[lumberjim]

I’m pretty sure I remember that someone got killed or injured by one of those umbrellas.

The rest of the trip was uneventful.

Money was getting pretty tight, so we had to spend what we had left on supplies to make more Bitchin veggie bagels. We had them down to a science at this point. We ate a fair amount of our profit that day. Hunger, again, was a daily presence. I remember giving half of my bagel to Shelby because she was looking so thin. She accepted it eagerly, as I recall.

Apparently there is a State mental facility right next to the Oakland Coliseum. We met most of it’s tenants that night. I think the facility let some of the less violently tweaked out in hopes that they’d tag along with the rest of the crazies that were following the band, and wind up in another city as someone else’s problem. That was a freaked out town. An armpit, too. We slept in the car in the parking lot of a hotel one night, and an apartment complex another. Oakland began an unfortunate trend towards our leaving shit on top of our car and driving around with it like that. We lost most of a bag of groceries, my good Dallas Cowboys travel mug (this is an essential item for a dead head. You eat and drink out of it), and who knows what else that way. The problem was that during the day, we would pack every cubic inch of that car with all of our belongings. Everything had a specific place, that we had worked out to make things easily accessible while driving. At night, we had to take it all out, put it on the roof, cover it with the tarp, and strap it down. So we became used to seeing things on top of the car. So, we had a harder time noticing disregarded roof top items.

It was in Oakland, that, as I tried for a “miracle”, a guy leaned out of his VW microbus, and stuffed a big green bud into my hands. I became one with the world. I was unable to come up with a ticket that day, and we heard some sad news, to boot. Bill Graham, the Grateful Dead’s promoter of a million years had died. Bill always prowled the lot on Halloween ( tomorrow) and gave out free tickets to those in good costumes. I wound up getting one of these that night, even though I had no costume. The guy that gave it to me seemed depressed. Must have been his assistant. It had “CHEERS, BILL” stamped on the back. I ended up “miracling” it to a girl, because we only got the one ticket and I wasn’t going to leave Shelb out in the lot alone, nor would she me.