My mother and sister just moved right next to Fenway Park in Boston, where Dead and Company happened to play last night, the night they moved in. I have no interest in this incarnation of the Grateful Dead for two reasons: Phil Lesh isn’t in it, and John Mayer is. However, they still draw tens of thousands of people to see them at venues as large as Fenway Park or Citi Field.
She’s texting me about all the hippies huffing balloons of nitrous oxide and how there are balloons all over the ground, and it got me thinking about nitrous oxide, you know, like from the dentist.
When I was young, maybe between the ages of 19 and 22, it was a yearly occurrence for my crew to go to this camping music festival in Greenfield, Massachusetts, at a kids’ summer camp. The local New England jam band Max Creek would headline, not that it mattered because I never left the campsite. In 2005, my best friend had a way of getting nitrous oxide tanks filled, and we brought two to the festival. We found a path in the woods to sneak them in so that we could fill balloons for all the festival attendees and separate them from the contents of their wallets, one five-dollar balloon at a time. It’s karmically fair, though. I’m sure that all of us who were assisting him had found our wallets emptied at some point in some parking lot outside of some Phish show. I can’t tell you how much money I’ve dropped on those foolish things. That’s the point. That’s why they call it hippie crack. Once you start, the inclination is to keep going no matter what, even if you come home hundreds of dollars lighter.
I don’t know how much money my friend made that weekend, but it was definitely more than a 19-year-old kid tends to ever have.
When we came back to our hometown in Plymouth, MA, he couldn’t just load these 20 and 30-pound steel cylinders into his mother’s house. It was too conspicuous, not to mention wildly illegal. So he left them in my maroon 1998 Ford Escort. Yes, I was smart enough to be cruising around my hometown, blasting the Grateful Dead, probably with Grateful Dead stickers on the bumper, with two nitrous oxide tanks in my trunk, one that still had some of the gas in it. Fucking idiot.
Speaking of the remaining gas, and I’ve never told anyone this, I called my other friend Mag, and we went out into the woods with a bag of balloons and huffed gas for hours. We had this little song we sang when we were moving the taller 30-pound tank to our huffing destination.
It’s from a Soul Coughing song: “You get the ankles, and I’ll get the wrists.”
We laughed. That’s what happens — you laugh and laugh and fall apart.
I had my mom sending me all these texts this morning about this phenomenon of dirty white prep school hippie life.
I was just like, “Yeah, Mom, why do you think I became an inhalant addict?”
If you want my advice, don’t abuse nitrous oxide. You’ll come home from the show with a few bucks, and you won’t end up huffing 10 cans of air duster a day like I did years later. Just save the N2O for your next tooth extraction.
The last time I got a tooth extracted, I definitely had the gas on and a 1969 Grateful Dead recording of “Dark Star.” It still sucked. It was the fucking dentist. Who likes that?
eyyyyyyy, if you had a laugh, you could get the kid a coffee: https://ko-fi.com/evr0ck17
