Drinking With Men : A Memoir (9781101603123) Read online

  My tarot cards smelled of patchouli oil and sandalwood incense, tobacco and marijuana smoke, and I kept them safe in one of those fuzzy purple Crown Royal whiskey bags. As I shuffled the deck, I focused my energy on a question I wanted the cards to answer, and then began to lay them out in the Celtic Cross pattern I’d learned from Waite’s book. First, the significator: the proxy, the card that stood for me. Then the card that “crossed” me, signifying the things that blocked my path. Next the card that “crowned” me, representing my ideals and aims. And so on and so on, until I’d laid out the tenth and final card, which would reveal the answer to my question.

  By then, a small crowd had gathered around me. When I finished, a woman asked if I’d give her a reading. It was the first time someone in the bar car had spoken to me without wanting to see my ticket. She asked what I charged. I hadn’t thought about that. I mulled it over and told her I thought it was kind of bad mojo to take money for readings—but I was cool with bartering, and I wouldn’t mind a beer. She didn’t ask how old I was.

  Her reading was good, loaded with cards from the cups suit—abundant and comforting—and earthy, practical pentacles. I had good news for her. Yes, I said with certainty, she would thrive at her new job. She might even get a promotion soon. She perked up—and discreetly got me that beer, which I tucked behind my back and nursed furtively.

  Suddenly it was like a divination marathon. I must have done five readings in an hour. And the more I read, the more confident I grew. I found my voice; a routine took shape. As I set down the cards, I’d sing Neil Young’s “After the Gold Rush” quietly, almost under my breath. Well, I dreamed I saw the silver spaceships flying in the yellow haze of the sun . . . Then I’d give the whole pattern an initial once-over and look solemnly into the questioner’s eyes. “The cards are here to guide us,” I’d say in a voice an octave lower than my own, “but what they tell us is not carved in stone, not written in blood. You have the power to change any of this.” I believed that. And here were all these grown-ups—accountants, lawyers, executives—hanging on my every word.

  I felt pretty good when I got home that night, with a couple of cans of warm beer in my backpack and the satisfying shock of newly acquired power. I brought my cards to school that week and practiced on friends, sitting cross-legged in a carpeted hallway near the cafeteria. And as soon as school let out, I’d hurry home, slam my bedroom door behind me, put on Led Zeppelin’s fourth record—ZoSo, the one with “Stairway to Heaven” and “The Battle of Evermore,” the latter a song I’d play three or four or five times in a row, for there is no finer accompaniment to girly adolescent magic than Sandy Denny’s voice—light a stick of incense, take my cards out, and practice some more. This was no joke. Huge and mysterious forces were at work. The cards had power. The cards knew stuff. The cards understood things that even my shrink didn’t get.

  The next week, after therapy, I stood in front of a mirror in a women’s restroom at Grand Central and fitted the paisley head scarf onto my head before boarding the train. And then my fortune-telling-for-alcohol scheme began in earnest. Again, I settled into the bar car and gave myself a reading. And again, a cluster of commuters assembled around me. I felt like I’d cracked a code. They’d sit down next to me and listen obediently: “When you shuffle the cards, put your energy into them. Focus. Concentrate on your question,” I instructed them. “The cards will know if you’re doing this halfheartedly.”

  This continued for weeks, and out of it I got plenty of beer, a couple of books, and a pair of silver earrings. That, and the undivided attention of all these adults. I’d explain what each position in the Celtic Cross meant, the significance of casting more cups than swords, more wands than pentacles. If someone’s reading turned up an unusually high number of major arcana cards (the first twenty-two in the deck, including the Magician, the Moon, the Devil, etc.), I’d go quiet for a moment before I disclosed to him how much power that foretold—and urged him to use that power responsibly, for the greater good.

  It didn’t take long for me to figure out something that Waite didn’t mention in his book: Reading the person was as important as reading the pictures on the cards. I never asked them their names, and I never told them mine—not my real one, anyway. Yet time after time, as I arranged the cards, as I laid out their destinies on a grimy laminated table sticky with liquor and blistered by cigarette burns, complete strangers would drop intimate clues about their lives, their jobs, their families. More than once, a wingtip-wearing banker or broker confided in me that he’d taken acid and sloshed around in the mud at Woodstock and felt very connected to the energy of the universe. I’d nod and say something like, “That’s awesome, man. I wish I’d been there.” They had lived through the sixties, when I had not yet been born. I think for some of them it was as if I’d materialized before their eyes like some ghost from their youth come back to answer questions about their future.

  Of course, there were people in the bar car who paid me no mind, and others who made their skepticism known. But I was dismissive of the nonbelievers and the cynics. They were out of touch, and that was their loss. Still, one heckler in the crowd made me nervous. I couldn’t pinpoint his age—midthirties, I guessed. He was a broad-shouldered, thick-necked guy with a beer gut, strawberry blond hair, and a big ruddy face. He looked like a distant Kennedy cousin, maybe, or an overgrown, superannuated frat boy. And did he have a mouth on him, deploying the F-word as a noun, verb, and adjective in one sentence, and then the next and the next and the next, like artillery fire.

  This guy was always drunker and louder than anyone else. Once, he cupped his hands into a makeshift megaphone and sort of stage-shouted at me, something like “The sixties are over, get a life!” It was pretty stupid, but it still rattled me in the middle of a reading and disrupted the flow. And as much as I basked in my bar car celebrity, I dreaded seeing that guy.

  One Thursday, after I’d already served a few of my patrons, he half staggered, half swaggered over to me. “All right,” he said. “This is total bullshit. But go ahead. Do mine.” He plunked himself down across from me, his knees a little too close, sweat beading on his forehead. I wanted to tell him to go away. I wanted to tell him that his unwillingness to believe would insult the spirits that governed the cards and make them uncooperative. But I figured he’d call me out. That he’d call me a chicken. So instead, I said okay. I kept my cool and started my spiel: “Shuffle. Focus. Give the cards your energy.” He rolled his eyes but played along.

  He cut the cards once and handed me the deck, following my orders. I spread them out. First, his significator: the Ten of Swords, possibly the worst card of all, with a solitary, prostrate figure under a black sky, pierced in the back by all ten swords. It represents, in Waite’s words, “pain, affliction, tears, sadness, desolation.” The rest of the cards weren’t much better. From the minor arcana, more swords. From the major arcana, he pulled the Tower, a card signaling corruption, destruction, and the presence of evil. He got the Death card, too. The Celtic Cross turned up little more than despair. And as much as I disliked the guy, I really didn’t like what I saw in those cards. Not for anyone, not even for him.

  I kept quiet for a few moments while I tried to figure out how to spin this. Anyone who read tarot cards knew that the Death card was not to be taken literally. It did not forecast imminent peril. It was about transformation: dramatic but necessary change. And the Tower, menacing as it was, might signal the obliteration of the negative forces in his life. But that Ten of Swords? I couldn’t get around it, especially since it was his significator. Had it landed upside down, that would’ve tempered its meaning and softened the blow. But as it was, right side up, full strength, there was nothing good I could say. Maintaining eye contact is key to being a good mystic, but I couldn’t even meet his gaze.

  “Well, what’s it say?” he finally asked.

  I took a deep breath. “None of this is carved in stone or writt
en in blood—”

  He cut me off. “Well. What?”

  So I told him what I saw. Things looked bad. Where destruction was already underway, there was likely more to come. The isolation, aloneness, and despair he felt held out little hope of diminishing anytime soon. Change was coming, that was clear, and it would be something dramatic, but probably not for the better. And as I interpreted one dismal set of symbols after another, the guy leaned in closer, put his elbows on the table, buried his head in his hands, and started to cry.

  He told me that his marriage was falling apart. That he constantly worried about his health. That he was too young for heart problems, but he had them anyway. That he felt as though his whole life had added up to zero. He asked: “Will I ever be happy?” The cards, I answered bluntly, said no.

  “But,” I told him, just like I told everyone else, “you have the power to change that.” He shook his head and glared at me with red, swollen eyes that said No. I don’t.

  I did not want to believe him, but I held myself back. I had no business contradicting him, arguing with him, trying to make him feel hopeful. Maybe he was right. Maybe he didn’t have the power. Maybe no one had the power. Maybe the days that lie ahead of us are set in stone and written in blood, and that was that. And it occurred to me that maybe I’d been the cynic: Something I had believed in had become a shtick, a gambit for attention. I hadn’t thought it through. Maybe I’d even hurt people.

  In the background, other passengers were caught up in conversation, laughing and drinking and carrying on. I could think of nothing more to say to the guy. Nothing reassuring. I felt small and foolish, incapable of any small comfort or kindness, and when the guy got off the train a couple of stops before mine, I was relieved.

  • • •

  I sat awake in my bed that night and thought about him. I imagined him going home to a white-clapboard colonial, to an unhappy wife pretending to be asleep. I imagined him returning the next day to a job he hated and getting wasted again that afternoon. But of course at fifteen, I really couldn’t imagine what it was like to be him, to live his life. And I realized I didn’t want to be able to. I didn’t want to be adult enough yet to understand where he was coming from. Reading tarot cards in the bar car had been fun until it got serious. Adults had problems I could not begin to fathom, that I should not wish on myself, no matter how badly I wanted to grow up. And they had things to say I wasn’t ready to hear, and to which I was incapable of responding with any real empathy.

  I didn’t go back to the bar car. I missed the drinks. I missed the grown-ups. I missed their attention. But I was not one of them. For the first time in my life—but not the last—I felt sharply and unhappily aware that I was getting older. That I wasn’t exactly a child anymore. I was in the borderlands, neither here nor there, old enough to see that I was too young for the bar car, even though I desperately wanted to be there. I had been little more than a pretender, but I had felt, at least for a little while, like a regular, and for reasons I didn’t yet understand, that feeling mattered to me, and I sensed that it always would. But I knew I didn’t belong there—not yet—although I could feel adulthood encroaching, real adulthood, which now seemed less about drinking and smoking and freedom and more about loss and fear and the sense that Death itself lay waiting somewhere just ahead.

  2.

  TWENTY-ONE SHOTS

  Inglewood and Santa Cruz

  My mother just had to go to a show and see it firsthand, I figured, and everything would be fine. She’d see that the people were nice, and no one really got hurt, and she’d stop worrying so much about what I was up to. So during the Grateful Dead’s nine-night run at Madison Square Garden in 1988, I hooked her up with a pair of tickets. She invited her friend Eva. Ma showed up at the Garden in a dress and Eva in tight, ironed dark jeans and a blazer. They both wore good jewelry, sunglasses, heels, and full makeup. Two cosmopolitan New York ladies, out on the town, taking in dinner and a concert. I pointed them in the direction of their seats and called out, “Have a good show,” as they descended into the belly of the Garden. “Come back and hang out during intermission.” A real Deadhead didn’t go to her seat. I stayed in the hallway with my friends, where the sound was fine and there was more room to hang out and dance and, if the spirit moved you, spin yourself into a trance.

  Not three songs into the first set, I heard the click-click-click of their high heels returning to the hallway. “Ma, what’s wrong?” I asked. She raised her sunglasses, just a little. I could see she was crying, and she said, “I can’t talk to you now. I can’t talk to you now. I can’t talk to you now.” My mother understood the magic in saying a thing three times. “Eva and I are leaving,” she announced, avoiding direct eye contact with me. “We are going to have a drink. Then I am going home.” She took a rumbly tearful breath and continued. “And I will talk to you tomorrow.”

  Some skinny stringy-haired kid slumped on the floor against the wall had been sizing up the situation. He looked at Eva and asked, “Hey, do you have a Valium?” She opened up her purse, shook a few pills out of a vial, and handed them to the kid.

  He was clearly a genius. I, on the other hand, was totally fucked. I knew I was in big trouble with my mom, even if I did not understand why. I slept outside the Garden that night, in a pile of hippie kids under a pile of blankets, taking swigs from a flask of Jack Daniel’s and trying to figure out what had made my mother cry. As far as I knew, the concert had proceeded without incident: no random acts of violence, no mass nudity, no college kid on a bad trip being hauled out on a stretcher. But I was sure she must have had her reasons, and I also knew that, in time, they would be revealed to me.

  When I finally went home the next day, I found out what had upset Ma. We sat together in the living room and talked, and she was eerily calm. She didn’t object to the odd joint now and again herself—she was no Puritan—but the sheer quantity of smoke at the show had freaked her out. I guess I’d just gotten used to it. Oh, and one other thing: the personal hygiene situation. Never before had she seen so many brazenly filthy people. “Do those people ever shower?” she asked, horrified. By then she’d seen me through a few bouts of plantar warts on my feet, but she didn’t even know about the scabies outbreak during the previous spring’s tour. Yet it is only in retrospect—twenty years on now—that I can finally ’fess up and say: Yes, yes, it is likely that in becoming a Deadhead, along with asserting my independence, forging my identity, following my bliss, blah blah blah blah blah, I was also deliberately torturing my mother (who wasn’t easy to shock, so it took some doing). Back then I hadn’t so much seen it that way. If nothing else, after her aborted evening at the Garden, my mother was sure I was smoking about a pound of pot weekly and not bathing a whole lot. The drugs and the dirty: this got to Ma. But, like many casual observers, what she didn’t notice was that many of us were also drunk.

  • • •

  Soon after I turned sixteen, with the encouragement of an unusually progressive guidance counselor who’d seen more than a few Dead shows himself, I dropped out of high school. Would it matter? I had already cut classes. A lot of them. And in the classes to which I’d bothered showing up, I was frequently overtaken by daydreaming. Or writing poems. Or worrying about the contras and the Sandinistas, nuclear power, the British miners, the Ethiopian famine, the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior, and how Ronald Reagan was ruining the world.

  I don’t recall ever doing my homework. I felt like I was wasting my time and my teachers’ time. My mother, to say the least, was not pleased with my decision to drop out, but she understood that I was unhappy, adrift, and desperate to do something else, and she consented. I promised I’d get my equivalency diploma someday. And go to college someday. For now, I wanted to hit the road. I wanted to see the U.S. of A. I wanted to live it. I didn’t even have to learn how to drive—there was always some other Deadhead with room for one more, one more who could pitch in
for gas, for tolls, for the odd motel room or campsite.

  Most of the jobs available to a teenage high school dropout with a limited skill set were in retail and service. That suited me fine. A couple of months of working in a bookstore could furnish the modest capital required to launch a cottage industry in tie-dyed apparel, handmade beaded jewelry, or vegetarian chili—or maybe even to get a plane ticket to the Bay Area for a big event like the annual New Year’s Eve show. I’d get a job near home, keep it for a season, then pile into someone’s rusty VW bus or sputtering van—someone, some friend, some stranger, no matter—and spend the next six weeks or so on tour.

  It played out like that for more than a year, and then even that was not enough. I wanted to leave, period. No more three months on, three months off. No more bookstores, no more New York, no more Ma. And so, after an autumn of selling art books in Soho, I packed it in and left, with no intention of returning. I parlayed my final paycheck into a flight to San Francisco, where, just across the bridge in Oakland, a few nights of Grateful Dead shows awaited. I was not traveling light. I took an Army-Navy duffel bag crammed full of clothes and books, my tarot cards, a portable typewriter, and about a hundred bucks in cash.

  On the flight out west, I sat next to a middle-aged man in a suit. I had on a favorite getup: a woven purple-and-green Guatemalan shmatte (a thing not so different from a dyed burlap sack, really) and a pair of tattered huaraches. The guy told me he was an actuary. I had no idea what that could possibly mean. He tried to explain. Anyway, he was a nice guy. We talked. He was going to some kind of meeting, he said. “And you?”

  “I’m going to see the Grateful Dead.”

  He smiled. “Oh, I saw them a couple times. Years ago. Back in college.” And then he got that glassy-eyed sweet-sad look, and sighed that sigh I knew from the guys in the Metro-North bar car, that sigh that says Nostalgia is a bitch, and getting old is hard.