on the method it was going go in. Sigh. I was irked, but I was stuck, so I did it.

Strike two was minor, but still a bit breathtaking in its lack of foresight. I had purchased a gas range for the upstairs and again, a contractor from lowes came out to install it. They got the cooking beast up the narrow stairs without significant drywall damage, for which they are to be commended, however, they neglected to bring neither any significant tools, nor any way to create fire. Gas range installation. No fire. No wrench. I provided them with such with a deep sigh. There haven’t been any major explosions hence, but still.

Strike three was simply amazing. As part of the upstairs remodel, I wanted to install a new ceiling fan. I wanted new ceiling fans downstairs in my joint as well so my ill thought out, yet at the time reasonable plan was to hire an expert, watch him do the installation upstairs and replicate his skill myself downstairs. Ah but the best laid plans of mice and men, etc. The installer arrived in a quarter ton tool truck (the irony of which will become apparent shortly) with my boxed fan. I took him upstairs and showed him the spot of the old fan. He got his ladder and go to work while I scrutinized his every move, attempting to commit it to memory. He pulled the blades off, then pulled the shroud and then let out an audible exasperated sigh. I gave him a quizzical glance, and he sighed again and said simply “Bolts.” “Bolts?” I replied. “Yeah, bolts.” Seems mister quarter ton dually tool truck guy had only brought a cordless drill with screwdriver nibs. Whatever that behemoth vehicle contained in its steel stomachs, it was not something that could remove a typical half inch bolt. It was with the rare mixture of amusement, sorrow and frustration that I went downstairs and once again provided my tools to a lowely contractor. But this strike did not end there… As I walked past the stairs I passed the circuit breakers and it occurred to me that the juice was still on, so when I arrived at the scene of the tomfoolery masquerading as installation, I asked the guy if he wanted me to cut the power to the upstairs. He merely looked at me as if I had an extra chromosome and said, and I quote: “Now how am I supposed to know which is the hot wire if the power is out?” While I did not know the answer to this at the time, I was fairly certain there was a way. Still, I figured it was best to let Mr. Tool Time have his way. I had long since given up learning anything of value from this man and headed downstairs. About the time I reached the landing, I heard an audible POP! followed immediately by a clatter, then a house shaking THUMP. I know what you are thinking and you are right. Our genius had found the hot wire the hard way. He had shocked himself good and fallen off the ladder. After checking to see if he was alive, I returned downstairs. On the way, I flipped the circuit breaker anyway. I wanted a lovely fan, not some burned up dead guy in overalls. Turns out the guy was a cabinet maker and his truck was full of saws and shit. Go figure.

So, my fine fellows, you can see the anxiety that this fridge dilemma caused your humble narrator. I must confess to considering pouring myself a nice big bowl of benzodiazapenes prior to embarking on this endeavor, but refrained. I paid for the fridge and arranged for delivery. Red vesty dude said 9am the next day. Excellent thought I, naively. At nine I got a call saying it would be the classic “between 12 and 4″. At 4:00, it became 5:00. At 5 it became “no later than 6″ and finally at 6:45, a budget rent a truck shows up with my cold making box. And then the fun began! The men came in and immediately keyed in on the 1/4 copper water line, which they said they could do nothing about. This of course meant that they could neither disconnect nor let alone remove my old fridge. Seeing as I had all the food that had not yet perished strewn about my kitchen, I made the point that installation today was mandatory.They suggested I install the new fridge in the (even smaller) laundry room temporarily, which for various reasons I found unacceptable. I told them to just install the fridge in the kitchen and I would deal with capping the water line myself. Of course bringing in the new fridge required disassembling two doors, and that required the borrowing of my tools once again. Said tool use ended up injuring one of the men, who spilled his blood all over my floor in pursuit of his noble cause. This of course lead to me providing basic first aid in the form of bandaids, butterflies and neosporin. At long last, the new fridge sprang to life.

So then it was eight o’clock, and I sat amongst melting frozen things, blood, dust and an array of tools considering the layout of my new cooking area, which for the time being is replete with two giant refrigerators. I guess for a while I could brag I have a side by side refrigerator, but really, that more literal than most people would understand. I have considered calling Lowes and demanding that they send out a plumber to cap my line gratis, but then I considered how that probably end up. They would probably send out someone who specializes in roofing and before you know it my corner of belmont would be underwater. I guess Im gonna try and figure it out on my own this weekend as the odds are at least as good as the professionals at Lowes, but if you don’t hear from me for a while it is because I have some how managed to drown myself in my kitchen. Wish me luck!

As evidence of this, I offer my very first step on the path to personal sexual self discovery, which, like many, was masturbation. I was about twelve, laying in my bed, absentmindedly scratching a primal itch when something magical happened – my penis erupted with a mystery substance, which I only noticed after the waves of seretonin and dopamine had cleared my shuddering brain. Amazing, this. And being twelve, and largely ignorant, I came to the only conclusion one could – that this phenomena could only happen at nine o’clock at night. I had stumbled upon the magic hour, and oh how I could not wait for bed time the following night! Of course, at nine the following night, it worked again and thus my theory was proven. And so I was born as a sexual being, taking my first steps in a bizarrely misguided yet harmless direction. And so it went.

I was fourteen and her name was Cathy Page. She was a 16 year old half phillapina catholic school girl who lived in the neighborhood, and oh man… oh MAN did she get my motor running. In hind sight, red flags were everywhere, but the lust of a 14 year old boy can blind one such that it could make Ray Charles look like a sharpshooter. Her mother was a Philapina woman who had married an white Army guy, who had then promptly left her in single motherhood. This lead to a catholic post traumatic race and garment based over protection of her daughter that bordered on pathological. I, being a young punk rocker, always wore a bunch of surplus army stuff that I had modified to flaunt my budding ideology. This attire, and my courtship of her daughter developed in her a nervous tic, as if she were holding back some sort of PTSD infused venom that could explode at any minute. Still she was polite enough, though, and I returned the favor out of pure fear.

Being both from single mothers who worked 9-5, me and cathy always had a couple hours afterschool in which we were semi unattended. I say semi unattended because there dwelt at Cathy’s house an individual named “auntie”. Auntie was a severely mentally disabled woman who would wander the house in her muumuu making strange guttural noises and obsessing over the availability of breakfast cereal. It was fairly easy to lock auntie out of Cathy’s room, though the noises were somewhat distracting. We would be making out on Cathy’s bed when from behind the wall would come a ‘Muaaaaah! Cheerios! Cheerios!” Small obstacle though, cause I was making out with Cathy Page. Auntie could have set off a bomb and I wouldn’t have blinked.

It was Cathy’s idea to “go all the way”. I believed she had done so already, but I sure as hell hadn’t. I found the idea compelling, in an “oh jesus christ I am the luckiest kid alive” type manner. We planned to do it just as soon as I could get some condoms. Ah., but my friends, this was the time before the plague, before condoms were in bowls at restaurants and in classrooms and every damn place imaginable. No, no. One had to go to the drug store and ask the pharmacist! Oh yes. I lurked in many a Walgreens the next couple days, looking for a non judgmental looking male pharmacist who had at the moment not a customer in sight. My moment came, and I made the deal. It was on!

So it was time, and as we lay naked in her bed in the afternoon, I suddenly came… to the realization that I had no idea what I was doing. Like so many other times in my life though, I took a deep breath and took the plunge. I could go on to describe that first feeling that has come to define some of my best and worst decisions in life, but it is not germane, and I only have seven minutes, which as it turns out was longer than I lasted that dafternoon. Succinctly, I came. As it turns out Cathy, like so many of you mysterious humans of the female persuasion, had only one way that she could come. Seriously, what is it with you folk and your special secret techniques? Jesus. She would extricate my semi hard wet penis and gyrate upon it. I knowing nothing, assumed this was normal protocol for intercourse, (and carry that misconception all the way to college) and seeing a the sensation was not entirely unpleasant, I lay back and enjoyed Cathy’s moans and groans as they mingled with the far away cries requesting Captain Crunch. Life was weird, but good.

Well, good, that is until I heard a new sound, a scary sound – the sound of the big deadbolt on the front door clicking over. This could only mean one thing, Momma was home early. General panic ensued. I was trapped, and was forced to slip into Action Hero mode. I did the only sensible thing and leapt, stark naked out the back second story window into the back yard. It was a good five minutes before Cathy was able to sneak back to her room and throw me out my clothes… well most of them anyway. She had neglected to toss me my shoes and socks.

Without a way to contact her I found my self on the horns of a dilemma. I got dressed, snuck out the alley between the houses, across the street to the laundromat and called her house on the pay phone. It was my intention to call and ask if she could toss my shoes out the window, which she did. What I hadn’t considered though was that the door to the alley had locked behind me. Now my shoes were in the back yard, I was unshod in a cheesy laundromat, and cathy was inside trying to explain why she was taking a nap in the middle of the afternoon. Ah young love!

My friends, I had no choice but to steel my resolve, summon my most powerful jedi powers, and march straight up to her door shoeless. I knocked and was greeted by Momma. “Hello Mrs. Page, is Cathy home?” I said trying with all my might to create the most magnetic eye contact ever conceived, anything, anything to keep her from looking down. Fortunately for me, either the powers of fate, or perhaps my freshly died pink and black hair, allowed me to pull this off, and I was granted access without a hitch. I subtly retained my shoes and spent the rest of the afternoon being the polite innocent young suitor that any Momma would like.

I have since read many books on human sexuality, and to this day I have never found a chapter on “Naked and Airborne”. If you have any suggestions, just let me know.

Financial districts have a very distinct caste system, and of all the castes, messenger is the absolute lowest. It didn’t take long to realize this. Drivers on the road hated you for weaving in and out of traffic and generally causing a vehicular ruckus. Office building folks hated you because by and large most messengers look like they are extras from the movie road warrior. One fellow I met looked rather normal. He had a baseball hat with longish hair coming out of it. Thing was, his head was shaved shiny all around the top, right where the rim of the hat began. His thing was that every time he would make a delivery, as he was leaving, he would tip his hat to the receptionist and wish her a nice day, leaving always a rather stunned expression in his wake. He was also known to write obtuse messages on his dome from time to time. The sheer creativity expressed in the diversity of shenannigans lead me to believe that this might be a culture in which I could thrive. But it was a closed culture, and I needed I guide to show me the underside of these invisible people. That person turned out to be Mike Mowhawk. He was named such because well, his name was mike and he had a bright blue mowhawk. We hit it off immediately. And slowly over time, he revealed many secrets of the downtown pariah.

Since most of the messengers lived in squats and such, most of them had no bank accounts, so being paid by check presented a problem. Mike showed me the Korean liquor store that almost all the messengers went to cash their checks on payday. Payday was once a week, and so this little hole in the wall turned into quite the circus every seven days. Now there are many Korean and Vietnamese liquor stores in SF, who will bend all sorts of rules so I always wondered why this one was the chosen one for nearly all the vagrant messengers. Once I had put some time in, and folks figured I “was ok”, I was allowed to find out why. A half block down from this particular store was a large sheet metal fence. The fence could be peeled back giving enough room for a person and a bike. Behind the fence was a large empty lot surrounded by tall windowless buildings on the three other sides. This was messenger party town, and every payday, flush with the cash for their vice of choice, the messengers would party down. I was young, but still I thought I had seen a few things in my time, but this… this was something else. I can remember just staring, soaking it all in, this hidden world that I had somehow found my way into. It left an impression.

Now just like that fellow with the baseball cap and the semi shaved head, I began to learn that most everyone had a “thing”. For some, like Mike, it was his bright blue hair do. For others it was more complex games – like taking a huge hit of weed right before entering a building and elevator and trying to hold it in until no smoke came out. Most of the larger buildings had separate elevators for pond scum like us, so it wasnt that big a deal, but did hear tales of messengers pulling it off in the main lobby elevators as well. These stories were carried like trophies, with everyone trying to out crazy the others. Keying cars while in motion. Throwing AA batteries at cars that cut you off or curse you. Now I was young, and not up to any of these potentially litigous antics, but still… I wanted a “thing” of my own. A game I could play throughout the day, something that amused me.

It started accidentally. Every receptionist must sign for a received or picked up package. I would then have to make my own initials on the form. Once I had a woman sign, and then found myself without a pen. I asked to borrow hers, made my initials and then unthinkingly left with her pen. I didn’t even realize it until I was out of the building. Thing was, it was a really nice pen – Parker medium ballpoint black, if memory serves. As I clicked the pen, it clicked in my head, for reasons that make no sense at all. I would try to see how many pens I could get a day. Absurd? Yes. But mostly harmless, and it gave me something to think about whilst dueling with the three mortal enemies of all bicyclists: rail car tracks, wet bald, and drivers that have no idea you are there. I had found my zen by collecting pens.

And I was good at it too, maybe 10-20 a day, all shapes, sizes and colors. I would sometimes pass Mike and he would shout “How many?” as a greeting. I would always reply “Six!”, or wherever I was in my count, as a response. I kept them in a big box at home for reasons that were entirely unclear to me. I mean, this ink armada was way beyond what an average person could use in a lifetime. Still, I got this odd sense of satisfaction out of that box of ill gotten writing implements. Was it the minor transgression? Was it a developing obsession? Is this how the concept of “hobbies” came to be a part of the human mental landscape? A minor amusement slowly creeps into the grey area bordering the realm of sanity? How many other aspects of my life have yet and since followed this slow winding path from pass-time to albatross?

As the box filled up, I began to worry. Its as if I could see the writing on the wall in a thousand different color inks. I could see myself sitting in that back lot with my head shaved into a reverse hare krishna, mumbling incoherencies and non-sequetors between gulps from my Mad Dog 20/20, celebrating yet another meager payday. But I had found some friends, outcast and odd though they may have been, and had carved out my own peculiar little identity as the guy you went to if you ever needed a pen. I was the pen kid, and god knows why, I kinda liked it.

I still had three weeks before I was to return to Santa Barbara for my second year of college, so I knew this mental mobius strip of mental hopscotch had a punctuation mark. This was a fact I never divulged to my fellow riders… I wanted to be the pen kid, not the college boy. But my box was nearly full, and when I considered starting a second – I wondered if I would even make it three weeks. I was addicted to the thrill of riding fast through the streets. I was enamored of the underdog access that being an accepted member of the pariah class afforded. And I liked stealing pens. My friends, I was at a crossroads.

And I was literally at a crossroads, 5th and Market, I believe, when my path was decided. The radios are set up so everyone can hear everyone else. This allows for the en route transfer of documents from messenger to messenger, and we were constantly handing things off. I was on a corner, waiting to meet another messenger to pick up some archetecht blueprint something or others, so I was monitoring my radio. On it, Mike was confirming a pick up and heading out for a delivery. Mid-sentence there was a horrible crashing screaching sound, and then total silence. The dispatcher then asked Mike what the hell was that but got no response. And again. No response. A little while later, I found that my friend Mike had been hit and crushed by a muni bus and killed. I had quite literally just heard someone, someone I knew, die on the air. It was the jolt that shook me from my obsession. It was payday, and I went and turned in my radio and id, collected my last check and never looked back. I never even went to the back lot payday party. My career, sanity lay elsewhere.

And to this day, if I find myself in possession of a pen that is unfamiliar, I often imagine Mike up there somewhere with a bright blue halo saying “Only one? Weak!”

Five Dollar Poem

So Im standing on the loading dock at work
just watching all the little circles
form in the big puddle in front of me
feeling just as grey as the skies above
thinking about all the little battles I have to wage
some asked for, others not.

Just a bad luck stretch for me,
I guess
and I shrug in the small moment of self pity
usually reserved for four a.m.

And I turn to return to my cube and I see
on the ground
crumpled in a receipt
a five dollar bill.

And I stare at its obviousness,
its “value”,
its familiarity,
with the sort of stunned disbelief one has when finding paper currency.

“Perhaps my luck has turned around”,
i think to myself
as I stoop to pick it up
and as I un-crumple it
I glance at the receipt…

“Harris Teeter: Salad. $4.86″.

My lunch yesterday.

Belmont Yo’s bear story

Donk’s Emu story

So after my party, the cake had been eaten. And after a week, the new toys had been played with and were gone in their newness, but my father’s flu did not go away, rather, it had grown quite worse. Many trips to the doctor, and a few trips down misdirected medical avenues later, he finally had his firm diagnosis: cancer of the bile duct. He was hospitalized for exploratory surgery. Trips to the hospital were surreal for a child my age, and I don’t remember much. I remember playing pool with relatives. I remember the shock of seeing him with all those tubes and machines. I remember the grave concern and gathering of family when it came to be the day of his surgery. I remember laying my head in my grandmother’s lap for what seemed an eternity in the cold steel waiting room. I remember my mother attacking the poor doctor physically when he gave us all the bad news: the cancer had gone too far, and the prognosis was grim. There were things that they could try, but we shouldn’t hold out much hope.

And so the medical staff tried those things, and so did my family. In my father’s mother’s case, this included lutheran priests, which my father did not cotton to all that well. In my mother’s case this involved bringing in shamans and healers of various stripes to lay on hands and cleanse auras. My poor father did not cotton well to those either. He was born a cynic and would likely die one as well. I can remember him in a n argument with my mother regarding these healers saying “Hey, you bring these weirdos in and then leave with them… I have to *stay* here with the whole staff snickering behind my back!”

Ultimately, it was clear no amount of science, god or new age shenanigans was going to do the trick, and my father resigned himself to prepare to die. I remember the conversation he had with me, telling me no matter what happened that he would always love me. I guess I kind of understood what he was saying, but he still had that twinkle in his eye, so to my small self, some how it just wasn’t real. Though i did not know it at the time, my father was adamant about dying at home, and an epic battle had been initiated to try to accomplish just that. And though I did not know if it is still true, it seems that once one is in a hospital, it is very hard to leave unless one is either healthy or dead. I do not know the mechanics of it all, but somehow he arrange to have hospice care at home. And so, home he came, with a plethora of equipment and care nurses of various stripes.

The next couple months, as my father got sicker and sicker, was a parade of old friends and distant relatives. Seems there were always many extra people in the house, which was good in that it distracted me, but bad in that it distracted me. My father was visibly sick now. His skin and the whites of his eyes were a ghostly yellow color. He had lost a ton of weight. I still remember the shock of finding out he was wearing diapers. My rock, my world, my hero was being eaten alive before me and my reaction was at best described as having the dear on the headlights look. As he got even sicker still, people came around less. People could barely even face me, with a few exceptions.

Finally, he was what could be described as semi comatose. He would be out for long stretches, and then come back. I guess you could call it sleep, but it was something else, really. When he was lucid, my mother, younger sister and I would sit with him. And he would talk. And what he would talk about was this on going series of dreams, the narrative of which went something like this…

He had been flying in a plane with his “friend” (I will use the name) Jon Smith, someone that none of us recognized. Jon had been teasing him to learn to fly, but my father was reluctant to try. Then there were several flying lesson dreams about how awesome it was. Then there was a dream where my father had tried to fly his first time, and had, it seems, managed to crash and become stuck in a rock. He was ready to quit flying forever, but jon over the course of dreams, convinced him that not only was it wrong to quit, but that he should just get right back in the plane, and in fact try to fly solo for the first time. After a a few more dreams, my father relented and actually became excited about his “first solo flight”. Even at nine I had a vague inkling of what this was all about. I remember the tears as he asked his wife and children to accompany him on this great new achievement – his first solo flight. I remember the tears as my mother said no, that this was something he had to do himself, but that she loved him and was very proud of him. After that exchange, he slipped into a coma and never was lucid again.

His condition worsened, and everybody knew that the end was very close. One evening I was told that my father was “probably not going to make it through the night, and that if I had anything I wanted to say to him, now was the time – he couldn’t talk back but he could hear me”. I was then placed in the room with him alone and the doors were closed. This then is a moment that has shaped my life since. The dim yellow light. The shadows. My frail father, weighing maybe 80 pounds. The diaper clinging to his skeleton. The IV making its drip drip drip, ticking off the last minutes of his days like a timer. What the fuck was I supposed to say? This is not hollywood. I couldn’t ask for a line. I stood there frozen, overwhelmed with grief and anxiety. And shame! I was supposed to be making the most of my last night with my father, and I was told that he could hear me, so I imagined him waiting for my final words, and being disappointed in my silence. In my final moments with him I was failing. But I couldn’t help it. His twinkle was gone and replaced with the jaundiced haze of the almost dead. I actually remember feeling that this wasn’t even my real father, although part of me knew it was. This moment, as I type this, I wish I could have done it different, but for the life of me, I cant figure out what I could have done. I was only nine. I didn’t stand a chance. I left the room without saying a word and that is a burden that I have carried with me to this day. I left, went in to my room and went to bed.

That night I awoke with a start. I was half asleep but had this strange awareness, a presence if you will. I looked through the dark at the opened doorway to the hall and thats when I saw it. Now I am not a superstitious guy, I inherited my father cynicism and it runs through my very DNA. But I know what I saw and I know what I felt. I saw a disturbance in the air, like heat waves in the dark, pass through the hall across my doorway. It was vaguely man shaped and seemed to float. It crossed the doorway, paused briefly in the opening, and then left my field of view. When it paused, I felt something, like a familiar presence. It was a very strong feeling of love, of sadness. It is so hard to explain the experience. It was as if it was only barely there, and lasted only seconds. I lay back down and eventually got back to sleep. When I awoke the next morning, I was informed that my father had died in the night.

I would be remiss if I did not mention the wake, which was quite the affair. Having grown up in my father’s mother’s house, a neighborhood kid of many generations, simply everyone of every stripe appeared. It was my father’s wishes that we have a blow out party and just really cut loose. And cut loose we did! My mother, who lived upstairs, was with all the beat hippy types, smoking weed and getting bleary and teary. The pile of seventies weed on the dining room table was like a small hill. Downstairs, in the inlaw apartment when my grandmother lived, the hi-balls were clinking and all the older more conservative folks were getting tanked. And we, the children navigated the stairs, trying to avoid the hugs and slurred condolences. The downstairs people bitched about the drug use upstairs, and the upstairs bitched about the alcoholics downstairs, but really the bitching wasn’t so intense, it was just something to talk about that wasn’t sad.

At some point in the evening, my mother related the story about the flying lesson coma dreams to a man named Freddy Norman. Freddy was a giant bear of a man and had grown up in the neighborhood and gone to school with my father. And even though he capped of the evening by falling down the front stairs, the memory of that story must have stuck in his stoned drunken mind. It was about a week or two later when he burst into our house shouting “You’re never going to believe this!”

Apparently the name ‘Jon Smith’ had rung a bell for him, but he couldn’t place it at the time, but eventually he did. Turns out that this fellow had played third base on my father’s high school baseball team. He was curious, he said, why it was him, Jon Smith, that my father had named, as they hadn’t really even been friends or acquaintances – just merely teammates. Freddy had done some research to try to find him, to tell him about these dreams and what he had found alarmed him. Seems Jon had gone on to be a commercial airline pilot and died in a plane crash the year before.

So. There’s that. I’ll just pause and let that sink in for a sec.

To this day I wonder. Was this some sort of paranormal experience laid bare by circumstance. I mean I did have some sort of experience the night my father died that was certainly not “normal”. Or. Or was this one last practical joke my father had left us with. Did he somehow know about the fate of Jon Smith and concoct one last ruse to leave us all hanging with as his final calling card. Truth is, I will never know. At this point either seems as plausible as the other. Personally, I am burdened that now I will have to come up with something even more extraordinary for my own death, I mean, it seems that it s one of the few family traditions we Cross’ have, eh? And man o’ man, my father is, as he always was, one tough act to follow.

Bobbo smoked and sold ALOT of weed. He was my connection and I was the distributor, so I was trusted. Now I know a lot of you are envisioning Bobbo to be some thin enlightened veggie long haired peace-nik. I can assure you this was not the case. Bobbo was a vile man, both in physical appearance and in spirit. He was kind of like a nerd biker guy, as he was a computer egineer. Sexist, overly flirtatious, almost spherical, unkempt and just foul. He had a twin dreadlocked beard that joined at the end that he would flip over his head to eat his meat. And he ate only meat, with only maybe the occasional potato to break things up. He had heard that Owsley Stanley was a strict carnivore, and semi adopted that stance. He often reeked so bad it was hard to be near him. And, as I said, he smoked ALOT of weed, I’d estimate a half an ounce a day on average. With all his flaws though, I was in his inner circle, and had been in business with him for years. That business payed for my college mostly, so I dealt with it. Besides, from a business point of view, he was very good at what he did. He was extremely careful, knew the laws inside and out. We never held anything but weed at GD shows, and never ever sold there it was just to big and iconic a vehicle to keep anything but joints on the downlow. Even alcohol was prohibited on board.

We had done this “set up and scoop up” for tickets deal a few times and it was a huge success. There are few stories there, but they are not germane. We had our sights on the upcoming shows in Las Vegas, which sounded like a lot of fun. Something happened before the shows though that changed everything – Bobbo got a girlfriend. I know I know it sounds implausible, but its true. She was a local homeless alcoholic named Vanda. I use her real name, because a) I am certain she is no longer alive, and b) she claimed to have a twin sister named “Wanda”. Wanda and Vanda. Um… Ok. Bobbo and Vanda were quite the pair. Bobbo was trying to set her up with a business making incense at shows, printing up labels that said “Vanda’s Vapors”, of all things, and buying her some essential oils and what not. Vanda made me slightly uncomfortable, as brash insane homeless alcoholics often do, but hey, it was a big bus. Like so many things in my life, I could deal.

I too had a new girlfriend, Zulu, whom you may remember from “Second Date”. I invited her on the ride to Vegas, and even though she absolutely LOATHED Bobbo, the allure of free tickets and adventure was too much to pass up. So me Bobbo Zulu, and Vanda packed up our wholistically obtained guatamalan backpacks, boarded Laughin Jack, and head inland to Sin City. As an aside, there was one other person in the caravan who was not riding on the bus and that was Eli. Eli was driving a very normal looking K-Car sedan. Why was he not in the bus you may ask? Well it was Eli’s job to transport large quantities of LSD back to town after Bobbo had hooked it up at the show. The bus was a cop target, but Eli and his baby face and boring car were not. Even though I knew, I would never guess that that brown car driven by what appeared to be a Youth for Christ crusader was in fact carrying up to 10 *books* of acid (thats 10,000 hits in case you are wondering). So off we went.

We arrived friday late afternoon at the Sands Hotel and parked in the parking lot. Bobbo went up to meet with the crew and receive our assignments. We were going to be spending the night in this parking lot, and then driving in the morning to the UNLV arena to set things up for the Sat/Sun shows. Bobbo returned shortly from his meeting with some special treats for us all – some rather large hits of “purple gel” LSD. I had only ever seen blotter acid, and this crystaline, translucent thing that looked like a bit of hardened fruit roll up looked ominous My tripping days were almost over at this point, having failed the acid test miserably a few months prior (a great story for another day), but I was in Vegas, baby, and feeling all Fear and Loathing. I was also urged by new girlfriend who was all about the hallucinogens. So with a wince of what’s to come, I swallowed the tab and headed with Zulu out to the strip.

One thing one must consider. When given drugs by people affiliated by the grateful dead organization itself, said drugs are going to be of the very highest quality, and very very strong. The mescaline I had been given in Oregon a while back kept me up for a two and a half day lesson on the reason native american art tends to be so rectilinear. This purple thing I had eaten was no exception, and as such, I can only offer a few glimpses into what transpired. I remember the bulk of the trip was spent at Circus Circus, which is why, like black cats, clowns now make me flinch. Though I was sure that EVERYONE knew that I was cerebrally supercharged, I soon came to the realization that, no matter what one looks like or how odd one talks or laughs inappropriately, as long as one is pumping money into some sort of game, no one will pester you – hell they will even give you free tang screwdrivers! So Zulu and I camped out at the nickel slots below one of the circus stages, an enormous bucket of shiny nickels in our laps, watching the most bizarre acts perform languidly on stage. I remember going to one of the buffets and watching the animalistic ways in which the morbidly obese ate their dried up steak breakfasts, like some sort of swollen lion guarding her kill. I remember running into shabby old Vanda at one point, who in an alcoholic stupor and tripping balls was trying to aggressively sell incense in the lobbies of the casinos up and down the strip. “Insent! Insent! Smell good! Insent!” How she stayed out of jail that night I’ll never know.

Towards dawn we returned to the bus and tried to sleep a little which was of course, impossible. Around 10 we headed over to the arena and did our thing, passing out trash bags and directing parking as folks arrived. We got our tickets during the first song and went in to enjoy the show. As we got situated, Zulu produced a bag of mushrooms and indicated we should at them. Again, I was reluctant, but I knew that mushrooms and lsd are cross tolerant, and after the intensity of the trip the night before, they probably wouldn’t hit me that hard. So as not to be a party pooper, I ate the damn things. They hit me alright, and for the most part, I had a good show. At the end, we stumbled back to the bus to see what was cooking. Well, besides meat, Bobbo had been granted the custody of three acid casualties which we were going to have to drive back into town and attempt to find where they lived. Groups of acid casualties can be either amusing, annoying or terrifying, and in this case we had one of each variety. The amusing one was a woman whose clothes kept ‘falling’ off and wanted to cuddle with everyone. The terrifying one was a black dude who had unwittingly taken a dose of something and was very angry about it, but couldn’t get it together to actually be violent, and the annoying was a man who just kept talking talking talking nonsense. Me and Zulu crept up in the bed in the back and left the three to sort it out on their own. We were tired and I needed to lay down for the 20 minute drive to town. They would be ok. Vanda could deal with them, as she was more at their level anyway.

Just as I was being lulled into a coma by the rhythm of the bus I was awoken by the flashing red and blue lights of doom streaking into the rear window. I peered out. We were in the parking lot of some gas station/mini mart in the middle of nowhere, and had a undercover SUV blocking us in. The cop got into to talk to Bobbo the driver. Apparently he had pulled a three point turn across a double yellow line… in a ginormous psychedelic school bus, which was the real reason for the stop. Bad points for Bobbo for giving them a legit reason, but really, if you were a small town desert cop, wouldn’t you be just a little bit curious? The reason Bobbo got pulled off the bus was no doubt the ashtray filled to the rim with roaches the size of your thumb. This was also probably the reason for his road side sobriety test, which was one of the most pitiful things I had ever witnessed. Owing to his short, morbidly obese stature, even if he was stone cold sober, he was simply not physically able to walk a line or touch his nose. At any rate, his sub par performance was what led him to be cuffed and led to the arriving squad car. In fact soon, we had a small regiment of squad cars and police vehicles. I guess, some lights in Vegas are just not so cool, you know?

We were inside the bus, the adrenaline of the reality closing in on everyone had a somewhat sobering effect, even on out guests. We watched the cops huddle up and decide what to do next, which as it turned out was to forcefully instruct us all to get off the bus with our id’s. For the next four hours we went through every form of cop trick in the book on the side of that chilly desert road, while what looked like the DEA stormed through the bus, tearing every thing to bits. We had the group interview with the ‘good’ cop which consisted of them trying to convince us that they knew we were on *something*, and it would be better for us all if we just told them what it was. I could understand. As a group we looked more like extras from the movie road warrior, all dusty and disheveled, but I was not gonna give up. Then it was the ‘bad cop’ who threatened us harm if we didn’t confess our ingestion transgressions. One of the most amazing things to come out of this was, that to a person, no one confessed. Everyone copped to “having a couple of beers”, except for Vanda, who when asked what she was on managed to belt out “I drank a liter of Vodka!” in her best homeless rasp. I do believe she was the only one the police had no doubts about. Then it was time for individual interviews with both good and bad cop, where they tried to get us to turn on one another. BAd cop even laced our fingers together behind our back and squeezed hard saying if we did not confess, he was going to break my fingers. I stuck it out and so did the rest, which, given the circumstances, had to be some sort of record.

All during the interview, the DEA guys were pulling random bits of hippy ephemera out of the bus and making a little pile on the hood of one of the cars. Rolling papers. Small bag of weed. Quartz crystal. Stickers (which I think they thought were LSD). End of a bag of mushrooms. So despite our surprisingly unified “two beer” resolve, it looked like we were screwed. But the cops made one critical error. They had pulled us off the bus with just our id’s, not our ’stuff’. So by the time the had finished putting the contents of the bus through the blender of justice, they couldn’t tell what belonged to whom. Good for us, bad for Bobbo, as he was the registered owner of the bus, and no was legally responsible for all its contents. Especially bad for Bobbo when they found the half ounce of weed that Vanda had stolen from Bobbo and bagged into eigths to sell sereptitously for sending money. Now Nevada has some pretty fucking steep possession penalties as they like to control the means of delusion in that town, but even in the more liberal states, bagged out quantity is “intent to distribute” – and that usually means time. Bobbo was fucked.

The cops took all our particulars, took Bobbo off some jail themed casino, and, after allowing the two girls to go on the bus to grab everyone’e sleeping bag, towed Laughing Jack off to god knows where, leaving us, weary, dirty, traumatized and cold on the side of the freeway. Now as Bobbo had been being put in the car he had shouted some instructions to me. BAsically I was to go to the Sands Hotel and find someone named Peter Smith, who would put me in touch with the Dead’s lawyer. So slowly we devised a plan. We went into the mini market and pooled our money and caught a cab into Vegas, to the sands. Arriving there, I instructed everyone to wait for me in the lobby, that I would find this guy and everything would be put right. So I left them in a huddled lump on a bench, and me, looking Mad Max Manson himself, approached the front desk.

Excuse me good sir, do you have the room number for a Peter Smith at this hotel?” I asked, hoping that decent grammar could over come the obvious displacement of my physical presence.

Clickity click click… “No sir, Im sorry, we have nobody here by that name.”

Damn I thought. So I tried some other names that I knew worked in GDM… clickety click clickety… “No sir…” “No sir…” “Im sorry sir…”

Things were getting desperate. “Do you have anyone by the name Jerry Garcia listed here?”

CClickety. “Im sorry sir…”

So after going through all of the band members’ names, and realizing that I was seriously testing the patience of the man behind the counter, I threw out my hail mary pass. “Look”, I said, “do you have ANYONE affiliated with the Grateful Dead staying at this hotel at all?”

“Do you want the Grateful Dead party room”? he said.

“Um… yes?

“Take that elevator in the corner to the top floor”

“What’s the room number”?

“Its the whole top floor”.

“Thank you very much!”

I gave the molten lump of my compatriots a thumbs up and headed for the elevator. A well dressed man got in with me, and after seeing that I had selected the top floor, he eyed me suspiciously. Dead heads are forever trying to meet band members and sneak back stage to give Phil that special crystal from Pluton 7 that can cause low harmonic telepathy or whatever they cook up in their chemically imaginative brain. “Where you headed”?, the man asked.

“Grateful Dead Party room.” I said, matter of factly.

“Um… Who invited you?”

“Nobody.”

“Well you just cant…”

“Look, no one invited me, but I need to find someone named Peter Smith, who will put me in touch with a lwyer because Bobbo just got arrested and he’s in jail and Laughin Jacks been impounded…” I blurted out in a panic.

And who did it turn out to be that I was speaking to in that elevator? Why Peter Smith himself. He was alarmed and invited me to come up and relax while he made some calls.

OK. Dead shows are about sleeping in tents, getting dirty, eating “kind veggie burritos’ that were barely heated on a propane stove… its kind of the deal. But the room I was in now was palatial! There was a huge buffet filled with all kinds of delicious foods. Amazing couches and views and just well, rock star penthouse in Vegas. All the people were elegantly dressed, or at least clean. I ate, I sat. And as word got round that I had the hottest gossip in the scene, I told the story again and again. Peter Smith told me that lawyers had been called and the legal wheels were in motion to spring Bobbo on bail. I was finally beginning to relax. It was then, after about two or three hours of living the lif of luxury, that I remembered what I had left in a dusty heap down in the lobby. I excused myself, and head downstairs to see what was what.

The three hangers on had all wandered off and I found Zulu and Eli in the lobby with very worried expressions on their faces. I assured them all would eventually be as well as it could be. We got a room and decided to head back to Santa Barbara the next day, as there was very little more we could do. I slept the sleep of the dead, as it were.

The absolute funniest thing happened the very next day. I got up and went downstairs to obtain my continental under-ripe melon balls and shitty coffee. I passed a news stand. There on the front cover of the Sunday paper, in full living color, was a picture of Zulu taken through the glass of the rear window of Laughin Jack, accompanying a story about how the Dead had come to town. I bought a few copies, and we all had a good laugh. Later I framed that clipping with our unused Sunday concert ticket and gave it to her as a gift. I dont think she liked it very much though as it always reminded her of a very traumatic scary time. But whatever, a keepsake is a keepsake.

Epilogue:

We all, save Vanda, had to return to Vegas two months later for Bobbo’s trial. I will never forget the look on the cops faces when we all showed up, all spit shined and in nice clothes, college degrees in hand. The prosecution cut a deal with the Dead’s high power lawyer, and Bobbo paid a $10,000 fine, had to take a Drug Awareness Course by mail, and promise never to return to Vegas. Which was fine, none of us were all that hot to get back there anyway.