I need a miracle

I went to a lot of Greatful Dead shows between 1986 and 1992. The first one I went to, I knew I was in love - not with the guy who brought me, but with the band. I remember feeling like we were all in the same living room, grooving to the same live band. All of us were on the same wavelength.

I had never much felt like I belonged anywhere, before. I certainly didn't feel like I belonged to the family I was born into. As we moved around so much, I didn't really feel like I belonged to a group of friends before then.

At the point of this story, I had been dating Seamus for about six months. He was a pretty popular guy among the stoners. His mother let him throw huge keggers with live bands in the basement, and would go out and cover to the cops for us if they were called about the noise. She was drinking right along with us, which we thought was awesome, at the time. That was actually how I met him, at his 18th birthday party right after school started our senior year. I'll devote a whole other post about him because he deserves it. We are still in touch and something happened recently that is blog worthy. CRAP, I just realized I missed his birthday exactly one week ago. I know you are not reading this, Seamus, and that is not your real name anyway, but Happy Birthday and I love you.

Seamus and I, and a large network of friends all traveled to The Meadowlands in New Jersey for a Dead show. If I recall correctly, which I don't, many of us were going to crash out on the floor of someone's apartment in New Jersey, and drive home the next day. This someone was a friend of a friend of a cousin of a neighbor of a friend. I don't think I ever even knew this person's name.

Seamus and I didn't have tickets to the show. If you knew the scene during that time, it wasn't a big deal. We had money, we would try to get tickets if we could. If not, it wasn't a big deal. We went for the experience.

I'll try to liken it to going to a fair or an amusement park. It was a much different theme, of course, but just as enjoyable unless you were planning to go on rides. Add in hallucinogenics and you don't even need rides! The best part, the side-show was free! All you have to do is walk around, or wait for people to walk to you.

People were selling things, giving things away, talking with each other, playing music and singing. There were two huge parking lots full of tie-dyes, jewelry, Guatemalan ponchos, Indian batik, gauze shirts and dresses, pipes and bongs, fallafels, whippets, Rastafarian weaves and tams, water and beer out of some one's cooler, crystals and stones, runes and tarot cards, musical instruments for sale, music on cassette tapes for sale, Indian blankets, veggie stir fry, hackey sacs, rain forest sticks, and anything else you could possibly think of. Including, and especially, the drugs.

One of the people in our group set up a pop-up camper on a grassy patch at the edge of one of the parking lots. This was basically home-base. We all went our separate ways with the intention of meeting back at that spot at some point after the show was over. The group not camping would then drive back to the apartment of which we planned to sleep on the floor.

Seamus and I very early on split a quarter pound of mushrooms. I don't think I had ever eaten mushrooms before this, but I remember they were horrible. Swallowing them down with beer was even worse, but that was the only option. In retrospect, this was way too much for my system, and swallowing a hallucinogen with alcohol did not help matters in any way. A large group of us set out to see the sights. The effects of the mushrooms and alcohol set in to me almost immediately.

While Seamus was very anti-cigarette smoking, I really liked to smoke. The more he tried to get me to stop smoking, the more I rebelled. And by rebel, I mean very passive-aggressive shit like telling him I would quit and smoking behind his back. Breath mints and perfume shit. Especially when I was drinking. Which was every weekend at his house. Add mushrooms, and forget it.

I didn't even care that he saw me smoking right in front of his face! He was pretty upset, we got in a fight that I don't remember, and the party split into two groups. He was in one group, I was in the other. And I got to smoke. I considered it a win-win situation until the concert was about to start. At which point I found out that every single person in my group had a ticket to go in to the stadium except me. I walked them to the stadium doors and wished them a good show, and then realized I had no idea where I was.

Not only did I have no idea where I was, I basically had no idea who I was. I was tripping my face off, walking around a parking lot in New Jersey where I didn't know anyone and couldn't find my way back to the pop-up camper home base. By this time, the sun had gone down, and the show inside the stadium had just started.

If you are not familiar with the Greatful Dead, one of their songs is called "I need a miracle". Many fans would stand outside the shows with a piece of cardboard like a homeless person asking for "a miracle". I don't know if they were asking for a free ticket, or a discount on a scalper's ticket, I know I never did that. Sometimes they would even hold up one finger. That showed they only wanted one "miracle" that day. There were always way more people outside the shows than the amount of seats inside, no matter what.

Back to me, because really, isn't that what it is all about? I was walking around a parking lot in New Jersey after dark, 17 years old, with no idea how I was going to find the people I came with. Did I mention I was tripping my face off? Tears were pouring down my face. Out of nowhere, someone walks up to me, puts his arms around my shoulders and says the magic words, "you look like you need a miracle". The dude just gives me a free ticket into the stadium, no strings attached.

I walk in, and go to my section. The first thing I see is my friends, Nicky Z and his brother and sister. All is right with the world after that.



This is literally the picture that I took immediately upon discovering them. This is before Nicky (on the right) becomes the jerk I have already mentioned. This is also right before Seamus and I decide to travel cross-country with these siblings and their cousin, following the Greatful Dead for the summer. Stay tuned for more craziness!

Update: after consulting YouTube for a link to the I Need a Miracle song, I have been obsessed with seeing and listening to other people's video to Greatful Dead concerts. This was way after I stopped going to shows. But it is close to what I was talking about the experience.

Come out of the closet

When I was a junior in high school, I started dating a hippie freak with long blond hair who I thought was just cute as pie. He was totally unlike any one I knew, but we hit it off. Nicky introduced me to a whole new world. He was a year ahead of me, and I knew none of his friends.

This was a big school, and I was pretty new to it. He had to re-take this history class in order to graduate, and he sat behind me. I was almost instantly smitten. We started studying together and eating lunch together, and before I knew it, I was hanging out with him and his really super cool hippie friends.

I had heard of the Greatful Dead before, I actually really loved one of their songs, Ripple. My older siblings had turned me on to a lot of different music as I was growing up. Until I started dating Nicky, though, I loved top forties and metal. Think Cyndi Lauper, Quiet Riot, Twisted Sister, and early Madonna. My first concert was Motley Crue in 1984, my second was Ratt with Poison. (Ha-ha, Ratt & Poison, what a marketing gimmick!)

My third concert, thanks to Nicky, was the Greatful Dead. What a difference! I was hooked. I was also hooked to the lifestyle. Nicky and his younger sister and brother were all musically inclined. And so were all of their friends. They held huge parties that either featured a band of their friends, or everyone sat around a group of guys playing guitar and everyone sang.

I felt like I belonged, for once. I loved music, I loved singing. Any songs I didn't know, I learned quickly. I met a bunch of people, and mostly everyone made me feel like I was included. Having moved around a lot as a kid, I was painfully shy. Just when I started to make friends, we up and moved again. Being part of a large group of friends was really new to me, and I loved it.

Nicky and I usually met at his house. It was not only party central, it was amazing. His parents had built an incredibly huge modern house on a property that already had a couple of houses on it. They also had a pond put in behind it. They were very open and welcomed their children to have parties in their finished basement with a full kitchen that opened into the back yard with the pond. I'm not sure, but I don't think they quite knew what their children were up to, all the time. They were very nice to me, and drove me back and forth for Nicky and I to spend time together. Sometimes, they even allowed him to do the driving.

Nicky and I never went "all the way". But we had ample opportunity to do so when I was at his house. In my own house, however, the rules had changed. Previously, I ran wild. There were a lot of things going down during this period of my life that I will write about at another time. The fact that I was raised by wolves is one of them. My mother had instituted a new discipline plan, kind of like closing the barn door after the horse had been let out. This plan was nowhere in evidence when I needed it, but now that I had turned a new leaf, I suddenly had restrictions. And I was not used to restrictions, or rules, or any kind of discipline in general after my father moved out.

One of the restrictions was that I was not allowed to have a boy in my bedroom with the door closed. Another restriction was that I was not allowed to have any friend in the house if my mother was not home. I tried to go along with it, I really did.

My mother worked third shift every night except Saturday and Sunday. That meant that Monday after school she was actually awake during the day. One Monday, I got home from school and was working on my homework. My mother had gone out with a friend, and I was home by myself that afternoon. There was a knock on the door, and when I answered it, Nicky was standing there. He had brought over a tan suede jacket, with fringe. I have no idea where he got it, I only knew at the time that he brought a present unlike anything anyone had ever given me, and it wasn't even my birthday. It almost matched the one that he always wore.

I remember thinking how uncomfortable it was with us standing on the front porch talking, and he didn't seem to be going anywhere. I don't think he had even been inside my house before, although I had been going to his house on a regular basis for months. Never once thinking about the new rules, I asked him to come in. And then invited him upstairs to my room. There were no intentions other than entertaining him the same way he had entertained me in his bedroom when we were studying. I was so excited by the jacket, and him just stopping by, and really didn't think anything of it. My bedroom was the only place that was mine in a family with no personal space and no boundaries.

I'm sure I was trying on my new jacket with fringe, and admiring it in my full length mirror, when all of the sudden my mother came home. I didn't realize she was home until it was way too late to get Nicky out of the front door. All of the sudden all the new rules went crashing through my head, and how much trouble I was going to be in and I had No-Idea-What-To-Do! So I shoved Nicky in the closet and told him to hide and be quiet, and I went downstairs.

I have never been a good liar, I have no poker face. Apparently when I went downstairs, my panic was written all over my face. My mother took one look at me wouldn't take "nothing is wrong" for an answer. She stomped through the house, looking for trouble. My bedroom was the first at the top of the stairs. She went into my room and immediately took in the new coat on the bed. She opened the closet door, and there was Nicky hiding in my closet with his eyes closed. She shrieked, "Get out of my house!" and the poor kid ran for his life. Amazingly, she let him go.

I was in a lot a trouble, but not as much as I thought I would be. Ultimately, my mother believed me that nothing had happened. She didn't really hold a grudge against Nicky, either.

When I was finally able to talk to Nicky again, I asked him why he had his eyes closed when my mother opened the closet. Do you remember being really little and playing hide and go seek? Do you remember being so young that you thought that if you couldn't see someone, they couldn't see you either? Maybe that is why peek-a-boo is so funny for very little kids. They really don't think you can see them. When Nicky heard my mother coming up the stairs, and into my room, he closed his eyes. He actually reverted back to childhood, and closed his eyes hoping that if she opened the closet door, she would not be able to see him.

Might I add he was 17 years old at the time, and over a foot taller than my mother? Like I said, I thought he was endearingly goofy. We broke up shortly thereafter, he kind of turned out to be a jerk. In later years he was upgraded to extreme jerk status. I'll write about that another time.




He just happened to have his eyes closed for this picture, which is what made me remember "the incident" to begin with.