The Half That's Never Been Told by Dread Doctor

Author:Dread, Doctor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Perseus Books, LLC
Published: 2015-01-06T05:00:00+00:00

EARLY LIFE

Once a man and twice a child. And everything is just for a while.

—Bob Marley, from the song “Real Situation”

I was born Gary Himelfarb on December 2, 1954, at George Washington University Hospital in Washington, DC, the same day Joseph McCarthy was censured for interrogating people’s affiliation with the Communist Party. Like many white Jewish families we moved out to the suburbs when I was in first grade. I had a good childhood. I was into sports, had lots of friends, and did well in school. I know Sigmund Freud says that many of our childhood experiences will affect how we turn out later in life, and I think to some degree this is true. I remember as a ten-year-old I had this little battery-powered record player, and I would take it to our neighborhood swimming pool along with my little red box full of 45 rpm records and play them for all my friends. I was the president of the chorus in junior high school and would lead warmups and learned about song arrangements from my teacher Miss Kerr. Don’t let ’em fool you: good teachers who can inspire the youth are worth their weight in gold. I believe this led me into becoming a record producer.

When I entered high school I was still into sports and went out for the junior varsity football team. I could catch a football like no one else and was dubbed “Hands Himelfarb.” For me this was what it was all about. Playing football. Making friends. The cheerleaders. I was doing pretty good at practice, but after a scrimmage one day I was horsing around on the bus ride home with the rest of the team and for some strange reason the coach cut me. Just like that. I was devastated. One week later I was at this big field party near my house and all these hippies were smoking weed and probably doing psychedelics (this was 1969) and I entered a world I had never been to before. I was completely transformed from jock to hippie, and to this day my mom says that her biggest regret in life, as far as I am concerned, is that she did not go back to the coach and demand that I get reinstated to the team.

Drugs soon became a very important part of my life. I would smoke weed at seven thirty a.m. before school with friends on the railroad tracks. I also experimented with psychedelics (in particular LSD). My first airplane ride was to visit some distant relatives living in Cleveland so I could see a Salvador Dalí exhibition. I had brought some LSD to take with me and I dropped just prior to entering the museum. The Dalí canvases were fantastic. Large, surrealistic landscapes including one called The Hallucinogenic Toreador. Believe me, the LSD took me deep into these landscapes, and when recounting this story at a recent dinner party I joked that I have never returned from these adventures down that rabbit hole.

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