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Mrzyglocki paid for the trip with an inheritance left by his father, who had committed suicide in 2007. He says some of his friends questioned his sanity, but he declares the one-of-a-kind week worth it. "It's a free-market economy; he [Freese] can do whatever he wants," Mrzyglocki says.
"He's a good kid. I didn't know anything about him until he landed," Freese says. Although he could have fulfilled his part of the deal in three days, he says, he and Amdurer moved Mrzyglocki out of the hotel and into their house. "By the end of the week, I felt like I had become a big brother to him. ... The last thing I wanted was for the kid to go home and go, 'You know, I guess it was OK. Yeah, I met Maynard, and he was a dick, and then he [Freese] dropped me off. Thanks.'"
But critics blasted Freese for accepting money from a teenager. "I was really bummed reading [about it] on the Internet one night, and I felt pretty shitty," Freese says. "I put this thing up for sale; someone bought it. I didn't know if he was 60 or 15."
The criticism is unwarranted, says Andrew Youssef, 33, a freelance photographer and pharmacist from Huntington Beach, who purchased a $250 Cheesecake Factory lunch.
"Obviously, he's doing it for the money a little," he says of Freese's strategy, "but it's not like the people who wanted to pay for it are feeling gypped at all. I don't think you're hearing any complaints from anybody who spent the money."
He says Freese's marketing effort is genius. "I think people are jealous they didn't think of it first," Youssef says. "With the music industry going the way it is, he's gotten more publicity out of all this than anybody could even dream of buying."
Freese is at the Indiana Jones Adventure ride at Disneyland with Ferris Al-Sayed, 18, from Carmel, Indiana.
A recent high-school graduate, Al-Sayed is quiet, but every now and then he slips in a funny one-liner. Freese is giving him a tour of Disneyland as part of the $5,000 package.
Al-Sayed chose this package, he says, because Pearl Jam guitarist Gossard had to write a letter to him. And because Freese had to "write a song about me and spend a pretty extensive amount of time with me."
A few days earlier, Gossard overnighted Freese a thick envelope containing the letter to Al-Sayed explaining his favorite song on Since 1972.
Freese and Al-Sayed head toward the Rivers of America, and then run into Eric Wilson, the bass player for Sublime. Freese points out the Mark Twain stern-wheeler floating just behind them, where he and his little brother played hide-and-seek while their father and the Disneyland Band played at the bow of the riverboat.
Freese, Al-Sayed and Wilson pose for photos in front of the Pirate's Lair on Tom Sawyer Island. Al-Sayed cracks a joke about chopping off Tom Sawyer's foot and replacing it with a peg leg. He stands, posing with a thumbs-up and his mouth open.
Freese and Al-Sayed decide to tackle the 45-minute wait at the Haunted Mansion. While in line, the two chat about music, and Freese swaps stories about his rock-star pals such as Twiggy Ramirez and Buckethead, the latter of whom is apparently a huge Disneyland fan. Al-Sayed reveals that he's an aspiring musician himself, about to study music theory at Indiana University or Purdue in the fall.
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