Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides [242]
If one of the guys had a girlfriend there would be a girl around for a while. I stayed away from them, feeling they might guess my secret. I was like an immigrant, putting on airs, who runs into someone from the old country. I didn’t want to be found out, so remained tight-lipped. But I would have been laconic in that company in any case. They were all Deadheads, and that was what the talk was. Who saw Jerry on which night. Who had a bootleg of which concert. Matt had flunked out of high school but had an impressive mind when it came to cataloguing Dead trivia. He carried the dates and cities of their tour in his head. He knew the lyrics of every song, when and where the Dead had played it, how many times, and what songs they had played only once. He lived in expectation of certain songs being performed as the faithful await the Messiah. Someday the Dead were going to play “Cosmic Charlie” and Matt Larson wanted to be there to see creation redeemed. He had once met Mountain Girl, Jerry’s wife. “She was so fucking cool,” he said. “I would fucking love a woman like that. If I found a lady as cool as Mountain Girl, I’d marry her and have kids and all that shit like that.”
“Get a job, too?”
“We could follow the tour. Keep our babies in little sacks. Papoose style. And sell weed.”
We weren’t the only ones living in the park. Occupying some dunes on the other side of the field were homeless guys, with long beards, their faces brown from sun and dirt. They were known to ransack other people’s camps, so we never left ours unattended. That was pretty much the only rule we had. Someone always had to stand guard.
I hung around the Deadheads because I was scared alone. My time on the road made me see the benefits of being in a pack. We had left home for different reasons. They weren’t kids I would ever have been friends with in normal circumstances, but for that brief time I made do, because I had nowhere else to go. I was never at ease around them. But they weren’t especially cruel. Fights broke out when kids had been drinking, but the ethos was nonviolent. Everyone was reading Siddhartha. An old paperback got passed around the camp. I read it, too. It’s one of the things I remember most about that time: Cal, sitting on a rock, reading Hermann Hesse and learning about the Buddha.
“I heard the Buddha dropped acid,” said one Head. “That’s what his enlightenment was.”
“They didn’t have acid back then, man.”
“No, it was like, you know, a ‘shroom.”
“I think Jerry’s the Buddha, man.”
“Yeah!”
“Like when I fucking saw Jerry play that forty-five-minute space jam on ‘Truckin’ in Santa Fe,’ I knew he was the Buddha.”
In all these conversations I took no part. See Cal in the far underhang of the bushes, as all the Deadheads drift off to sleep.
I had run away without thinking what my life would be like. I had fled without having anywhere to run to. Now I was dirty, I was running out of money. Sooner or later I would have to call my parents. But for the first time in my life, I knew that there was nothing they could do to help me. Nothing anyone could do.
Every day I took the band to Ali Baba’s and bought them veggie burgers for seventy-five cents each. I opted out on the begging and the dope dealing. Mostly I hung around the mimosa grove, in growing despair. A few times I walked out to the beach to sit by the sea, but after a while I stopped doing that, too. Nature brought no relief. Outside had ended. There was nowhere