My BiPolar Reality Dispatch: Garcia’s Dead.

This excerpt is from my book “My BiPolar Reality; How Life Goes On…” and I present it today on the 20th anniversary of Jerry Garcia’s untimely demise. I am remaining #offline (more or less) for the remainder of the week, but I couldn’t let this day pass without sharing it with some of you, my Deadhead friends…Enjoy!

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An Old Logo...

We returned to The Split/Apple on the first of August, the reception we got from our friends and associates was something less than enthusiastic. Nobody thought our marriage would last, they had been taking bets in a pool speculating how long our relationship would last. Most bets were in the three to six month range that was our average relationship expectancy. The longest bet for our survival was 13 months and so we too placed a bet on ourselves and declared we'd last longer than my lifetime. Several people chuckled at that, including Gleason who muttered that I would be lucky to make it a year too. Then, one very hot, steamy morning in the second week of August, as I stumbled from our bedroom, Gleason stopped me. He just looked me dead in the eye and said, “Garcia's dead.”
“What?” I was pissed, I thought he was acting like an asshole or something, “Fuck off.”
“No, seriously d'Philip,” Gleason's tone changed slightly, a note of compassion resounded as he repeated, “Jerry Garcia is dead, he died this morning.”
“What the fuck?” I still couldn't comprehend this, he was saying Jerry was dead? How could he be dead, I thought, he was just here in Chicago a month ago, he couldn't be dead. I shook my head, “Stop fucking with me Mark.”
“No babe, it's true...” Kelly sat down next to me, draped her soft arm across my slumped shoulders and whispered, “Jerry Garcia passed away this morning in a rehab center in California.”
“Kelly, he just turned 53, like last week!” I felt tears welling up, my voice started to quiver and I had echoes of other tragic moments in life, “No fucking way, Jerry can't be dead, can he?”
“It doesn't surprise me...” Gleason again sounded harsh, cruel, “The life he led, he's lucky to have made it as old as he did really.”
“Fuck off Mark!” Kelly snapped, “Just go away!”
“You don't have a clue, man, Jerry was like...he was like...” I was lost for a description of what Jerry Garcia meant to me. This was another of those most profound passing which had an impact on my state of mind, like the deaths of my friend Todd or John Lennon, Jerry Garcia was an iconic, sort of father or big brother role model for me, I was devastated. “Man, he was keeping this dream alive, this scene, this everything I am, it was because of him, him and Kesey.”
“Is Kesey still alive?” Mark asked but he was talking to his buddy, “Or is he another dead artist too?”
“You're a fucking asshole, Mark!” I shouted, stood up and went to my room while Kelly followed close behind. I fell onto the bed in tears, “I can't believe Jerry's fucking dead!”

The Split/Apple on a hot Saturday night in '95...

Like so many other fans, I grieved both in public ceremonies and alone. On very short notice, the following Saturday night we held a memorial tribute event, “The Fat Man Lives On!” featuring our new friends in the band “Ralph’s Kind” and there were perhaps 400 people crammed into The Split/Apple that night. The summer of 1995 was a brutal and excessively hot summer. It was the summer that over 750 people died in Chicago from heat related deaths. There were so many dead bodies they were storing them in refrigerated semi-trailers. There was no air condition inside The Split/Apple, just two huge industrial sized fans and a few open windows. Everybody was wet with seat, dancing their asses off, tripping hard, drinking heavy, smoking pounds of weed and the band jammed all night long. The party didn't stop, but near sunrise, there were only about 50 people remaining and we all shared this strange but beautiful ceremonial prayer for the spirit of Jerry Garcia. I made my own little promise to myself and the cosmos, now that Garcia was gone, I vowed to help keep this community he fostered alive. Like when I gave that odd note to Babbs back in 1980, when I vowed to keep Lennon's message alive when he was killed, I was going to somehow do my part to insure this counter culture I was raised within would survive, beyond Jerry's death, behind anyone's passing including my own, I promised made a promise to the world that morning. A promise I still try to keep alive every day I still walk the planet.

John Kadlecik at The Split/Apple in '95...

When Jerry died, something inside me too passed away. I lost that fire for what I was doing at the time, I didn't feel like I liked to feel about myself and I started to exhibit more symptoms of my BiPolar Disorder. I started to make some very irrational and seemingly random decisions that had an impact on everyone around me. I swept chaos throughout the lives of many, never realizing the damage I was doing because, being in the eye of this emotional cyclone, none of it seemed to affect me very much. There was a strange event in September that included a kid from Alabama who was selling freshly harvested, still very wet and not yet ready to be consumed psychedelic mushrooms. He parked himself next to our ticket table with his shoe box of mushy black mushrooms and sold them to the kids visiting the loft to see “Ralph’s Kind”. These white bread suburban kids, without even thinking, simply washed the shit tasting mushrooms down with bottomless cups of beer until, sometime just before midnight, things got way out of control. It started first in the bathroom, a girl got sick and puked all over the toilet. There were two other girls in the bathroom with the sick chick and they too started to puke, one in the bath tub and the other in the sink. As the vomit soaked girls came screaming and smelling out of the bathroom, into the dark and very hot loft, other people got whiffs of their vile stench. Before we knew what was happening, there were kids throwing up all over the place. They puked on the dance floor and several people slipped, fell and squirmed in the nasty slime. They started puking too which made other kids run to the few windows, they hung out the window over Michigan Avenue, two or three at a time, everyone spewing projectiles of black mushroom, used food, beer and stomach acid. The band stopped, the house lights came on and The Split/Apple crew got rude by forcibly kicking people out into the streets.

The Open Canvas Art Wall at The Split/Apple

That October Mark and his crew of people presented me with a cake to celebrate the first anniversary of The Split/Apple, but I wasn't very impressed because of my aggravated mind. Two weeks after that we had a smashing big Halloween show featuring a couple of Grateful Dead tribute bands and a costume party. The Friday after Thanksgiving we held our second annual “Split/Apple Leftover Jam Party” where the price of admission was a plate of left over Thanksgiving food. We then invited several homeless people from the neighborhood inside for the night, served them dinner and performed music, skits and played games with them. For Gleason and his group of friends, that was the last straw. They didn't appreciate my bizarre sense of generosity and took offense at making their home a hang-out for homeless folks. I didn't give a shit, I felt like I related to the homeless people better than the kids I lived with so when the first week of December came around, Mark gave me thirty day notice, he and his friends were moving out after the first of the year.

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Jerry like I remember...

The death of Jerry Garcia started a chain reaction for me, it was where those namby pamby trippy dippy hippie parts of me started to shrivel up and die off...like so many old flowers from a forgotten daisy chain, my innocent and youthful hope began to wilt, fading like old childhood dreams never to be dreamed upon the same again. In the story I continue explaining how I did my last acid trip, how I gave up the whole Split/Apple vision and eventually, lost mind a few times as life played it's treacherous plot out before me; but Life Goes On and here I am, you too, some 20 years later. I'm still moving in the same general direction, how about you?

Alright, well there are things to do and people to meet, so I need to move on and I'll catch up with the on-line realm sometime before mid-week. I'm feeling very grounded in my tactile, real world experience these days so I'm going with it for a while...if I don't see/hear or speak wit you too soon, no worries, I hope things are as well for you as they are with me and take care, be well and stay safe!

Peace,

d'Philip

09 August 2015

The San Joaquin Valley

Republic of California

Earth