Mischa Berlinski - Fieldwork

"That's right. Exactly right. We cried because they wanted to hear the Word so badly. There wasn't a minute we weren't out there preaching, your uncles, your grandfather, me, because the people were so eager to listen." Thomas shifted to his didactic mode. "So what we are seeing now, you see, is a complete and total reversal of roles. Even as the Dyalo people are going toward the Lord, the people in our own country are turning their backs on Him. Sad, really. Crisscross, you see. A film like this one, celebrating everything that we have spent such a long time fighting, a film like this one would have been unthinkable when I was a boy, when America was still a Christian country. When I first started working with the Dyalo, we had a whole country praying for us, and you could feel the difference. It was like having wind in your sails. Now it's not the same. A boat can't sail without wind. And you know who suffers? Paul, tell me who suffers because of this."

"The Dyalo, Dad. The Dyalo are suffering because of this."

"That's right. That's exactly right. People in America go around watching your Star Wars or what have you, and thinking that there is something else in this world more powerful than Jesus Christ, and they forget to pray. Just forget, if you can imagine that. I remember when I used to go up in the mountains and tell the people about Jesus. There wouldn't be enough hours in the day to baptize all those who were ready to be baptized — we'd have them lined up — and now, well, just look at the difference. Still the same Gospel, same as it's been for two thousand years. Still the same people, same old Dyalo. I'm still me. What's the difference? I'll tell you all the difference. Not the same prayer backing in the Home Country. They're sending us out to fight the battle and not giving us the tools we need. And you know why not? Because their minds are being filled with trash. David, are there kids at your school who have seen this movie?"

David looked down at his plate and made a little rice mountain with his fork.

"David, that was a question for you. I asked if there were kids at your school who had seen this movie?"

"Yes," David said.

"And what do you say to them?"

" ‘May the Force be with You.' "

The fight that followed was a turning point in the Walker family dynamics. David, frustrated to the point of tears, tried to tell Thomas that Star Wars had nothing to do with the Dyalo, nothing to do with demon worship, that it was just a movie, a good one, that he had seen it three times and loved it, and that if his father wanted to know why the Dyalo didn't listen, perhaps, just perhaps, it was because he kept pointing at his son, and saying that his son wouldn't ever grow as big as him on account of the end of the world, when his son was two inches bigger already; and Thomas, hurt and angry, wondered just how David could be wasting his time on trash like that when he had grown up himself in a Dyalo village and seen those hurting people who needed his prayers and love, and how long had he been lying to the whole family? It took Nomie two days of shuttle diplomacy to make the peace, which was finalized over breakfast two days later, when Thomas asked David if he'd be going upcountry with him the next day. That Thomas had asked and not presumed was a sufficient gesture for David, and he said that he would. Nomie thought to herself that boys were so much easier than girls: had the offended party been Ruth-Marie or Linda-Lee or Margaret and not David, she would have been staring at two months of sulking, pouting, and slammed doors, minimum . David really was a good, calm kid.

But with the fight over Star Wars , something had changed. Before, David had considered his involvement in the big world a source of guilt and shame; after the fight, David went to the movies openly. He was now a senior in high school, and following the fashion of the time, he allowed his hair to grow long, which irritated his father, not because it was a countercultural gesture (in fact, Thomas, who had simply missed the 1960s, would hardly have recognized it as such), but because it reminded him of the queue worn by the cruel Chinese Mandarins of his youth, who forever impeded His progress with the Dyalo. David, who had been plucking out hymns on his guitar since he was a boy, started a rock-and-roll band with three of his classmates called Waterwheel, and stopped going up into the mountains with his dad on weekends. He went out with some kids from school and came home reeking of cheap whiskey, which would have provoked a monster fight had Grandpa Raymond not taken Thomas aside and said that as a boy in Tulsa, before he found the Lord, he'd certainly taken his fair number of nips from the bottle. Just give the boy an aspirin, Raymond advised. David bought himself a record player and started playing such horrific music on his speakers that Nomie no longer knocked on his door and asked if she could hide in his room.

David graduated from high school and spent half a year with his big feet flopping over the ends of the fake-leather couch in the living room watching the goldfish Olympics, until his Aunt Helena, who'd been telling him all along that one day he'd be big enough to do whatever he liked, told him that now that he was big, he ought to get off his duff and do something. She called her Aunt Jean in Tulsa — this would be Laura's other sister, these Walkers had aunts like China has heathens — and had her send over pamphlets and brochures from the local community college, and she convinced the whole family that the best thing was if David went off for a while. Grandma Laura, who always felt that it wasn't entirely a good thing for the kids to lose touch with their heritage, especially supported the plan. She wasn't quite sure what to make of it all, however, when Aunt Jean wrote the family in Chiang Mai to say that six months after David had arrived in the States, he had left Tulsa to follow a rock band called the Grateful Dead. Laura was only partially comforted by the thought that given the group's name, at least David seemed to be involved with good Christians: if Laura's long experience had taught her anything, the only people who were particularly happy about the prospect of being dead were those who had been saved.

Let me tell you. If you think it's tough to ferret out the doings of an unknown anthropologist in a village of unlettered tribesman deep in the remotest jungle in the heart of Southeast Asia, just try finding out exactly what David was up to on the Lot of Dead Tour twenty years ago. If you find someone who remembers it all that well — actually, I couldn't find anyone who remembered it all that well; and those who do remember something tend to have memories that sound a lot like this: "Oh yeah, that was the show when the boys did ‘St. Stephen' and Mickey did a cosmic drum solo, and then this girl Moonbeam who was a twirler and this guy Miguel who was a taper and I decided to go to Boulder to see this guy she knew who could hook us up with some jimsonweed." Then try doing it all over the telephone from Chiang Mai, dealing with more than your fair share of people who for one reason or another are just a little suspicious about calls from strangers. For this reason, given how hard it was to get the lowdown on David during his Dead Tour years, I think I should here and now give a big "Hey now" to my friend Rabbit, whose help and assistance lacking, no story would have been possible.

Rabbit — full name, Gray Rabbit, legally changed from Jeffrey McLean — was old school: in his Boulder home, he told me, he has over two thousand bootlegs, from the band's very early days in San Francisco to Jerry's very last terrestrial show, including the European tours and Egypt.* I asked Rabbit how many shows he had seen himself and elicited only a low groan, which I think meant either very many or very, very many; and when I began to think about what those very, very many Dead shows really meant, I began to think in terms of planets circumnavigated in that gray-green Volkswagen van, license plate magicmn.