Memory Of a Free Festival — Bigger Than Christmas

I don’t know how far I can keep going with this thing. I don’t know how much sadness and misery I can keep foisting on the world as if I’ve never known a moment’s happiness. And God knows I have. So many little moments that filled me with sunlight and waves of love. They seem disconnected, but they really aren’t. I will play this song on loop until I think of as many beautiful little moments I’ve been gifted with until I just can’t think of any more. I’ve lived such a charmed life. Just because I’ve virtually lived on heroin for most of my adult life and sit here to tell about it with a smile on my face listening to David singing “Memory of a Free Festival.”

My Mom would let me stay home from school often, and we’d go on picnics or attempt some sort of fishing. It didn’t matter that we had no idea what we were doing. We were with each other. We were so happy. I swam in my Mom’s love. My Dad’s too, but it was always my Mom where I felt the most at ease. Later other things happened. The first kiss. The first taste the first time doing THAT. That was such a mind-blowing moment in life with Robin in that ramshackle apartment with Music for Airports playing all night long. Whole new worlds sprang forth, and I never wanted to leave them.

Maybe all the pain and sadness in life make the other moments so powerful. Just so many random moments of magic. Sitting at a table in an Italian restaurant with some friends and Phillip Seymour Hoffman. He was in LA filming “Moneyball.” He drove up to LA from Long Beach to meet us. He’d bought the rights to the book about the baseball team I’d started. He was going to direct the film version and play me. As surreal as it gets. He died about a year later, but we stood outside and smoked at one point, and we talked like two happy sober junkies. Happy. “Baby, won’t you keep me happy.”

I remember the first time sleeping with Jana. Jana had the most beautiful full head of immaculate black hair. Just miles of it. Christ, she was and still is gorgeous. Every girl who ever accepted me was stunning. God’s honest truth. I’ve been one lucky motherfucker when it came to the women in my life. I couldn’t keep any of them, but I wrap every memory around me like a diaphanous slip of starlight. My hair was always long as well. At some point, our hair got so tangled up in each other. We just started laughing, “Fuck, we have a lot of hair going on here, huh?” I kissed her for the next year.

It’s so easy to focus on the happiness of love. Because it’s real, and it’s all that really counts. Leslie was my first real love. I remember lying in my bed the day after we first made out. It seemed to me that we should just be doing that forever. Just put everything else in life on hold and just kiss and wherever else that took us forever. I called her to try and make such plans, but it occurred to me not everyone thought this was, but it was good enough. I was in love, and while I surely hurt her, I know she knows that I love her deeply. I never stopped. I just became too dangerous for her, so I left. But I love her to this very moment while listening to the Pixies play “Gouge Away.” But other sparkles of light spring through as well. It seems so much easier to elicit emotion from people with tales of sadness. I’ve traveled in it. It’s been my stock in trade. And while it’s all true, it’s somewhat lazy. I want to make you smile. I want to fill your heart with light and feathers and dogs’ eyes when they first wake up to see you looking down at them. And I already find myself trying to pull the beautiful from the ugly. The ugly seems to swell and crash upon the shore and drown out the little trickles of the streams of joy. But I’ll do it. I’ll sit here, and I will fight for it and make my best showing.

And then there’s the part of me, obviously, who says, you? Why would you deserve happiness after all you’ve done to Leslie, and Jana, and Denise and Trish and Stephanie and Nery and Your Mom and Dad and others I’m shamefully forgetting. You’re lucky you have a single fuck to hold onto. But I rail against that. I’ve done some good things too.

A few years ago, I noticed a couple little kids and their mothers stopping to play in the garden on the side of my house. The elementary school at the end of the block would let out, and my street would fill with parents parking to walk down and pick up their kids. Just little kids. 1st, 2nd, maybe 3rd grade. One day, I was on my front porch when I noticed them stopping and the kids fiddling in the plants. One of the moms caught my eyes and walked over. She said, “I hope you don’t mind, but they call your garden the fairie garden, and they like to visit it each day.” Jesus.

I loved that. I started putting little “treasures” out there for them to find. Just little things like coins, little metal stars, and broken jewelry. I usually didn’t see them each day, but one of the little kids, who had surely been coerced by her Mom, haltingly walked up to me and handed me a little note she’d written. She asked me to give this thank you note to the fairies if I happened to see them. That made every awful thing I’ve ever done worth it. As Lou Reed would say, “I thought I was someone else. Someone good.” I shared this story years ago on Facebook, but it’s no less powerful for me now. Lord knows I’ve done some good things too.

We go through this life keeping score of the good and the bad. We hope it’s at least a wash, if not slightly better than worse. But who are we to tell. We’re living it. We can’t really tell. The bad feels so awful and the good so wonderful it’s just so easy to get overwhelmed and lose track.

I’ll admit that I turned “Happy” off. I’m just listening to whatever comes on. I’m listening to Sweet Jane by the Cowboy Junkies. That’s the record I listened to on repeat when I finally gave in and started getting loaded in Baltimore before Paul and Arron came to bring me home. But, later that year, I saw them live at the Wiltern. That was beautiful enough, but one of my most cherished memories was seeing Townes Van Zandt open for them. He was near the end. But he was Townes. He was God. I got to see him one last time before he passed. I can’t say that’s happiness, but it’s a gift, and a gift will do. Same with seeing the Go-Betweens. I got that as well. I’ve been pretty lucky. I’ve been in the right place and the right time many times.

I got to sing “Wild Horses” for a room full of documentary filmmakers one day after a crazy series of events. They paid me two tickets to see the Stones play Sticky Fingers front to back for about 200 people. Jana and I went. The right place at the right time. Even the wrong times and places seemed ok.

And Jesus, all the Dead shows. Friends packed into cars headed to God know where to be a part of something that felt much more like church than a concert. The music was always incidental. It was the community. I never felt so free to be me. No matter what I was wearing. No matter what I’d ingested or didn’t ingest, I felt accepted. I got really lucky falling under the Dead’s sway for those years when It overtook me. Such joy and love and lovely confusion. I think I turned away from it too soon, but what can you do. Life pulls you along like a goofy puppy on a brand new blue leash. I wish I’d taken my Dad that one night, but I can’t dwell on that. I just can’t.

A couple of years ago, I went to my friends’ house in Joshua Tree. We’d planned this trip for a couple months. There were 5 of us. We sat in a circle in the sand, and the sun and each of us said some intention we wanted for the day. It was such a beautiful day. We had this little ritual, and then we all took LSD. I remember sirring at a table outside about 30 minutes later, talking to one of my friends. And wham, It hit me like a fucking torpedo. I had to get up and walk back into the yard with trees and sun. I remember there was a tree of some sort that was just so vividly iridescently green. I touched it. I couldn’t imagine anything being that green. I hugged the tree. I fell in love with it. I realized there was just so much love in the world, and I’d been pushing it away for years. Cynically and full of fear and I had to stop. The next 12 or so hours are one of my life’s most singular beautiful days. Just one squirming sliver of light and love wrapping around another one as they took turns fading away. I haven’t had that experience since, but Jesus, I want to. To spend 12 hours wrapped in love and music and singing and watching wood ripple and dogs lick you and spending an hour eating a grape. Well, Christ, you can do worse than that.

Ultimately, what I’m trying to say isn’t so much about finding happiness. It’s about finding love and forgiveness. God knows I’ve done awful things, but I think that if I love hard enough and let love in, I can balance things out.

I’ve had a truly beautiful life. Every fucking second of it. While I’d certainly change so many things, I did to other people. I wouldn’t change a second of what’s happened to me.

Let love it. Do it. Be a fucking pussy. Man up. Let love in.

And now the perfect song has come on. The perfect song to end this thing with.

“The Sun Machine is Coming Down, and We’re Gonna Have a Party...

The Sun Machine is Coming Down, and We’re Gonna Have a Party...

Uh, huh huh (I love you all)