My Afternoon With David Crosby

Sometime in the early 1990s, on People Magazine’s dime, I spent a day with David Crosby and his wife Jan in their gorgeous home in the foothills of the Santa Ynez mountains.

I was not a fan of either Croz’s music or his lifestyle. Minor keys and four-part harmonies were white boy music, I thought, and it really galled me (as an X-nurse) that he’d managed to propel himself to the front of the liver donation list solely on the basis of being famous.

Croz was on the Well, which is how I kinda, sorta knew him.

In those days, the Internet was a hard sell in Hollywood, but as People Magazine’s Interactive Entertainment Editor—a title I made up for myself! Basically, I was the person who first put People up online with my self-taught HTML skills and thereafter, for five years or so, presided over People Online’s content—my job entailed scrambling to connect with celebrities that I could then offer up to my tiny but growing pool of 500-baud modem users.

Croz was in the active redemption stage of his career when I spent that day with him. He’d recently had a liver transplant; mortality was on his mind. He was more than five years out of prison, but you could tell prison was still on his mind, too. He was touring more than he wanted to and making less money than he wanted to.

The resulting interview, sliced, diced, and pureed, eventually made it into some People Magazine story or other. (People had this very weird setup whereby “reporter” and “writer” were separate job titles; I had been dispatched to Santa Barbara as a reporter.)

And I published the extremely lengthy interview, copyedited but uncut, in People Online.

I looked for that interview yesterday afternoon when I heard the news that Croz had died.

But I couldn’t find it.

There are so few remnants around of the Internet’s Wild West days these days.

Not even on the WaybackMachine.

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I couldn’t help liking Croz. He was a contrarian shit-stirrer and top-level asshole but also incredibly bright and charming. Croz had that talent all quintessential con artists have of zeroing in on whatever commonality you and he had and then blowing it up into a bonding experience. I enjoyed the long afternoon I spent with him, and I liked his wife, a perky hippie who liked bright, shiny things but refused to wear makeup.

I’m surprised he made it to 81. Shiny new liver or no shiny new liver, his health back then was obviously Not Good, and his touring schedule this past 30 years had to have been absolutely grueling.

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After I heard Croz had died, my thoughts turned, as I have to say they have been turning increasingly often, to my own upcoming death.

Way back when I was deeply into horary astrology, I calculated the date of my own death. I still have 14 years to go if those calculations are correct.

But, of course, it is the Last Big Life Experience I have in front of me, so it makes sense that I would spend time thinking about it.

What does it feel like to die?

Is it like falling asleep? (I like falling asleep!)

Is there really a shiny white light tunnel with all your favorite cartoon characters waiting on the other side for you to slide out?

Your ego doesn’t survive the experience, but I am quite certain your essence—go ahead! call it a soul!—carries on.

What relationship does your ego have to your essence?

All fascinating questions that will be answered in good time.

Or not.