Tom Petty - Now And Then

This past summer on 6/29/13 my wife Nadia and I went to see the timeless Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers at the Target Center in Minneapolis, MN.  We had amazing front-row lower-deck seats right off the front-left corner of the stage.  At the age of 62 Tom’s hair was a little thinner and he looked a tad road-weary but not much.  Our show was the last on the tour but he still had plenty of energy to put on a kick-ass show full of deep cuts, covers and of course the hits from his vast repertoire of material from the Heartbreakers and the Traveling Wilburys.  There was not a lot of back-and-forth chatter with the audience and not much moving around.  There was no real light show or stage show to speak of and he was not even promoting a new album.  He was just out to play music and it was two hours of no-BS straight-ahead rock-and-roll.  He always comes off as a cool, laid-back dude who is having fun and knows his sh*t.

 

Further proof that he ‘knows his sh*t’ is his SiriusXM satellite radio show he has called ‘Tom Petty’s Buried Treasure’ on the ‘Deep Tracks’ channel.  I listen to it in my car on the way home from work where Tom plays tunes from the 50’s and 60’s that he grew up with and influenced him.  Not only do the deep cuts bring you back, but half the fun of the show is listening to Tom’s easy southern drawl between songs when he talks about the history of the song or the band with little known facts and stories and how they may relate to his life.  It is fascinating and educational and makes you wish Tom was your uncle.

 

During the concert I happened to look down at the folks on the floor and directly below us was my buddy B-Dog with his new girlfriend Beth, aka Li’l Treefrog.  He came over and said hi and then after the show he talked us into coming out for drinks.  B-Dog was extremely buzzed but in a fantastic mood as he told jokes and showed off his incredibly hot and extremely nice new girlfriend.  He had a surprise for us all as he led us to a fancy downtown hotel suite a couple blocks from the arena.  Despite a spilled bottle of vodka and some B-Dog wardrobe changes we had a good time chatting, drinking, eating Cherry Garcia ice cream and checking out the pictures I took from the concert.

 

As I said it was a great show and it got me thinking back to the other two times I saw Tom Petty.  The first time was 6/26/86 when Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers were the backing band for Bob Dylan.  It was at the H.H.H. Metrodome in downtown Minneapolis with the Grateful Dead playing two opening sets.  As a budding 20 year old college hippie I had liked Tom Petty as a kid and of course I liked Bob Dylan, but I was really there to see the Grateful Dead.  It was only my 3^rd Dead show but I got bit by the bug a year earlier and was really getting into them as I was phasing out of my Black Sabbath/Judas Priest/Iron Maiden high-school metal music and into the Grateful Dead.

 

The Dead played two sets including a strange but cool ‘Terrapin Station’ into ‘Estimated Prophet’ to open the 2^nd set but I could barely hear a word of anything that was said or sung from the stage because of the atrocious acoustics in the 60,000 seat inflatable Metrodome.  It was seriously unbelievable how bad it was.  I had seats up in the stands so I jumped over the wall down onto the wood planking covering the fake grass but it was just as bad.  We stuck out both sets of the Dead but left a few songs into the Dylan/Petty set because the sound was somehow even worse.  On a good day Bob Dylan is hard to understand, but in that huge inflatable bubble of white noise it was just sad so we left.

 

My girlfriend Lona, my buddy Mark and I went home and we packed for the road trip down to Alpine Valley, WI for two more Dead shows in the coming nights.  I had a pet Ball Python named Damien back at my parent’s home near Alpine Valley and for some reason I brought a rat with us for the road trip to bring to the snake.  Just outside of Minneapolis we picked up a hitchhiker who was heading to the Alpine Valley shows.  The guy thought we should name the rat so he picked a name like ‘Julius’ I believe.  We gave the guy a ride to Madison, WI before we parted ways…him heading on to Alpine Valley and us going to Waukesha to crash at our parents’ house and rest up for the next two nights.  In the morning we got up and drove the 20 miles to Alpine and set up our tents.  Eventually we found my buddy Rinehart Simpson, who had driven 18 hours straight overnight in his pickup truck from New Mexico to meet us at the show.  We enjoyed two great nights with the Dead which made up for the acoustically horrendous show in Minneapolis.

 

Okay, back to Tom Petty.  The next time I saw Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers was 9 years later at the same Alpine Valley Music Theatre on 9/16/95.  I was living in Madison then and working for WPS Insurance Company.  A horrible place to work but the birthplace of at least a dozen strong friendships including my best friend Mitch.  Another friend from there was my buddy Glenn Kampson, one of the funniest men in the United States.  He was a Tom Petty fan and when the concert was announced he asked if I wanted to go.  A full day/night with just me and Glenn?  I wondered if I could handle it.  I decided LSD would be required to get through all that so I located some good clean paper acid mailed in from California.  It came in block sheets of 100 hits, and when 9 sheets were placed together it made up a picture of Jesus.  Communion.  Lord help me.  We filled a cooler with beers and began the hour-plus drive to Alpine Valley.

Glenn drove his truck and we drank beers and laughed as we took a back roads short-cut that Glenn thought he knew about.  We promptly got lost so Glenn decided to pull over at some out-of-the-way roadhouse strip-joint.  I have never been a fan of strip clubs as I think it is very weird for a bunch of guys to sit around with boners staring at hot, bored-looking girls that they will never have a chance to touch or know.  Weird, creepy and ultimately frustrating.  But Glenn wanted some food so we strapped ourselves in and ordered burgers and beers and watched the show.  I finally managed to pull Glen out of there by reminding him of the concert tickets we had and we hit the road with directions to Alpine.  We got lost again but eventually found the lines of cars leading to the beautiful outdoor amphitheatre that I had seen 14 Grateful Dead shows and countless other concerts at.

It was a fantastic show and Glen and I had a blast out on the lawn.  With him drinking and me tripping our two personalities were perfectly tuned to each other and that band at that venue on that night.  We laughed uncontrollably for hours until my face seriously hurt and I thought my perma-grin cheeks were going to stay that way forever.  I remember at one point trying to climb up on Glen’s shoulders but he shook me off.  Besides our spirits in tune, so was Tom and his band as they tore up the Wisconsin night with all of our favorites.  This was Tom’s ‘Dogs With Wings’ tour and it’s interesting to note that 12 of the 22 songs he played that night were also on the setlist 18 years later when I next saw him with Nadia.  It just goes to show how great both shows were.

After the concert we hopped in Glenn’s truck and started the trek back to Madison.  Of course we got lost within minutes as we bounced from small town to small town trying to find Madison.  Glenn obviously should not have been driving and it was stupid of us, but I remember one particular quiet little town with actual cobblestone streets that was not ready for Glenn.  It was a quaint little place and ‘downtown’ was nothing but a crossroads with houses lining the streets between the closed corner-store and several churches.  When we pulled into the main square Glenn rolled down his window, leaned out and started yelling indecipherable gibberish at the few pedestrians who happened to be walking while his truck slowly rolled through town.  I think he was frustrated and trying get directions but nobody including myself could understand a word he was saying and all I could do was cringe at the helplessness of the situation.

After getting no help there we rolled on and eventually found a main highway that brought us safely back to Madison.  It was a fantastic night.  One of three and hopefully more to come with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.   As my musical heroes (and I) get older I am more and more of the feeling that I need to see them every chance I get when they come around in concert, as it may be the last time.  Here are setlists for the shows:

6/26/86 – H.H.H Metrodome – Minneapolis, MN

Bob Dylan’s backing band.


9/16/95 – Alpine Valley Music Theatre – E. Troy, WI

1)      Love Is A Long Road

2)      You Don’t Know How It Feels

3)      Listen To Her Heart

4)      I Won’t Back Down

5)      Free Fallin’

6)      You Wreck Me

7)      Diamond Head

8)      Mary Jane’s Last Dance

9)      Don’t Come Around Here No More

10)   A Higher Place

11)   It’ll All Work Out

12)   Learning To Fly

13)   Lonely Weekends

14)   Breakdown

15)   Cabin Down Below

16)   It’s Good To Be King

17)   Drivin’ Down To Georgia

18)   Refugee

19)   Runnin’ Down A Dream

Encore

20)   Honey Bee

21)   Gloria

22)   American Girl 

6/29/13 – Target Center – Minneapolis, MN 

1)      So You Want To Be A Rock ‘n’ Roll Star

2)      Love Is A Long Road

3)      I Won’t Back Down

4)      Baby, Please Don’t go

5)      Here Comes My Girl

6)      Mary Jane’s Last Dance

7)      Free Fallin’

8)      A Woman In Love (It’s Not Me)

9)      Cabin Down Below

10)   Tweeter And the Monkey Man

11)   Rebels

12)   It’s Good To Be King

13)   Learning To Fly

14)   Yer So Bad

15)   I Should Have Known It

16)   Refugee

17)   Runnin’ Down A Dream

Encore

18)   Don’t Come Around Here No More

19)   You Wreck Me

20)   American Girl

Aids Benefit (5/27/89) With The Grateful Dead

It was May of 1989, a month after my girlfriend Lona and I had gotten safely back from the trip that I wrote about in my 6/28/13 blog entry:  “1989 Grateful Dead Spring Tour”.  I was 23 years old and living in Minneapolis.  One Sunday morning I was perusing through the Classifieds section of the paper looking for anything interesting and I saw a roundtrip ticket from Minneapolis to Los Angeles for $100 for the upcoming weekend.  Awesome!  This was back in the day when it did not matter what name was on an airline ticket.  Anybody could use anyone else’s ticket and you could sell them in the newspaper want ads for whatever price you could get. 

 

I happened to know that the Grateful Dead were playing a huge all-day charity festival that next Saturday at Oakland-Alameda County Stadium on 5/27/89.  It was called the ‘In Concert Against Aids Benefit’ with a bunch of bands that were, in order:  Tower Of Power, Joe Satriani, Los Lobos, John Fogerty, Tracy Chapman, and then the Dead closing it out with two full sets.  My girlfriend Lona’d had her quota of the Dead on spring tour the previous month, but I always craved more and knew that the only shows I would be seeing until the New Year’s Eve shows were 3 nights at Alpine Valley in July.

 

I wondered if I could make this work.  Los Angeles is not too far from Oakland right?  I figured I would just fly in to L.A. and hitchhike up the coast to the Bay Area.  No problem.  Well I checked a map and realized it is a pretty full day’s drive, and my friend Sean Morrison who hitchhikes a lot made me realize that it would suck trying to get a ride out of LAX airport to the freeway heading north.  Discouraged but not deterred I called the airlines and found out that round-trip flights from L.A. to San Francisco were only $100.  Lona and I had already made plans to go to Greece the following spring and were trying to save money, so the $200 total cost was more than I wanted to spend.  I had already gotten the bug in my system though so I just had to do it.  I splurged on airfare but would make up for it by not getting a hotel.  I would fly out Friday morning and come back Monday night and only miss two days of school.  Perfect.

 

I called the newspaper ad and bought the ticket issued to a ‘Kelly Swanson’.  I was flying to L.A. as a girl.  That was okay…I had hair halfway down my back and they did not check ID’s back then.  So that Friday it was a beautiful, warm, sunny morning and I jumped on my motorcycle with nothing but a thin jean jacket and a little bit of cash for the concert ticket and food.  I parked my bike at the Minneapolis airport, boarded my first flight and started the weekend.  After a brief layover in LAX airport I got to SFO airport that afternoon and decided I would head over to Oakland on the ‘BART’ commuter train.  I would see what is up at the Stadium, figure out a place to sleep there and get ready for the next day’s festivities.

 

I got off the train near the Stadium and was not sure what to do.  There is nothing around there but highways and the Oakland Coliseum which is right next to the Stadium.  From previous trips I knew there was some hotels about a mile down the road, but I did not have the money for that so I decided I would just wing it and hopefully meet some cool Deadheads who would give me a place to crash.  So I started cutting through the Coliseum parking lot to get to the Stadium parking lot.  There were tons of cars in the Coliseum lot but I was not sure who was playing there that night.  This was not the usual ‘Dead-friendly’ lot full of VW buses and kind hippies milling around.  It was dark now and suddenly I heard some dude slowly mutter to his two friends:  “Hey look over there, it’s a f*cking Deadhead.”  And then they started chasing me.

 

I was a soccer player and there was no way they were going to catch me, but I had no idea where I was going.  I zig-zagged through the cars, put some distance between me and the three dudes, and eventually came across a 20-foot high hill that had a bunch of bushes circled around the base and a lamppost with more bushes sticking up out of the top.  I ran up there and figured I was safe because I could hide in the bushes and would be able to see/hear if anyone was coming up the hill.  So I abandoned my idea of finding any friendly faces and I hunkered down in the bushes to sleep for the night.  I used a loaf of sourdough bread that I had bought at the San Francisco airport for a pillow, but it was a bit cold with just my thin jacket for cover.

 

The next morning (Saturday) I got up with the sun, looked around, and I was on a hill between the two parking lots.  I walked down to the Stadium side of the hill and there were already some friendly tie-dyed Deadheads starting to spill into the lot and I was happy again.  I walked around, met some folks and got free food from some people who were cooking up breakfast.  A Grateful Dead parking lot back in the day was a big, friendly, traveling carnival...everybody partying and selling food and beer and clothing and jewelry and whatever else you could think of.  Eventually (and inevitably) I ran into some friends I knew.  Another thing about ‘back in the day’ was that it was impossible to go to a Dead show (it did not matter what city you were in) and you would always run into some friends.  So I ran into Tommy-the-Freak who used to live in Minneapolis but had moved out to the Bay area, and a few other people I knew and I was ‘home’.

 

I bought a $25 ticket and we all went into the show during the amazing Joe Satriani set.  Then Los Lobos had us all dancing and I was having a blast, but I was hungry so Tommy handed me a chocolate-chip cookie with a wink.  At this point in my life I had already quit smoking pot, but I did not care if the cookie was spiked with weed because I was starving.  It tasted awesome and I wolfed it down, but about an hour later things started changing.  I was giggling and floating and having the time of my life because I was hiiiiigh as hell.  But after awhile I was too high.  After quitting weed for a couple years I had forgotten how to be stoned and I got all paranoid and did not want to talk to people.  So I ditched my friends and started wandering around the huge crowd of 33,000 people and just enjoyed myself and my freedom and the music and the beautiful day.  It was general admission so I went up in the stands, on the grass, all over the Stadium.

 

The foul-mouthed comedians between sets were funny but it was a bit strange at a Dead show.  John Fogerty came on and his set with Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir of the Dead sitting in was phenomenal and I was starting to feel better.  Then Tracy Chapman came on and I got really mellow, soulful, introspective...and then just bored.  But finally darkness fell and the Grateful Dead came on with Clarence Clemons sitting in for most of both sets while I danced on the grass near the soundboard.  Not a great show by the Dead’s standards, but a good large-crowd festival-type show.  The ‘Fire On The Mountain’ without the ‘Scarlet Fire’ preceding it was a bit weird, but after seeing them 40 times at that point it was always cool seeing something weird just for the fact that it was different.

 

After the show I never did reconnect with my friends, but I was partying out in the lot and I met some cool people.  They let me sleep on the floor under the sink in their hotel room.  The next day (Sunday) I got up, thanked them and took the BART back over the Bay from Oakland to San Francisco.  My plane did not leave till Monday morning so I had 24 hours to hang out.  I went over to Haight-Ashbury, walked around for awhile, checked out all the freaks and then walked over to Golden Gate Park.

 

It was another beautiful sunny day and I walked around for a couple hours till I came across a bunch of people playing softball.  After watching them for a bit they invited me to play and help myself to their coolers of beer.  So I spent the afternoon playing softball and drinking beer and having a blast.  I am not sure why, but up until that day and ever since then I have never hit the ball that well in my life.  I am normally not that good but I was clocking home-run after home-run until at one point one of the guys from the other team tried to trip me as I rounded third base.  They were getting sick of me so I started hitting grounders.

 

Finally late afternoon they called it quits on the softball.  I thanked them and walked back up to the Haight and hung out for awhile to kill time.  I was a bit lonely but took comfort knowing that I would be home in my bed the next night.  When it got dark I jumped back on the BART and headed out to the airport south of the city.  I had a little bit of money left so I bought another loaf of sourdough bread at the airport and ate until the smell of it was making me sick.  Then I found a HUGE potted plant way down on the end of one of the terminals in a gate that was dark and did not look like it was being used.  I pushed the plant over to one corner of the gate and I slept on the floor behind it with what was left of the bread for my pillow.

 

The next day I got up, flew home, and lo and behold Minnesota was being slammed with a freezing-rain ice/sleet storm.  Armed with only my skimpy little jean jacket, tee-shirt and jeans, I found my motorcycle out in the cold dark lot, chipped the ice off of it and somehow got it started.  I was living near the University of Minnesota campus in Dinkytown, and to this day that was coldest I have ever been on that 45-minute trip from the airport to home.  I remember slowly, carefully going down the I-35W freeway with ice building up on my bare knuckles and my glasses.  Occasionally I would try to wipe the ice off my glasses so I could see, but they would immediately ice up again.  It was slow going and miserably cold but I eventually made it home and warmed up.  When it was all said and done it was a hell of a great weekend.  Here are the setlists for John Fogerty's awesome set and the Grateful Dead's two sets:

                JOHN FOGERTY

One Set: Born On The Bayou, Green River, Down On The Corner, Rock And Roll Girl, Centerfield, Proud Mary, The Midnight Special, Bad Moon Rising, Fortunate Son, E1: Susie Q, E2: Long Tall Sally

Lineup: John Fogerty, Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir - guitar & vocals
              Randy Jackson - bass
              Steve Jordan - drums.

GRATEFUL DEAD

Set 1: Touch Of Grey, Greatest Story Ever Told, Althea, Walkin' Blues, Iko Iko*, Stuck Inside a Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again*, Bird Song*, Promised Land*

Set 2: Hell In A Bucket*, Fire On The Mountain*, Blow Away*, Truckin'* > Drums > Space > I Will Take You Home, The Other One, Wharf Rat, Lovelight*, E: Brokedown Palace*

* w/Clarence Clemons on saxophone.

Who's The Best?

Recent email exchange at work:

 

From: Krista Tappan
Sent: Wednesday, October 30, 2013 9:37 AM
To: Sneaky Sweets
Subject: RE:

Omg thanks!!!!!!  Thank you for all of your help…you are the BEST!

Krista Tappan
Enrollment Specialist


From: Sneaky Sweets
Sent: Wednesday, October 30, 2013 9:56 AM
To: Krista Tappan
Subject: RE:

Aww, you’re the best Krista!

Or maybe the second best to be honest…you’re right, I’m the best.  Well, then there’s Adrian Peterson…he’s pretty good too…so we’ll make him the 2^nd best and you’re the 3^rd best!  Although…my Uncle Jim is super cool…not as cool as Adrian though so we’ll put him at 3^rd best and you’re a close 4^th best!  Oh wait…I forgot about Keith Richards…only the coolest guitarist in the coolest band ever…the Rolling f*cking Stones…we’re going to have to put him in at 2^nd best and bump everyone else down 1 slot.  So…here it is…I’m the best, Keith Richards is the 2^nd best, Adrian Peterson is the 3^rd best, then my Uncle Jim at 4^th best, and you’re right there at 5^th best!  Cool!  Oh sh*t, wait…I totally forgot about Al Pacino.  Dog Day Afternoon…Scarface…say hello to my little friend…c’mon, so awesome.  He’s cooler than Adrian, but not as cool as Keith.  Okay, okay…so here’s the final tally:

I’m the best.
Keith Richards is 2nd best.

Al Pacino is 3^rd best.

Adrian Peterson is 4^th best.

Uncle Jim is 5^th best.

Krista Tappan is 6^th best.

 

Okay then, thanks, and have a great day!!

 

 

From: Krista Tappan
Sent: Wednesday, October 30, 2013 9:58 AM
To: Sneaky Sweets
Subject: RE:

 

6^th best!  I’ll take it!!!  Thanks…LMAO!!!

 

Jerk-Moves

I was listening to our local morning radio show 93X on the way to work the other morning, and they were having a ‘Jerk-Off’ contest for tickets to some concert.  They were having people call in on the air live and tell their story of a time where they pulled a jerk-move or did something that made them come off as a complete jerk.  I tried to call in and tell them a story of my own, but I could not get through as I just kept getting a busy signal.  I have been on the air before with those guys (see my 9/7/12 blog entry ‘STD’) and I thought they would enjoy the following ‘jerk’ story.

It was February of 2007.  My then girlfriend at the time Nadia and I had driven from Minneapolis down to New Orleans for a wedding of the daughter of a friend of mine.  Nadia and I were in the French Quarter at a gift shop and I noticed in the postcard section a huge ‘Mammy’ postcard with the typical heavy-set black cartoon woman on the cover.  My friend Penny McCartney is not a racist or anything, but I knew she was into the history and collected that stuff.  So I bought the card and a stamp so I could mail it to her right away and have it postmarked from New Orleans.  I wrote something short and quick like:  “Hi Penny, I know you like this Mammy stuff so I thought of you when I saw this.”  I dropped it into the nearest mailbox and that was that.  Cool, right?

No.  Not only is Penny not a racist, she is a lawyer managing the State of Colorado’s Civil Rights Division.  As the state counterpart to the federal civil rights law she is responsible for enforcing Colorado’s Anti-Discrimination Act.  And without thinking about what I was doing, I mailed the postcard to her work!  It was the only address I had, and I had been mailing her cd’s and other correspondence to that address for years.  So like always I just used the one address I had for Penny and off went the mammy postcard to the office of the State of Colorado’s Civil Rights Division.

A couple weeks later I got an email from Penny.  “Do you have any idea what you have done to me?!”  Uh oh.  My mind raced.  What??  What did I do?!  “The postcard!” she screamed online.  She then proceeded to tell me how the large black female receptionist in her office had eventually, wordlessly handed over the mammy postcard to her with an evil glare.  But only after she had passed it around to all of the other people in the clerical department for a few days before finally giving it up to Penny.  The entire angered department then proceeded to f*ck her life up for years afterwards with delayed deliveries, dropped phone calls and lost mailings.  It was so bad that a couple of years later this large black female receptionist was the catalyst for a phone call that Penny received from a psych ward.  The receptionist had been admitted as an inpatient to the facility and they were obligated to call Penny and warn her that the woman had made direct threats to her therapist that she wanted to “kick Penny’s ass”.  Wow.  My simple two-minute goodwill gesture of sending a postcard to a friend totally screwed her over at work for years.

That particular jerk-move was not on purpose and I felt really bad, but a couple others were definitely on purpose and I enjoyed them immensely.  In the fall of 1985 my best friend from high school Mark Smith moved into my dorm room with me at the University of Minnesota.  We had a suite, each with our own bedrooms and a living room in between.  He fancied himself a clever jokester, so one night I thought I would show him a neat trick by waiting till he went to bed in his room and then I rigged up the ol’ water-bucket-on-the-door trick.  It worked to perfection the next morning at about 5am when the dog we were keeping in our room started whining to go out and pee.  Mark opened his door and “Blammo!”, the large bucket of water perched atop his door and attached by an elaborate system of strings and a pulley completely soaked him from head to foot.  So awesome.

Another time in the early 1990’s I was at a house-party with a bunch of people from my first wife Lona’s work.  I did not really know any of them and I was bored and not enjoying myself much.  At one point I got up to use the bathroom.  I was pointed down a hallway but was not sure which door was for the bathroom.  The first door I tried turned out to be a bedroom.  I started to back out and close the door but then I noticed a camera sitting on the dresser.  Nobody was looking so I went in, turned on the lights, closed the door and I took a picture of my naked butt.  I had gotten the idea from a new show that was sweeping the nation, 'The Simpsons'.  I put the camera back and went to find the bathroom.  I forgot all about it until a couple of months later when Lona asked me if I had taken a picture of my ass with the owner of the house’s camera.  This was back when there was not digital cameras…we all used actual 35mm film.  The couple had brought the film in to be developed and were quite dismayed when they got their photos back from the Fotomat and one of them was a picture of a butt.  The pictures were date-stamped so they figured out that it happened at their party, and by process of elimination eventually figured out it was me.  Good clean fun.

Probably the worst jerk-move I ever pulled though was on Memorial Day weekend in 1991.  I was living at Lona’s parent’s house in Waukesha, WI.  Like any good blue-collared Wisconsin folks they liked to drink a lot and threw a lot of parties.  I loved living there.  Her parents Kenny and Nancy treated me like one of their own, and Kenny was basically my best friend.  So that Memorial Day her parents threw a big bbq party complete with a keg, tons of food, and dozens of family and friends.  I had a beer bong with me from my college days and eventually brought that out.  We were out in the back yard and I was showing people how to down a beer in seconds with the apparatus.  Pretty soon everybody was trying it and loving it.  Kenny tried it…Nancy tried it…even Grandma tried it.  It was a huge hit.

We were all having a great time and then suddenly Lona’s little brother Corey showed up with all of his big-shot high school football buddies.  They strolled in wearing their letter jackets, noticed the beer bong on the table near the keg and scoffed.  The guys bragged that nobody could down a beer as fast as them and Corey claimed that he was the fastest.  I peered at him and formulated a quick plan.  Earlier that day when Kenny and I were at the liquor store buying the keg I noticed a 6-pack of ‘Pepper Beer’ on the shelf.  It was from Mexico and each bottle had a jalapeno pepper floating in it.  I liked hot spicy stuff so I thought I would give it a try and bought a 6-pack.  It was god-awful hot and not very enjoyable.  With each flaming-hot sip your body would crave cool liquid relief, so you would instinctively take another sip and just compound your misery.  It was a novelty item at best and nothing I would ever buy again.

So after listening to Corey brag about how fast he could down a beer-bong, I challenged him to a dual.  We would take turns, somebody would time us, and we would just see who was really the fastest.  He nodded, smiled and all his football buddies clapped him on the back and assured him that he would kick my ass.  So Kenny got out a stop-watch and I grabbed the beer-bong and went in to the kitchen to fill it up with beer.  But instead of filling it with Miller High Life from the keg, I of course popped open a pepper beer and filled it with that.  I brought the apparatus outside and while everyone at the party was gathered around us in a circle to watch, I tipped my head back and put the tube to my lips.

At the last second though I lowered it back down and said:  “You think you’re the big-shot, you go first.  Show me how it’s done.”  So I handed it over to Corey.  He smiled confidently, tipped his head back and downed the entire pepper beer in about 2 seconds.  Damn, he was fast.  He looked up and started to smile but his look of triumph instantly turned to pain and fear.  He dropped to his knees and liquids started pouring out of mouth, nose, eyes and pores.  He was puking up beer and snot was hanging out of his nose while tears and sweat were running down his face.  He had no idea what had happened to him and he was freaking out as his body was desperately trying to rid itself of the offending liquid intruder.

Everyone’s laughter quickly turned to concern and I felt terrible.  I grabbed some paper towels and tried to help clean him off after he stopped hacking and drowning in his own puke and snot.  Corey was a great guy and I felt bad about reducing him to a puddle.  It was the ultimate jerk-move and one that I always felt bad about.  I am sure everyone has pulled few jerk-moves out there…it happens…just be careful.

Homeless

I have a real problem with people being homeless.  As I posted in my 8/27/12 blog entry ‘Down By The River’, back in college in the mid-80’s my friends and I spent a lot of time exploring the banks of the Mississippi River and climbing on the various bridges over the river in Minneapolis.  In our many explorations we came upon a lot of homeless people living on the riverbank and under the bridges.  Sometimes they would have a dirty old mattress to sleep on, or just some blankets or towels…but no home.  I had never seen that before and it blew my mind that people had to live like that.  They never bothered us and we did not bother them, but their condition always bothered me.  I was sleeping in a nice warm bed in my expensive dorm room at my fancy college, and they had literally nothing.

Well I decided I could change that in the only way I knew how at the time:  beer and cigarettes.  So every once in awhile me and a friend or two would grab a case of beer, a few packs of smokes and head down to the river.  We would find some friendly homeless people and invite them to join us for the afternoon.  We would smoke cigs, drink beer and listen to their stories.  Everyone has a story.  Some funny, some meaningless, but mostly sad.  I am not sure it helped, but I think just having someone to talk to that did not look down on them was good for them.  Hopefully it made them feel like it was not always them against the world…that some people out there cared a little bit.

As I posted in my 8/16/13 blog entry ‘Austria’, Lona and I spent a sunny afternoon in Vienna in the summer of 1990 hanging out with three homeless people drinking beer and smoking cigarettes.  We had a lot of fun, but I had a real hard time dealing with the concept that some people have to sleep in parks while some people sleep in mansions.  The people we met that day all used to have homes, but fell on hard times and ended up living on the streets.  Could it happen to anyone?

I have more or less always had a home.  Even when I was backpacking in Europe with Lona that summer in 1990 we knew that when we got back to the States we would probably stay at her parent’s house in Waukesha, WI until we got on our feet again and found a place to live.  We eventually did just exactly that, but when we first got back in September I got in a huge fight with Lona.  I was so incredibly hurt, bewildered and angry that I grabbed my bank-book, some clothes, all my cassettes, and drove my ’74 Dodge Charger from Waukesha up to Minneapolis, MN and couch-hopped at various friends houses for a few months.  I did not have a ‘home’, but I always had a place to stay thanks to the kindness of my friends.

It was a crazy few months in which I ended up dropping almost $4,000, mostly in bars buying rounds for my friends, drowning my sorrows and burning through a lot of my savings.  I was not eating much that fall as my mind was not at all on food.  I would occasionally eat a turkey-bagel sandwich, but mostly I was just full of self-pity and bent on having what I thought was a great time at all costs.  One day when I was at my friend Gary Paulson’s house I looked in the mirror and I realized that I was pretty skinny.  I hopped on his scale and was dismayed to see that it read 147 lbs.  I had been around 170 lbs a year ago in college and that was about the right weight for my 5’10” frame.  Ah well, I didn’t care.  Back to the bar, and at the end of the night on to whatever couch was available.

There were various accidents during those drunken months.  One night at a party a bottle of beer slipped out of my hand into the sink.  I tried to grab it and save it, but my hand arrived at the bottle just as it was shattering in the bottom of the sink.  The broken top of the bottle sunk into my right middle-finger and sliced it deep, flapping it right down to the bone.  Another night I was at my friend Randi’s house fixing her an authentic Greek meal like the hundreds of ones I had recently enjoyed in Greece.  I was cutting up a cucumber for a Greek salad when I cut off the tip of my left index finger.  Just a small chunk of flesh and fingernail, but it came clean off and bled for 3 days.

So I was technically ‘homeless’ for a few months, but I always had a roof over my head and friends around.  I eventually patched things up with Lona and went back to her parent’s house and lived there for a year before the two of us moved on to Madison, WI.  We continued to follow the Grateful Dead around the country, but always had a home to go back to.  Unlike some of the Deadheads we encountered on our travels that basically lived wherever the Grateful Dead were.  ‘Home’ was their VW bus and they would travel around selling their wares in the parking lots of wherever the Dead were playing that night.  It was a gypsy type of life and had its romantic charm, but I was always glad to be back home after seeing a run of Dead shows.

One night after the first of two Grateful Dead shows at Madison Square Garden in New York City, on 9/17/93 to be exact, we decided to walk back to our hotel which was just a block off Times Square.  It was me, Lona, our friend Travelin’ Dave that I had met in the dorms in Minneapolis, and his friend Attic from Milwaukee.  We were all high on acid as well as the good feelings that we had from the wonderful show that night.  On the walk back we marveled at the late-night hustle and bustle and lights of mid-town Manhattan.  When we got to the corner of where our hotel was a scraggly guy asked if I had any spare change.  I was all happy and feeling groovy, but did not feel like pulling my wallet out so I offered him a few cigarettes instead.  We got to talking and he was a really nice guy.

He walked with us and when we got to the entrance of our hotel I told him to wait there while I ran up to the room and grabbed a bunch of beers.  I came back down and we had a party right there on the stoop.  A couple more homeless guys came over and we smoked and drank and talked.  They were really nice and very thankful and polite.  One guy was so thankful though that he offered to give me a blowjob.  Yikes.  I thought it was a nice gesture, but I politely declined.  I suppose it was all he had to offer, but I quickly decided that there are some things that are not better than nothing.

About 10 years ago I spent a summer volunteering at a homeless shelter one night a week, cooking and handing out food at the shelter.  The people that came in were almost always genuinely thankful and appreciative, but they all had an aura about them.  An extremely noticeable aura of sadness and pain.  When you look past the dirty hair and shabby clothes you see a real person though.  A real person who is sad, scared, mentally and maybe physically in pain, and completely desperate and hopeless.  It makes you want to take them home, let them take a shower, wash their clothes, give them as much food as they can eat, and send them off with a bunch of money.  It would be so cool to be rich and be able to do that.

The homeless do not want to be in the situation that they are in.  Nobody would want that.  People often see a beggar on the corner and say:  “Get a job!”, but it’s not that simple.  Someone who has been wearing the same clothes for months and has no identification is not just going to be able to walk into McDonald’s and get a job.  A homeless man with mental problems or drug/alcohol addictions is not going to get that door-greeter job at Wal-Mart.  When I see the guy at the intersection holding up a ‘homeless’ sign, if I have my lunch on me I will hand him that, but if not I occasionally will hand him or her a $5 or $10.  I know they may just head to the nearest liquor store and get a bottle of booze, but so what?  Can you blame them?  Hopefully they will buy some food, but I am not going to be the one to begrudge them a buzz.

Statistics vary widely because there is no way to accurately count the homeless, but it just blows my mind that there are as many as 3.5 million people in the United States that experience homelessness in any given year.  I am assuming most everyone reading this has a home.  But can you imagine not?