Grateful Dead Tickets

after Ed Skoog

“...because they are kind and almost meaningless.”

i tell him that i like the one with the skeletons playing
baseball: one skeleton batter, one skelton catcher, and
one skeleton umpire, calling a strike. he’s brought in his grateful
dead ticket stubs to show me, spread them out on a table in
the breakroom of the grocery store. there’s thirty-seven years of
service in nametag time between us, but before he started out,
he got five wandering months in ‘92 to follow the dead
across the country in a nissan sentra , selling broke up
six-packs of beer to minors, grilled cheese sandwiches when
they had the dough, hemp bracelets, and sometimes whippits
when they wanted to make gas money. i only got to see the last of
the living ones on a school night when i was 17 and convinced
my boss to park the produce van outside the fabulous fox theatre
for four hours. that’s the thing about dead shows, about the
birth of children, and most baseball statistics, you have to
be there or they don’t mean anything. so he gives me the baseball
one representing may 19, 1992 at the cal expo amphitheatre and,
at shift’s end, i try to dive deep into the archive to hear the sound this
ticket holds, but the site says it is down for maintenance. the next day,
he brings me a panoramic shot of bob, bill, and jerry from one of
the shows, despite the tickets clearly requesting no flash cameras or
video equipment of any kind. i say, are you sure, i mean your kid might
want these some day, and he says don’t worry, i’ve got more, and so we go
back to the work and wait until it happens again: touch of grey will
play above the aisles and he will walk to find me, point up and stare
out past me to where he thinks the song is coming from.

AVERY GREGURICH is a writer living and working in Marengo, Iowa. He was raised next to the Mississippi River, and has never strayed too far from it.