The Book of Breaks – John Perry Barlow’s Last Words

It was a most uncomfortable feeling to receive and begin reading Mother American Night the day John Perry Barlow died. The Prologue didn’t make it any easier. It is titled Not Dead Enough. It describes how the book came about. Barlow had been dead eight minutes when a young intern yanked him off the bed onto the floor and proceeded to knee him in the chest until his heart reactivated. This after barely surviving the removal of a huge tumor on his spine, discovered while treating a horrendous staph infection he got from brand new cowboy boots. He decided it was time to focus on this book of memoirs.

It contains a chronological stack of wonderful stories spread over 47 lightning-quick chapters. They make Barlow an American Original. Some stories are being told for the first time, like when he drove to Boston to become the first American suicide bomber, in the 1960s. The who’s who of Wesleyan University, where he was Student President, descended on the place he was crashing, brought him back and put him in a sanatorium to bring him down. It took two weeks – and he resumed classes as if nothing had happened.

All through his life, Barlow (known as johnperry to anyone who mattered) caught breaks: getting through Customs with a life-sized head sculpture filled with hash plus a page full of LSD tabs. Or hitting gravel on a motorcycle, wearing only cutoffs and not even shoes, and taking himself to the hospital. He couldn’t wear clothes while he healed, and showed up at a university board meeting in just shorts. Given the choice, Barlow always took the more dangerous path, and never got caught.

Aimlessly, he managed to be in absolutely the right place at the right time. He spent the Summer of Love (1967) in Haight Ashbury, right in the home of The Grateful Dead. In the early 70s, he lived right by Needle Park on New York’s Upper West Side, and dealt cocaine in Spanish Harlem. He got into computers in the mid 80s, and his links to the Dead got him entrée to computer high society, which was populated by deadheads.

Among the right places at the right time, Barlow:
-had his pick of top eastern universities (despite his school record) simply because he was from Wyoming, where few applications originated.
-forged three medical excuses from the draft, and though discovered (he used the same typewriter for all three), got away with it.
-worked with Dick Cheney to get him into Congress, but realized he was a “global sociopath” interested only in pure power. They argued fiercely, and went their separate ways.
-had John F. Kennedy Jr as a 17 year old summer intern on his ranch, taught him how to fly, and warned him about instrument flying, which, like Barlow, he could not master. Before Kennedy plunged his plane in the ocean, they danced together at a Prince concert in New York and got the whole Radio City audience up and dancing – and no one recognized them.
-became a close friend of Timothy Leary, after having been taken to see him as an anonymous undergrad. It was Barlow who Leary wanted at his side when he died, though that didn’t quite work out.
-got a $5000 advance on a novel while an undergraduate, and instead of finishing it, took off to India with the money.
-with no connections, sold several screenplays to Hollywood to raise money for the family ranch.
-wrote the lyrics for 30 Grateful Dead songs.
-with no qualifications but his Dead connection, worked for Steve Jobs on a book idolizing the corporate culture of Apple, and later, the NeXT news magazine.
-co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation with Mitch Kapor, who diverted his private transcontinental flight to Wyoming to meet him.

It was a remarkable, varied, exciting, and high profile life. But it’s not as if John Perry Barlow is anyone’s idol. He was an alcoholic, smoked three packs a day, took more than a thousand hits of LSD, dealt cocaine, cheated on women (a family tradition) with abandon, and tested his luck constantly. With homes in San Francisco, Wyoming and New York, he was an absentee father of three. On the other hand, he consciously and deliberately tried to make things better, opening up copyright for art’s sake, helping Wikileaks in its time of need, and building an environmental startup to clean and recycle biomass. The book ends as it begins, with his newly acquired appreciation of love and how he had finally been able to accept the love freely shown to him over a lifetime. His wish seemed to be that we not wait quite as long.

David Wineberg