Dumbek's Random Stuff

9-21-91 - The Grateful Dead @ Boston Garden

So here's a tough one.

Tickets for weekend shows in the northeast were always tough. It turned out that me and my friends got some of the mailorder tickets we needed, but not enough. So we were stuck trying to get through to TicketPro on the phone. (I think it was TicketPro - You get the idea.) So the morning of ticket sales, my friend Joby and I were dialing away, not really expecting to get anything. Miraculously - I managed to get through fairly quickly. I was thrilled. The lady on the phone pulled up the tickets - We were on the FLOOR! Amazing. I gave her my name, address, phone number...wait....hang on a second ...............click ...........umm.... hello??.................. CLICK..... and a dial tone. She hung up on me! I'm pretty sure I woke up all of my neighbors with the stream of profanities that I was screaming, but I just started dialing over again. DAMMIT!!

So a few more minutes go by...busy...busy..busy... Then my call-waiting starts beeping. I ignored it at first, but it kept going. I answered with an obviously angry "WHAT?!" It was the lady from TicketPro. She apologized for hanging up on me. She still had my order up and just needed my credit card number to complete the order. Can you believe that sh-t!? 5 minutes later and we had more than enough tickets for the 2 weekend Boston shows. On top of that - Joby got through, too. Not only did we have tickets...we had 2-3 extra tickets for each night. Holy crap.



But that's pretty much where the good news ends. Mike - the guy I was dating at the time - decided to head up to Boston a day early to see if he could trade one of our extra tickets for the show on the 20th. Had I been able to leave work, I would have gone with him, but he ended up going up there alone. Our plan was to meet at the hotel very late on the 20th. Joby and I get to Boston - No Mike. He never checked-in at the hotel. There were no cell phones then. I tried calling his house, but his roommates weren't home. We ended up getting a room elsewhere for the night. I finally got in touch with his roommates the next afternoon, just before the show. Mike had been in an accident. He was hit head-on by a huge truck that was driving the wrong way down the highway. All they knew was that he was flown to a hospital in PA and his parents were on their way. I eventually got in touch with Mike's sister, who basically said he was in shock-trauma and nobody could see him. I talked to his roommates again and they said it would be best to just calm down, go to the shows (they were Deadheads, too), then go home and wait it out. I wouldn't be able to see him or talk to him for at least a few days anyway, until he was out of shock trauma. I think it turned into a couple weeks before I could even talk to him. To say I was a mess would be a bit of an understatement.

I won't get into the details of all that, but I'll just say that today Mike is very much alive, well and currently gentrifying Columbia Heights. Hi Mike.

Needless to say, I didn't pay much attention to the shows. It turns out they were actually fantastic. I just couldn't have cared less at the time. I didn't even bother to sell or even give away the extra tickets. I still have a few of the unused ones.