The music starts and Ray is so thrilled he’s close to wetting his pants. Gilbert was absolutely right: this Grateful Dead crew is the perfect headliner to open the Festival. There’s not a thing you can say, or think, or imagine that even begins to describe the energy that rolls forth again and again, like waves of St. Elmo’s fire, over the lifted faces and hands of the crowd—they now number in the tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands. Is it fair to take a pat on one’s back? Look at what Ray has done. Look what happens when an underling, a dead-end post-adolescent, a whipped dog, rips the leash out of his master’s hands and takes over.

Ray turns to a the young bushy-headed boy next to him and bellows through the din, “Rockin’ good shit!”

The boy holds a fist high in the air and shouts something back. Ray can’t even hear his voice, and has to read his lips. He’s not sure, but what it looks like is, “Rock on, Baba!”

Oh, it is sweet, so sweet to have built this launching pad to tomorrow! Rock on.



Spin, spin, spin!

Marnie has been up and spinning from the first explosive note. Like a wobbling top, she spins here, spins there. Her head is reeling and jangling and it feels good, good, good! Staggering to a momentary stop, she draws a bead on Jerry. Vibes, vibes, vibes, vibes— Look at me, Jerry, look at me. HE DOES. Now she can spin off again—and she’s not the only one. At least a couple of dozen spinners have found their own spaces to boogie in, as this spacey, loud, ugly, beautiful group of magic guys fills up the field or meadow or Dell, or whatever the hell they’re calling this glorified cow pasture, with musical SUNSHINE. She wonders what the Dead (they call themselves that, “the Dead”) are like at home, hanging out in that so, so other country, California, where getting high is just plain old white-bread reality to them, and everyday life is so advanced and futuristic that it makes poor little Applestock look like Duckburg, USA. Jerry, look at me! Jerry, I love you! She loves this guy, she DOES! In the way she first loved Gilbert Tully, how cool he once was—up there behind his big black guitar with The Hey Youse twenty zillion years ago—and the way he escorted her and Ray and Captain Jim and Becky all around the clubs of Back Bay that night, the night he said, “This is the past. . . and this is the future.”

Well, what happened, brother?

Spin, spin, spin.

Well, here's what happened to her: Captain Jim coaxed her secret body into full flower, then he freed her mind. Now, Jerry is all the things Jim refitted her for: Jerry is God’s Cock, the Whole Cream Pie. Jerry is I, ME, NOW. Jerry is No Compromise. Jerry is the now and future King. Jerry is Cloverland. Gilbert, by sorry contrast, is just the caterpillar who was once a butterfly, evolving backwards, king to clod, receding into the dumpster of history.

Have a nice safe life, Gilbert Tully! I love you, Jerryyyy!

Spin, spin, spin.


(from pp. 238, "Healing the Sick")

Even as a kid, Ray sensed something momentous happening outside the polite world. Whatever it was lay entirely beyond the ken of social bullies like Mother or snotty diaper intellectuals like Peter J. Upjohn. At Oberlin (the non-Ivy compromise he and his parents agreed upon), Ray really tried to swear off low culture. But the more he listened to Brahms’ Requiem or The Magic Flute, the more he ached to spin the dial. Whenever he did allow himself to watch a little TV, or pig out on Top-40 radio or take in a dumb Hollywood flick, the need to purge would drive him back to the tabernacle to torture himself with several hours of late Beethoven string quartets.

He really was a good boy, after all. He wasn't put on earth to wreck or destroy. Try to tame the baser instincts, he was taught, and if you fail, just keep on trying. What else but a desire to please could keep him here at Newton Academy? Would any self-respecting destroyer be sitting in this same miserable closet of an office, year after hopeless year, administering the snotty lives of these heedless little snobs?

Ten past four. . . .

Ray leaves his desk and peeks into Dean McGarrigle’s office, where Becky is pecking away at one of her error-free secretarial masterworks. He's been hoping he could talk her into knocking off a few minutes early, since the Dean is gone for the day. What a piece of work she is. He takes a full minute to watch her, hunched over the IBM. Her precise, trim back. Her tweedy skirt. The long rum-dark hair that hides her rather plain, girlish face.

"Almost finished typing up the Gutenberg Bible?" Ray calls from the connecting office door.

"One more sec.”

“Becky, I want to get out of here.”

"I'm trying to get this thing done, do you mind?" Her fingers cascade over the keys.

Ray slams the door and sits back down at his desk in a pout. Why so all-fired dedicated when it comes to getting out Dean McGarrigle's soporific little droppings? He stares at the forlorn artifacts on his desk: smudgy student papers, a half-eaten Snickers bar, a smug copy of The New York Review of Books. . . and Robby Cahill's marijuana cigarette.

Joint, that's what you call it. A joint.

Hmmm. All right Latest studies indicate that, contrary to government propaganda, a joint won't turn you into a homicidal maniac or make your pecker rot. It isn't addictive, it alters your mind—and if there's one thing Ray could use right now, it's an altered mind. He shoves the joint into his mouth and lights it. . . .

After a while, Ray isn't sure how long, Becky stops typing. An enveloping profusion of silence, full of microcosmic sounds from everywhere, pours into the vacuum of the now not-typing typewriter. Then comes the clacking of her heels. She sticks her head in. "Are you nuts? I could smell that all the way back in McGarrigle's office."

Ray looks at her, forgets what she just said, then realizes she must have smelled the smoke.

"McGarrigle's gone," he says. "It's Friday."

Becky glances around. "Did you smoke the whole thing?”

"No. The other, um. . . half is—"

Becky reaches for what is left of the joint, places it between her lips, and sucks hard. Where, Ray wonders, has she learned to do this? How can he not have known? He watches in wonder as she pops the the burnt remainder of the joint into her mouth. She smiles at him and her face transforms into the faces of twenty or thirty different women, none of whom he knows, each one merging into the next and into the next and the next. . . .

"Let's go," he says. "I need some air."

"Congratulations." She is grinning monstrously. "Your first joint."

He wants to flip something sassy at her like, “not yours, I notice,” but all he can do is grin back. Becky slides onto his lap and smooches him lightly on the mouth. Then she opens up and thrusts her tongue between his lips—a thing she normally never does. A tongue in his mouth. Something about it is obscenely funny. Ray finds himself dissolving into hysteria. His mood has a life of its own and he can't control it. Becky bounces off his lap as giggles overtake him like an army of chipmunks pouring through chinks in a fence. He falls off the chair and rolls to the floor. The giggles merge into sobs.

Incredibly, he is weeping.

(from pp. 4-6, "Better Sex on the Radio")