Are You Experienced? (4 page)

I thought I knew a lot about Woodstock, especially compared to a lot of kids my age, who didn't know much about the sixties, except maybe that there used to be some people called hippies. I had seen the documentary film a million times, mostly so I could try to copy the guitar solos of the amazing people who had played there, like Carlos Santana and Jimi Hendrix. I had picked up most of the other basic info between guitar solos, too: Woodstock was a massive concert in Upstate New York. It took place over three days in August 1969, in a farmer's field, and 500,000 people came. There were gigantic traffic jams for miles and miles around on the way into the concert site, and a lot of the bands had to be flown in by helicopter. The organizers only expected maybe 100,000 people to show up, so there were shortages of food, medical supplies, toilets, parking, and just about everything else you can think of. Also, the weekend featured tremendous rainstorms that turned the entire area into a mess of deep, reeking mud. There were drugs everywhere. Hundreds of people went skinny-dipping in a lake a few hundred feet down a hill behind the stage. Babies were born. A couple of people died.

But—and this was the amazing thing that my dad had once talked about glowingly to me—there were no riots. There was no looting. People shared whatever food and supplies they had. Over the entire course of the weekend, half a million young people lived together in these primitive, crowded conditions without a single injury due to fighting. Everybody got along. The hippie generation proved to the world that they could live their ideals of peace and love, at least for a while.

Then my dad came home, experienced the death of his brother, and grew into a bitter old man who thought the right way to raise a kid was to keep him locked in a room until college.

Usually when I had a truly raging case of insomnia, I would text Courtney. She always put her phone on mute before bed, so she never texted back in the middle of the night, but at least it let me feel like I wasn't completely alone. I got up, turned on my light, and looked around for my phone, but realized it was probably downstairs somewhere. My alarm clock said it was 2:23 a.m., so I figured my parents were long since asleep, and it would be safe to tiptoe past their bedroom and retrieve the phone.

I figured wrong. My mom was sitting at the kitchen table, barely illuminated by the tiny stovetop light, drinking a cup of her horrible-smelling flowery herbal tea. “You couldn't sleep either, huh?” I whispered, in a pathetic attempt to establish common ground.

“Do you know what day this was?” She said this in a stinging voice, like she was trying to cut me with the words.

I didn't say anything. All I could think of was wisecracks, and she was holding a mug of boiling liquid. It didn't seem like a great time to antagonize her.

“Your uncle Mike died on October seventeenth.”

Ouch. Of all the days to get busted at a pro-drug rally …

“Do you know what your father does every year on October seventeenth?”

I just kept staring at her, thinking,
Still not talking … still not talking … must bite tongue
 …

“He sits in his den in the basement all night until dawn with his brother's things … photos, an old guitar, an amplifier.”

A guitar? An amplifier? My father had an amplifier downstairs my whole life? I have to explain: My parents had bought me a really great acoustic guitar—the beautiful Martin I had played at the protest—as soon as I had proven I was serious about playing. In fact, my dad had insisted on getting a Martin, even though Martins are expensive, because he said that a Martin was “the only serious choice” if I was going to play popular music. But when it came to electric, I had spent years begging him for an amp before he let me get the world's teeniest model, and he still made me practice through headphones whenever he was home. Whatever.

“He usually goes down there at around nine thirty or ten, but I suppose you've never noticed before. He tries really hard not to talk about it. Let me tell you a story, Richie.”

Richie? She hadn't called me “Richie” in, like, seven years. It had sounded a lot nicer back then. I had the feeling this was going to be some story.

“A long time ago, there was an extremely sweet, extremely confused eighteen-year-old boy. He was talented and beautiful. Some say he looked, sounded, and even acted a lot like you. This boy had a younger brother who loved him very much. One night, when the younger brother was away from home on a high-school marching band trip, something terrible happened. The older boy locked himself in the brothers' shared bedroom at around ten thirty, sat down on his bed, tied a length of rubber tubing around his right arm just above the elbow, and stuck a needle full of an awful drug called heroin into a vein in that right arm. Then he untied the rubber tubing, pushed down on the plunger of the needle, and sent the heroin into his bloodstream.”

I noticed Mom's voice was quivering. Mom's voice never quivered.

“The boy had apparently been experimenting with heroin for two months or so, but nobody really knew about it at the time. Anyway, for some unknown reason, he took too much this time. Immediately, his heart rate slowed down. His breathing became shallow and uneven. His pupils shrank to pinpoints. He became confused. He may have realized that this time he had gone too far. He may have become frightened … or maybe he was so far gone, so fast, that he never even knew what was happening to him. His lips and fingernails turned blue.

“Within a minute or two at most, this beautiful young man fell off his bed and landed facedown on the bare hardwood floor, breaking his nose and several of his front teeth. This must have made quite a loud noise, but his mother and father, who were drinking and watching television in another room, never heard a thing. At this point, his body probably flailed and twitched around the floor in violent convulsions for several minutes, but the parents remained unaware that their first-born child was dying alone.”

Tears were running freely down Mom's face now. She wiped them with the back of one hand but never stopped telling her story.

“In fact, it wasn't until six o'clock the next morning, when the younger brother came home from his band trip, that the body was discovered. The parents woke up, still intoxicated from the night before, to find their younger son screaming hysterically. He had entered his bedroom without turning on the light because he didn't want to wake his beloved big brother—so he tripped and fell over the cold, lifeless thing on the floor.”

 

WALKING DOWN THE LINE

FRIDAY, AUGUST 15, 1969

 

Oh, my God,
I thought.
My father is a demented, hyperactive maniac
.
With sideburns
.

Being the same age as my dad was weird enough. Watching him practically bouncing off the ceiling of the car with excitement was the one thing that almost pushed my entire time-travel experience beyond my capacity for belief. While I was leaning back against the seat, aching and shaking, my father—who was destined to spend every weekend night of his adult life sitting at the kitchen table with a crossword puzzle—was rattling on a mile a minute about the concert:

“Wow, do you think we're going to get there in time to see the first act? Are we going to get good seats? This is going to be so wild, man! Think about it. We're going to see the Who! We're going to see Janis Joplin! We're going to see Jimi Hendrix! Hey, Michael, turn up the radio! Willow, tell him to turn up the radio! Please? Oh, wow, it's the Beatles! I heard they might even show up. Do you think it's true? Huh, Mike? Do you think the Beatles might be there?”

He was like a five-year-old who really, really needed to be medicated.

I sat up to look at Michael and Willow and caught my reflection in the huge rearview mirror. Suddenly, I felt another huge wave of shock. My hair really was completely white-blond. So were my eyebrows. I looked like the illegitimate love child of my normal self and Luna Lovegood from the Harry Potter movies. What was I going to do? What if I never got back to my own time? What if my hair stayed this way? What if …

“TURN THIS UP!” my dad shouted, showering the side of my face with flecks of spit.
Well,
I thought,
there's one habit he never lost
. The song on the radio was called “Get Back.” It was by the Beatles, and I knew it because I had taught myself the guitar parts. Willow turned it up, and Dad and Michael both started singing the vocal at the top of their lungs. Most Beatles songs have tons of vocal harmonies, but there aren't any harmony parts in most of that one. Still, I'm good at singing harmony, because that was pretty much the one part of my musical career my mom, the music teacher, found interesting, so when the song got to the chorus, I joined in with a high harmony part. Willow looked around from Michael to Dad to me with a huge, beautiful smile on her face as we sang,

Get back to where you once belonged.

My father and my uncle sounded so perfectly at ease together that you could just tell they did this all the time, and Dad looked so happy, it barely seemed possible he could grow into the man who had raised me. As for me, when my voice blended with theirs, I almost stopped singing. We sounded amazing. We sounded like we belonged together. We sounded like a family. I didn't want the song to end.

I knew the next song, too. It was “Everyday People” by Sly and the Family Stone, who would be playing at Woodstock. They had male and female singers, and Willow belted out the female parts while the three of us did all the guy harmonies. Willow banged her hand on the dashboard like she was playing a cowbell, I hummed the bass part whenever I didn't have a singing part, and Dad rocked forward and back so hard the entire car shook. His hair flew all over the place. It hit me that my father had really, really long, wild hair—hippie hair.
Dude,
I thought,
your students would freak if they could see this.

Dad, Michael, and Willow sang maybe ten more songs, some of which I knew, and some of which I had never heard in my life. Apparently, the number-one song in the entire country the week of Woodstock was something called “In the Year 2525” by Zager and Evans. I sang along with the choruses of most of the songs I hadn't heard, but this was so strange I had to listen. I mean, here was a song about the future … and I was actually a kid from the future. I could feel the newly blond hair stand up all along the backs of my arms and the nape of my neck. Willow noticed I had gotten quiet, and stopped singing. “What's wrong?” she asked. “You were looking so much better for a while.”

“Nothing,” I said. “I just don't know this song.”

She laughed her tinkly laugh. “You must have amnesia, Gabriel. This song is everywhere! It's so far out!” Then she stopped smiling as she looked around and noticed we weren't moving. “Gee, how much farther, Mikey?” she asked. “We still need to get Gabriel checked out.”

The traffic had been getting slower and slower ever since I had gotten into the car, but now we were at a complete standstill in front of a combination gas station and general store. Lines of teenagers were walking past us on both sides of the street, carrying sleeping bags, backpacks, and a wide variety of other stuff on their backs. There were also cars pulled off and parked haphazardly everywhere. When I really stopped to think about it, I noticed that there had been more and more parked cars and teenage pedestrians for miles, but I had been so busy pretending the Barber 3 were the Jackson 5 that I hadn't thought about it. The street sign said we were at the corner of Route 17B and Route 52. Michael put the car in park (which didn't really make any practical difference in our progress) and dug out a road map. I had never seen anybody actually use one of those in a car before. I reached for my pocket to get out my cell and see where we were, and had to fish around in there for a moment before I realized my cell was in my living room, forty-five years away.

After studying the map for a couple of minutes, Michael said, “I think we're still about six miles away from the festival. But we're not moving at all. I'm going to pull over and park here. Then I think we should go into this store and buy as much food as we can eat.”

“Then what?” Dad asked.

“Then, little brother, we walk.”

There were cars parked two and three rows deep in a grassy area behind the store, so Michael angled the Cadillac in between a VW minibus painted up in DayGlo peace signs and a beat-up Jeep that looked like it had survived World War II. What a weird thought—this was only twenty-four years after World War II, so that was completely possible.

We went into the store, which was already nearly picked clean. A scraggly-looking old lady in overalls was scurrying around with a sticker gun, raising the prices of the remaining items. “Quick!” Michael said. “Grab a bunch of stuff that won't go bad.”

I followed Dad and Willow as they went on a quick scavenger hunt through the three aisles of merchandise, snatching up a loaf of bread, a package of crackers, a jar of peanut butter, a big container of orange juice, two tins of sardines, and a few other items I didn't get a good look at. Then Willow started piling my arms high.

“Uh, just so you know, I don't have any money or anything,” I said.

“We know,” she replied. “I mean, like, where exactly where would you have kept your wallet?” I could feel myself blushing as she laughed and gently hip-checked me into an empty display case. “Just pay us back by being kind to somebody else in the future, okay? It's good karma!”

We went to the register to pay and found Michael already standing there with two cases of soda. He was muttering under his breath as the lady rang up the person in front of him. “Can you believe this? A dollar for a six-pack of Cokes? Seventy-five cents for a box of Corn Flakes? These people are deliberately overcharging just because they can!”