Page 121 of The End of the World As We Know It

Just imagine the looks of astonishment on the faces of the punks who disliked Jerry and the Dead. Imagine that now! How upset they’d be to discover the genius had outlived them all. For Jerry Garcia could not have died from a disease called Captain Trips. And those pigeon-shit punks were dead now, those pricks who couldn’t recognize a good song if Bob Dylan took it apart to show them.

He strummed. An ugly, ungainly sound. And not just because the Martin was out of tune. And not just because of the finger. Lev had no touch. Never had. No rhythm. He played a guitar like he was sawing a bone. His wrists still hurt from not having made it through the bar-chord phase of learning and he never practiced. Half the chords were muted, dead, as the few pure notes made it out alive. He didn’t know the intricacies of the chords for the songs he played, but who did? G worked just fine even if Bob Weir had been playing G7 onstage.

He played a meek D now.

“Morning Dew,” he said. He paused playing. It was a revelation of sorts. Yes, the Grateful Dead had a song about an apocalypse.“Morning Dew” was the story of a man emerging after nuclear fallout. He lifted the dead finger and eyed the pale nail.

“Morning Dew…”

Is this why the punks named the end after Jerry? It was easy (thrilling) to imagine himself, Lev, as the narrator of that song. As if he’d listened to so much Dead he’d finally stepped into their music.

“Holyshit,” he said. It was too much to take in all at once. It made him too giddy. He got up again, clumsily put the guitar back into its case, the finger back in his pocket.

And he continued southwest. Toward San Francisco.

A man with a guitar and a tie-dyed shirt.

And a missing finger, found.

Lev Marks. Deadhead extraordinaire.

“I’ll ask him myself,” Lev said. “I’ll ask him whathethinks of the stupid nickname.”

He plugged one nostril with a finger from his chord hand and snotted out the other. He’d seen people get sick, the discoloration around the neck. If he squinted, it looked like dark tie-dye. “He’s alive. I can feel it. No way a guy like him dies from the same thing everybody else does. No way, suckers!”

Still, he worried, yes, as he stumbled along, a bit hunchbacked, taking quick anxious steps in his tennis shoes. He’d seen a lot on his walk from Boise. Endless traffic made up of driverless cars, bodies on hillsides. He stopped dozens of times to play guitar, strumming with Jerry’s finger, just like he’d played guitar as his friend Denny died from the flu.

He’d seen life, too, out here. Deer and sheep. Coyotes and birds. Crows. His sister had warned him long ago not to do too much acid, that it could all come screaming back one day. She told him acid gets stored in the back of the head and could one day drip down the spine.Unannounced. Lev could be seventy years old and suddenly find himself on the same trip he’d taken at twenty. But what did Fran know?

Still…

This whole thing felt like a bad trip. Maybe that’s what the punks meant when they nicknamed it so.

And maybe it was the acid he’d taken (and maybe it wasn’t) that caused him to think the same crow had been following him from Idaho through Oregon. He’d seen it in trees in northern Nevada. Seen it in the desert. Lev had felt a sort of pull then. An idea to go to Las Vegas. One night, he thought the crow spoke to him. Told him Jerry Garcia was indeed alive, playing shows in Las Vegas.

“No way,” Lev said then and he said it again now. “That’s beneath him. Jerry Garcia is the smartest, warmest, most brilliant guitar player of all time.”

He once loved talking about Jerry’s missing finger at parties.You think this song is good now? Wait till I tell you he only had four good fingers!

“Ha! Genius!”

His voice carried across a grassy plain as he exited what felt like the thousandth stretch of forest. Whatever was going on in Las Vegas could wait. Lev Marks was going to find Jerry Garcia in Haight-Ashbury because that’s where a genius like him would go.

“Home,” Lev said. “He’d go home. Because he’s smart. And because that place was good to him. And pretty damn good to the rest of the world, too.”

How close was he to San Francisco? He didn’t know. He’d been walking along highways and dirt roads, through woods and over hills. Felt like a month now, maybe more. He’d slept in empty hotels and abandoned homes. Restaurant booths and the back benches of cars. Eating sardines and other canned goods. There was so much death out here. So much emptiness. And the silence of a world turned off. Like when a record ends, that sorrowful moment of scratchiness, then…nothing. That’s what had happened to the world. Everybody was singing along to “Franklin’s Tower” and then… the scratchiness… the needle with no song to play… the superflu.

The end.

“Ah, Denny,” he said. “Wish you could be with me right now. You’d finally get to meet the man and then you’d finally get his music. All those times you made fun of me. All those times you didn’t get it. I bet you got it at the end, though. The last thing you heard was ‘Ripple.’ I bet you got it then.”

Lev felt the rage he’d felt back in Boise. Back when people made fun of him for his taste in music. God, it sucked. Pretentious dickwads and their disco and new wave punk. And what about the pricks who only liked the Dead because of “Touch of Grey”? Yeah, what about them? Lev didn’t make fun ofthem. Not out loud anyway. Was it any wonder he’d fantasize about the deaths of those who made fun of the Dead and those late to the party? Was it any wonder he’d imagined some punk getting electrocuted because he’d been too dumb not to take the radio into the bathtub? Was it any wonder he’d fall asleep, sweating, rolling over and over, imagining the broken splinters of an acoustic guitar wedged into the chests of the people who just didn’t get it?

Ahead, more woods. Another tract of forest. How close to the birthplace of the Dead? He didn’t know. But he’d read the signs. San Francisco. This way. That way. And the California state line was a long way behind him now.

“There,” he said, spotting a rock before that next bunch of woods. “A good place to play a song.”

He brought out the Martin and set it gently on his tired leg. He pulled out the dead finger. He strummed.