Only one generation apart themselves, In 1995 Jerry Garcia, 53, died of a heart attack brought on by decades of drug abuse. A few days later, Mickey Mantle, 63, died of complications resulting from decades of alcohol abuse.

Lives like Mantle and Garcia illustrate all religion most lugubrious warnings about the vanity of human wishes. Nothing is so prey to entropy as celebrity, as the fortune of the great.

Two doomed sensitive young men with their wild and crazy lives. It’s an understatement to say they both dealt badly with their fame. They were insecure exhibitionists and hopeless addicts. For them there was never a resting-place at the top.

In 1956, Mickey arrived on the baseball scene in a blaze of glory hardly anyone in America could have missed. There was a president election that year and the Suez Crisis and a revolution n Hungary. But it was a one-man revolution in Yankee Stadium that claimed even more of the nation’s attention. Ike and Adlai sat on the bench to Mantle’s performance in 1956.

Mantle, 24, had played five years in the shadows of Willie Mays, Duke Snider and his own teammate, Yogi Berra, and had not yet made New York forget the great Dimaggio. By the end of the season he was a demigod, without any more mountains to climb.

He hit 52 homers, 39 left-handed, 13 right-handed. He won the batting title, the Triple Crown, the Most Valuable Player award and the Hickok Belt for the professional athlete of the year. He led the Yankees to a pennant and a world championship. In May he clobbered two of his colossal, gravity-defying home runs off the façade of the left-field upper deck in Yankee Stadium, tape-measured between 550 and 600 feet. He hit a home run in the All-Star Game and three in the Series, including one in teammate Don Larsen’s historic perfect game.

Robert Lipsyte of the New York Times wrote about what Mantle meant convincingly.

"It is center field in Yankee Stadium, a patch of grass glistening in the sunshine of afternoon in America. It is the 50s and the quintessential American sports hero, Mickey Mantle, rides the lawn, our cowboy in the outfield, helping us feel good about ourselves. Mantle, wearing number 7, the Oklahoma Kid with his booming bat and sunny smile, seems a promise of all the afternoons to come on a planet we would democratize, tame and teach fair play."

There must have been a moment of innocence there, with America choosing a president from two candidates no one feared or hated. The world looked pretty good, and if you ever believed in baseball, you believed in 1956.

If you ever believed in rock n’ roll, you believed in the late 1960's, and if you believed in the late ‘60s you believed in the Grateful Dead led by their signature guitarist Jerry Garcia.

My relationship to rock n’ roll in those days, as a dopey typically self-involved teenager, was much like my relationship to sex. I was definitely interested, but not directly involved. At least not until a prep school buddy, whose father produced B.B. King, snuck us in to my first Dead show at the Fillmore East at age 14.

From then on I was hooked on their music and their romantic ideals of the late ‘60s era. There’s a lot to admire about the reluctant rock star Garcia. His music did what good music should do. It defied description and demanded to be heard.

Two things stand out even more than his compositions, guitar virtuoso and production wizardry. One was his unyielding iconoclasm. He established his own boundaries and thrived doing things his own way.

But above all else, Garcia believed it is the duty of every citizen to keep his mouth open, to keep the bullshit detector set on zero tolerance. Society will always need people like that.

As a long time Jerryite I was aware of his deteriorating health and of his heroin addiction. I’ve known a lot of stoners who have abused their brains, but needle addiction horrifies me. Most fans, even the most devoted Deadheads, could never face the real music behind the gentle image of Garcia’s smiling bearded face and bearlike body: that all he could buy with his money was a one-way ride on what Joan Baez, in a dirge to Janis Joplin, called "The Mainline Rail."

It’s hard to be generous about Jerry and Mickey. Part of it is the angry frustration of The Catcher in the Rye who has missed another one. Each generation of kids seems paralyzed when its cultural heroes self-destruct. But no sentiment sways me, after seeing several promising lives swept over the same Niagara as when applied to the burning question raised by a Mantle special liver transplant, or the bizarre deification of high kitsch shrines to a junkie.

Maybe it’s my own quick ride from dream to disillusionment to boredom, paranoia, excess and substance abuse. Nevertheless, I think Mantle and Garcia are miserable role models. If anything redeemed them, it was certain grassroots honesty, an incongruous innocence that distinguished them from the average celebrity.

They had that in common. Are their lives more important than yours? Not in the eyes of God, if you believe in one. But don’t they deserve some consideration for what their lives meant to other people?

Did you ever have a better year than Mantle’s in 1956? If you have, I might put you ahead of Mantle on the transplant organ roster. Imagine that Garcia was still alive (many do) and needed a liver. How many of the Haight-Asbury pilgrims taking snapshots of the Dead’s old haunts, or standing mute and reverent at a Garcia wake in Golden Gate Park would sign up to give him their own?

In a gallery in San Francisco there is a plaque by the pious folk artist Howard Finster inscribed, "I believe Elvis is a (sic) angel."

Indeed, there’s always the cheap, nasty, venal, predatory quality of life as we find it, what F.Scott Fitzgerald called "the foul dust" that floated in the wake of Jay Gatsby’s dreams.

We loved Mickey and Jerry because they were bigger and finer than most of us ever dreamed of being. Even though they fell on their own swords, didn’t they give us enough to earn a liver or maybe even a postage stamp? Go ask the fans of Richard Nixon.