California Healing
Scabies was the leprosy of 1990 Grateful Dead tour. That's probably how it made its way to our Charlotte NC hippie house. One of my roommates had given some dude named Owl a ride on spring tour and may have brought the scabies back. Or maybe it came from the metal band house next door. Either way, I took it back on tour in early summer while traveling with a different roommate who was a girl but not my girlfriend. We had tickets to Dead shows in California and I'd almost cleared the scabies by using a prescription cream that smelled like sour milk. By the time we reached the Painted Desert in New Mexico, the poison ivy style rashes had mostly subsided, but as we crested into the Sierra Nevadas at dawn, I caught myself scratching my left ankle. Two nights later at the California show, I was hanging inside the amphitheater when I heard someone across the lawn yell, "scabies!" The voice was too far away to be screaming at me, but it sounded like a medicine man exorcising...