Around and Around

Today, I won’t write about what I want to write about. What I want to write about is Lupac the cat and her travails but Consort has astutely noted I’ve been writing about cats an awful lot lately. Soon, I will write about Lupac and her travails and we’ll all feel sorry for her and she’ll sneer at our pity, but today I am going to write about the least likely thing I ever did. Something so out of character, in fact, that when Consort first heard about it last night his eyes widened and he said dubiously, “You…!” This was especially pleasing since we’ve known each other over a decade and he assumed he knew every detail of my past life. He was in the room when I had my c-section so he’s even met some of my internal organs; that still irritates me on some level. And yet, I do have a few mysteries left. I have done things I’m not proud of. I have found myself in situations where I could do little more than bow my head and pray for the strength to see me through a dark and troubling experience.

Yes, I attended a Grateful Dead concert.

I like to think of myself as adventurous. Then again, I also like to think of myself as 5’9”. In reality, I’m happiest when eating something I’ve eaten before or listening to something I’ve listened to before, ideally while wearing some variation of the same khaki pants I’ve worn my entire adult life. For instance, I spent this past weekend reading a book about Patrick Henry College, a place dedicated to forming the next generation of evangelical politicians. To me, this was the perfect Quinn adventure; reading about someplace completely outside my world while sitting on my couch wearing my familiar clothes and feeling my cat sulk behind me.

[I promise you, I’ll bring you up to date on Lupac in the next post.]


But when I was twenty-two I was invited to join a friend at a Grateful Dead concert. I decided while the very thought of it made me nervous, I should consider it an adventure, something which might open up a whole new side of me. It hadn’t yet occurred to me that my personality might be an immovable object, my likes and dislikes carved in stone before I reached the age of maturity. I didn’t understand a great deal about myself and the world around me at the time.

For example, I didn’t understand that part of the Dead experience was to get there early and walk through what appeared to be a street bazaar situated in a country whose main exports were incense, body hair and whatever is the opposite of irony. I arrived with my friend and her mother. My friend’s family was wrapped in the sixties like a permanent poncho. My friend’s name was kind of a weather system and kind of a Platonic Ideal; let’s call her Raintruth.

Needless to say, they had seen the Dead many, many, many times and they were very familiar with the pre-show cavalcade. They bought their dinner and encouraged me to do the same. I’m a vegetarian but I’m not that kind of vegetarian; you know, the kind who likes a bean burrito with fingerprints. I’m the fussy kind. I asked around, to see if anyone had food which had been packaged in a large and anonymous building, preferably by Chinese prisoners who washed their hands, but no luck. Yes, there were bags of substances to be bought, but they had no relationship with the Kraft Corporation. My friend and her mother, having travelled all over the world living on local street food, had a digestive system capable of extracting nutrients from untreated sewage.

So now I was hungry. I was also coughing because we were walking though a nearly solid wall of smoke through which you could see nothing more than a flash of graying braid or the glint of sunlight off a dream-catcher. It was like walking through London in the 1870’s, only without Jack the Ripper. Or undergarments. Under the constant chatter of people buying grubby food or hemp backpacks, I noticed what appeared to be some music playing. Or rather, it was the same seventeen seconds of music, which had been playing for twenty minutes. Was someone’s cassette stuck? Do cassette tapes stick? I pointed out the sound to Raintruth. She cocked her head and focused on the noise, a pre-Raphaelite beagle hearing the bay of the fox hunt.

“That’s ‘Uncle John’s Band’, she said. “Berkeley…August ’75, I think.”

And with that, I understood a little more. I learned about the Dead bootleg tape industry, I learned that Raintruth was probably not going to find the humor in this and I learned I disliked Grateful Dead music very much. Someone once described the Dead as modern variation of bluegrass. I’m fine with bluegrass but this wasn’t bluegrass. This was the soundtrack to staring directly into the sun.

The small part of my brain which isn’t mean and horrible spoke up. Let’s try reserving judgment until we actually get inside the Forum and hear a single solitary song, okay? it snapped. Besides, they drove and you can’t sit outside for three hours so just suck it up and think of this as an adventure.

It was an adventure, all right. We got inside, the lights went down and several men who looked to have eaten a few fingerprinted burritos in their time ambled onstage. The audience cheered which I took to mean these were The Grateful Dead. I came of age in a time when “Rock God” meant “Deathly pale, thin and British.” My ideal rock star was Bryan Ferry. These appeared to be Bryan Ferry’s roadies. They began tuning their instruments. A few minutes passed. The woman next to me started spinning in circles, her hair and breasts flying around. I came to understand the band wasn’t tuning up; this was their first song. I had never heard it before but by the end I was singing along which wasn’t a great trick because the song lasted seventeen minutes and had one chord. Everyone around me was sort of spinning and sort of hopping. I had a sudden flash of insight: this is what American dancing would have looked like had black people never existed.

The song didn’t end so much as gently expire on the floor. Another song, nearly identical, began. The woman next to me, refreshed from a pull of something pinkish-grey in a water bottle, began to spin again, faster. Her hair whipped across my face, some actually brushed my lips. It tasted a bit like lentils. It was time for me to go. I raced up the aisle, prepared to sit outside the Forum in the dark and count not-so-distant gunshots to pass the time. As I dashed toward the exit, an older woman touched my shoulder and looked at me kindly. “Are you having a bad trip?” she asked, understandably assuming anyone running about at a Dead concert might be trapped in a horror of their own making, desperate for a wiser hand to lead them to safety.

She wasn’t entirely wrong, but I didn’t see her driving me back to West Hollywood. I answered, “Thanks, but I just need some air,” and I took my khaki-wearing, judgmental, hungry, novelty-despising self out into the clear and music-free night.