Dark Stars

Thirty years ago yesterday —April 17, 1971 — was undoubtedly a very interesting day in the history of Princeton University. I wasn't there, of course, but the Grateful Dead were playing their one and only concert ever here, in Dillon Gym. That's right, the Grateful Dead. Jerry Garcia.

My point, you ask? The Dead (and their fans) did a ton of drugs. Pot, LSD, mushrooms, alcohol, heroin — you name it, they probably did it. Nonetheless, the musicians who play in the band are heroes to many; the reverence shown them by their fan base is usually reserved for deities or, at least, sports heroes.

Sports heroes, you ask? When I was a young boy in 1986 in New York City, the two things that mattered to me on a daily basis were remembering to bring my rug to school for nap time and whether or not the Mets had won the night before. That year, they won a lot — 116 times in all, including the World Series — far more often than I remembered my little rug. But unfortunately, playing baseball wasn't all that my heroes did. While I was napping on the rough carpet of my kindergarten classroom, Darryl Strawberry, "Doc" Gooden and others were out drinking, womanizing and doing drugs.

This weekend's New York Times Magazine featured as its cover story a piece on Strawberry's tragic life. It is a story about an extraordinarily blessed young man — a hero to millions of 6-year olds and just as many 60-year olds — who never reached his full potential, struggled with alcoholism and drug addiction, once threatened his wife with a pistol and now, after fleeing his court-ordered drug-rehab program for four days, is likely to head to jail.

When I was eight, in '88, Dwight "Doc" Gooden — Strawberry's co-star, the great pitcher on those mid-'80s Mets teams — entered drug and alcohol rehab and missed the first couple months of the season. I can remember his first game back; I didn't know exactly what had gone on that had kept him away, but I knew something was wrong.

A few years later, when I was 10 or 11, my world was rocked again. A babysitter told me that my newest heroes, the Beatles, were drug users as well. "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds," she told me, was meant to represent the acronym for LSD. I was, to put it mildly, shattered. I denied it. I argued with her. I refused to believe that it could be true.

These days, of course, nothing really shocks me anymore. Every reading for my Intro to Jazz class is about musicians like Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Billie Holliday — my current heroes in a sense — who spent much or all of their careers under the influence of some drug or another.

Ever seen VH1's "Behind the Music" series? Are any of them not about how someone's career was ruined, sidetracked or inspired by drugs or alcohol?

My point, I guess, is that every so often things happen that make me rethink drugs. They are (in case you weren't aware) very prevalent on this campus. Every week I hear another story about a friend or acquaintance doing anything from Ecstasy to cocaine to heroin to Special K (not the cereal), and I usually shrug it off. Drugs don't hurt most of us too much, after all, and look at what Miles, Garcia, Carl Sagan, Sigmund Freud and Ken Kesey — just to name a few — did while under the influence (even if their drug use may have, at some point, come to negatively impact or even end their lives).

The stories like Strawberry's are the ones that scare me. Maybe it's just because he was my first real hero, from the first time I went to see him play at Shea Stadium when I was five-years old (even though he broke his wrist that day) until he left the Mets for the hated Dodgers in the early '90s. I expected him to hit 600 home runs, go to the Hall of Fame and be a model ballplayer and person for generations of kids to come, just like one of my father's heroes, the great Willie Mays, was for me.

Instead, Strawberry's career is over before his 40th birthday, he has hit only 335 home runs, and he is likely on his way to prison. It's sad for me to think about; it is much, much sadder for him. Dan Wachtell is a philosophy major from Rye, NY. He can be reached at wachtell@princeton.edu.