by Jim Miller
Other times, after practice, when we didn’t have to hit one of our many short-lived, shitty mall jobs, we’d get high and take the bus to used record stores. Before we got into our punk purist stage we’d scour the bins for old blues and jazz, sixties psychedelia, and promo copies of new music. At one point, we really dug The Doors. We found all their albums in pretty short order, but then we discovered a cool shop over the hill in Hollywood that sold bootlegs. I got a tape of the Miami Concert where Jim Morrison was arrested, a soundboard copy of American Prayer with a bunch of unreleased poems, and a concert where Morrison was on acid. We got so into The Doors that we both read a Jim Morrison biography and followed it up by going to the library and checking out all the books that Jim had read: William Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Friedrich Nietzsche’s Birth of a Tragedy, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death, and Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception. I could quote the line from Blake where The Doors’ name came from, and Shane started dropping words like “Dionysian.” We didn’t get it all completely, but it was heady stuff for the back of the bus.
When Shane found out that Ray Manzarek, The Doors’ old keyboardist, had produced the first X album, we were all over it. Shane, who’d just gotten a car, made his way over to the Whiskey to see X live and that was the beginning of our identity as punks. I remember the first time he took me with him and I stood in the back of the crowd as the band went into a searing version of “Los Angeles,” and the thought of watching them on the same stage where Morrison had done his first version of “The End” was thrilling beyond words. It was like nothing in my life up to that point. I felt the energy surging through the crowd as they fed off of Billy Zoom’s rapid-fire guitar riffs and John Doe’s and Exene’s dissonantly beautiful harmonies. They did “We’re Desperate,” and the whole crowd sang along with “My whole fucking life is a wreck.” Something was really happening, I thought.
Then there was the time Shane scored some acid from some guy we met in the park. We thought we were pretty clever so we read up on it before we decided to do it, devouring The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and Centre of the Cyclone to make sure we were prepared to embark on our inner journey. In any event, we determined we’d take it one Friday night at the movies. The Nuart was showing The Who movies The Kids are Alright and Quadrophenia, which seemed appropriate at the time for some reason. I remember sitting in the dark theater waiting for the light show to start for what seemed like a long time, until, slowly, the edges of everything rounded, and the quality of sound changed dramatically. It was as if I was hearing inside of the music, note by note. Pete Townsend’s guitar chords exploded in my head like the Fourth of July and Roger Daltrey’s voice surrounded me completely. During one scene, Daltrey appeared to be walking through a luminescent corridor of some sort. I leaned over to Shane and said, “Roger Daltrey is Jesus” and we both almost peed our pants laughing. As the acid got stronger, I was struck by a feeling of overpowering joy in the wake of the laughter. Everything was simply oceanic—and then the first film ended.
I tried to speak to Shane but he was sitting with his eyes closed, smiling, lost somewhere in the distant recesses of his being. Stupidly, I got up to go to the bathroom. During the intermission, what was a half-full theater had been invaded by an army of Mods and Rockers. I glanced outside at the street and spied a myriad of shiny new Vespas by the curb. They were rich Westside kids, rude and full of pretensions, and their dress up and play scene would have usually filled me with disgust. A gang of them were barking orders at the beleaguered kid at the popcorn stand, mocking him as he filled their orders. As I stood behind a line of trench coats in the men’s room I became unhinged. Literally, I was just in line to pee, but inside I became totally disassociated, utterly gone. I couldn’t remember my name or Shane’s name, or what I was here to do. In the full grip of the panic, I turned around and brushed by one of the trench coats who pushed me in the back and told me to fuck off. It was as if it had happened to a different person. I just wandered into the lobby and stared in horror at the faces of the kids as their flesh fell from them and they became formless. Somehow, I made my way back inside the theater where I found Shane, still grinning with his eyes closed. I sat in my seat, the lights went down, and the film began and the formlessness continued now in sound as well as matter. Then I stopped hearing altogether, and I closed my eyes, terrified at this latest development. Behind my eyes, the world emptied out and I’m not quite sure how to describe this except to say that I saw the hollow core of the world of lies, the vacuum at the heart of all that is. And this wasn’t some nice Buddhist notion; this was a big ugly nothing, a huge, looming, menacing meaninglessness. I think I wept, but I can’t say for sure.
Slowly as the film dragged on, my angst began to ebb and I noticed that Shane had put his hand on my arm to calm me. As things began to take shape, I got a grip and started to focus on the music. What brought me back to my body and the world was the rage and sorrow in Daltrey’s voice as he wailed out “Doctor Jimmy,” and by the time the film ended with “Love Reign O’er Me,” I felt like a prize fighter who’d lost but not been knocked out through sixteen rounds. We walked outside and headed down the street for a Coke at a diner. The high had ebbed but I was still a little wary of what else might be lurking in the back alley of my consciousness, so I was silent. Shane kept asking me if I was OK, and I just nodded. He was ecstatic, going on about how he forgot himself and thought he was seeing into the heart of matter—and it danced! Atoms dance, he told me. It was a struggle for him to put it into words but the essence of his experience was that everything in the world was interrelated, interpenetrating, all part of some big fluid common ocean of Big Self. “Everything is always alright,” he kept saying as if it were profound. In an hour or so I found the words to tell him about my nightmare. He was crestfallen and kept apologizing to me even after I told him that it wasn’t his fault. It was the first and last time I did acid. One dark night of the soul was enough.
Looking back on it, I think that night epitomized the difference between Shane and me. He was always sure that something better was right around the corner and I had to fight the notion that the worst was waiting for me somewhere, so I’d better watch my back. He was in love with the world and I was a spurned lover. It wasn’t that Shane was super naïve or anything, it was just that he had a sense of urgent possibility. I fed on his exuberance and lust for life. He checked my anger and pessimism. What was I to him? Loyal, I suppose, and honest. Later, when he was at UCLA, he’d refer back to our different reactions to the acid and say something like, “I’m Whitman and you’re Melville,” or “You’re an Existentialist and I’m a Taoist.” One time he told me I’d had “a Heart of Darkness trip.” It was just whatever shit was on his reading list that week, but I guess there was some truth to it. Actually there was probably a lot of truth to it.
By the time he was in his junior year, he got really political. He had this Marixist sociology professor who inspired him to want to change the world. We’d meet for coffee and he’d have some big pronouncement about “economics not culture being the driver of social change.” He’d take me to political meetings at Midnight Special Bookstore in Santa Monica and buy me books about urban space and class. He joined the International Socialists and went to protests against apartheid in South Africa or police brutality in LA. I got some good leads for stories from him. By that time I’d gotten a full-time gig with the paper and had stopped taking classes at Valley College. I’d moved over the hill to Venice and was in the thick of things, or so I thought. Once in a while Shane would try to get me to go back to school. “You’re smarter than most of the people in my classes,” he’d say. I didn’t listen.
It was around that same time that Shane got into the Grateful Dead. One of his college buddies, Josh, had toured with them and had thousands of bootlegs. At first I was very skeptical, given my allegiance to punk and my father’s sad history, but I went to some
shows with Shane and Josh in Ventura and I liked it. We camped for the weekend and hung out and wandered around the campground. There were lots of old hippies who traveled with the band and we talked to some of them. One guy had gone on every tour for the last twenty years. Amazing. It turns out he lived in a commune (they still existed, I learned) up in Northern California. It sounded cool, but a little flaky. I was convinced he had to be rich. “Don’t be so cynical,” Shane chided me. At the show the next day, Shane and Josh did some mushrooms, but I stuck to pot, still leery of my dark interior life. The show was in a rodeo arena at the Ventura Fairgrounds. They did “I Know You Rider,” and the whole crowd went wild when a train went by just as Jerry Garcia sang, “I wish I was a rider, on a north bound train.” I thought about the fact that the Dead were born out of the era of the first acid tests and that Neal Cassady drove the bus—the same Neal Cassady who was Sal Paradise’s pal in On the Road. Very cool, I thought, even if the dancing was a little spastic. I liked the openended nature of the jamming, like jazz improvisation.
After the show, we went swimming in the ocean by the camp-site. Shane talked about reading that subatomic particles weren’t really separate entities but actually came together in what he called, “a fluid event.” He was the only person I knew who said things like that who didn’t make them sound contrived.
“Fucking hippie,” I joked. He was still pretty high and laughed and then said something about how punk and hippie were just different sides of the same avant garde, countercultural coin. Just people trying to imagine some space “outside.” He said “outside” in a way that was supposed to convey great meaning. I wondered about it, less sure of myself as always.
“Earth to Shane,” I said, “you’re full of shit.” He laughed and dove under a wave. I felt a little outside not being on mushrooms with them and a bit like a coward for being afraid to get back on the horse. Shane never pushed me, though; he said that people should never do “sacred things for small reasons.” I wasn’t sure what that meant, but I knew that one glimpse into the void was all I needed. Later that day, I decided to interview a few hippies for an article. What I discovered was that the campgrounds across the country had been infiltrated by DEA agents posing as deadheads. They were busting kids for selling acid and sending them to prison for long terms based on minimum sentencing laws designed to go after gang members. I called the piece, “Busted down on Bourbon Street” lifting the title from the Dead’s song “Truckin’.”
After he graduated from college, Shane had a kind of nomadic period. He followed the Dead for a few months with Josh and then took a trip to Ecuador where he did an internship with an anti-poverty organization that was working with indigenous groups in South America. He sent me long letters about how amazing the Andes were and how great it was to wake up in an Indian village at dawn and spend the day doing “the real work” as he called it. He was “learning from the wisdom of the people,” he’d write. Sometimes, he’d include a photo from some big protest in Quito or a slum in Guayaquil. After a couple months, he met a beautiful French woman at a café in Cuenca and sent me her picture too. She was a stunning beauty with raven hair, big blue eyes, and a sexy, world-weary expression on her face as she refused to smile for the camera. After his internship was over, Shane and Monique spent a few weeks in a rented flat in Baños, under a volcano at the cusp of the Amazon jungle. It was like he was playing Albert Finney playing Malcolm Lowry with Jacqueline Bisset or something. I have to admit, I was pretty damn jealous. I thought he’d never come back.
When he did, it was without the French girl, who’d returned to Europe to be exotic and beautiful there. Much to my surprise, my friend, the world traveler and international lover, got a job working for a community organization in Oakland. Before he left Los Angeles for the Bay Area, we went to a Raiders game together. We got to the LA Coliseum early and had a couple of beers in the car while we listened to “The New World” by X and chatted about the future.
“You know, you’re my best friend in the world,” he told me. We toasted our friendship and his new job and pledged to stay in touch. When I told him how proud I was of all the stuff he’d done and what he was about to do he surprised me.
“I’ve got nothing on you, man. You’re something special. You’re a self-taught, self-made man. And you’re a fearless motherfucker too.” I asked him what he meant by fearless.
“You stare the world right in the face,” he answered. “That takes courage.”
“Thanks, man,” I said and hugged him. I’d never known that he felt that kind of respect for me before, but it was just like him to say a kind thing at the right time. I loved him for it. We finished our beers and got out of the car to wade through the crowd. A Raiders game is like a Dead show with carne asada instead of veggie burritos, beer instead of acid, and, of course, bloodlust for football rather than psychedelic music. Still the crowds were similar in that both came in costume and expressed a kind of longing for community and fellow feeling. It didn’t matter if you were white, black, brown, or yellow—it was all about the silver and black. We shared a few high fives and back slaps with our fellow fans and headed in to our seats. We were way up top in the last row and could see the downtown LA skyline if we looked behind us. It was a good game, but the Raiders fell to the Broncos on a bad call in the fourth quarter and that was all it took to flip the switch. We could see the fights breaking out as bodies flew and the crowd moved in ripples below us. The cops arrived in force, as they always did, with riot gear on, and the mood turned ugly fast. The teams had left for the locker room and the crowd below us was chanting, “Fuck the police.” It was too bad. I’d been hoping to get a win on the day my best friend left town for good.
Up in Oakland, Shane helped at-risk kids get jobs, tutoring, and other social services. His office was in East Oakland where they’d lost not just the Raiders but thousands of industrial jobs and this had torn the working class “flats” apart. East Oakland had been a refuge where people from West Oakland moved to escape violence, but now it was just as bad. There just weren’t any pockets of peace left in the flats. The hills were a different story with big houses and plenty of services. Down in the flats, there were neighborhoods with no grocery stores, no banks, nothing but fast-food joints and liquor stores. Crack was hitting big too and people were getting shot every day it seemed. At first, Shane lived downtown in a loft space with some artists and his letters were full of enthusiasm for the “poetry of the streets” amidst the economic deprivation and violence. “The drive down East 14th Street as it turns into International Boulevard is a mosaic of America—Mexican, Salvadoran, Vietnamese, African—taco stands and auto body shops, the anarchy and play of the streets, mean and beautiful,” he wrote once. I could tell the place had really gotten into his blood and he loved it. He worked long hours with kids from Elmhurst who had to run away from gangs on their way to and from school. One time he sent me a picture of one little boy, Roy, whose mother had been murdered by a drug dealer. Roy was living with an aunt who worked the night shift as a janitor and had to sleep in the day. He was a cute little guy with a sweet smile who ate up the attention he was getting from the white boy at the outreach center. Then, the letters stopped coming as frequently.
When I finally did get another in a month or so, it was post-marked from San Francisco. It turned out that little Roy had been killed by stray gunfire in his Elmhurst neighborhood. They never caught the gunman because the neighbors were too scared to testify. It was “horrible beyond words,” Shane wrote. He’d moved across the bay to a place in the Mission so he had a “refuge” from work. He kept at it for a few more years, but the poetry was gone from his letters. He’d tell me about some new project, but his tone was matter of fact, sometimes depressed even. “Another attempt to save the world went to hell this week,” one of his letters started. When yet another kid he was working with died by gunfire he thought about quitting, but he stuck with it. My son would have said that he was fighting his “storm inside.” Things
had always seemed to come easily for Shane, but now I saw that he was really fighting the darkness. I admired that about him. He dug in and kept pushing.
Shane started saying stuff like “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will” and “hope is a moral obligation.” It was like he was searching for some new philosophical framework to help him get through the day. When they finally had to lay him off because of budget cuts, it was probably a relief. He got another job in San Francisco pretty quickly, this one in a workers’ information center that was sponsored by a group of local labor unions. The job was to help non-union workers find out what their rights were and what benefits were available for injured or unemployed workers. Real hands-on stuff.
I came up to visit him a few times when he was living in San Francisco, and we had a great time. Of course, I had to do the usual things like go to City Lights Bookstore and drink in the bars where Kerouac drank in North Beach, but we also spent a lot of time with Shane’s friends in the Mission. He’d met a bunch of artists and activists who shared a big loft complex. They were good people and there was lots of stirring talk. Shane always found people like that, wherever he was. During one visit around New Years we went to a party at a loft where everybody was doing ecstasy. It wasn’t like a rave with lots of bad loud disco and teenagers jumping up and down with pacifiers in their mouths. Here people were just lying around on big couches and rapping about things. I did some and it was nothing like the acid trip. I got the oceanic thing going and Shane and I talked about how much we loved each other. You get really empathetic on the stuff. It was earnest and good. I met a great woman too, a mural artist named Carla who I ended up seeing for a while, whenever I could make it up to see Shane. I remember they had “A Love Supreme” on the stereo. Toward the end of the night, a bunch of us went up on the roof and stared at the downtown skyline, sparkling like a diamond in the distance. Carla kissed me for the first time up there and I fell into her completely in the womb-like darkness. It was really something, a perfect moment.
