J. seemed to be occupying more of the sidewalk than a normal human being, a giant joint between his fingers. It had been years. Two, three, four maybe. Our conversation was brief and manic. He introduced me to his friend A., all quiet and smiling. I couldn’t tell if he was amused. Or what he was thinking. He was the officiant, J. said, as if no other information were needed. And none was. The officiant. At the wedding. In the Catskills! Wherever the fuck, said J. As if the location, the date, the occasion, none of it mattered.

Day 3

I should avoid all news while here, let it be an intriguing, unpleasant surprise upon our return, the aftermath of a brutal invasion depicted on the array of CNN screens at JFK immigration. But instead I’ve been compulsively checking the Times and the Post.

We went to the mini mart this morning and there were stacks of Red Stripe cases, so now there will be two eras of this vacation: the bottle and the can.

An older guy on the beach came up to me pulling a baggie out of his pocket. What do you need mon, that rap, and I said yeah but I don’t want to spend much, what can I get for ten. He wanted to sell me two for thirty, two for twenty-five. I said twenty, he said fine. A light rain began to fall and he led me to a covered space nearby. He ground a bud into a paper and made small talk, where you from, who you with. At the mention of the word wife he said it’ll make you real hard mon and I said you don’t need to tell me that and he laughed but what I really meant was, you don’t need to tell me that. You don’t have to sell this shit. It’s fucking marijuana. It sells itself.

I rejoined my family buying trinkets from a woman displaying her wares from a scarf in the sand.

The Autobiography of Someone Else - 19

One fall day in homeroom Jim said he discovered something in the woods, and you could tell from the shine in his eye it wasn’t the usual find, not an arrowhead or a stash of waterlogged porn.

“A joint!” he said.

“A joint? Pot?”

“A joint. I found it in a baggie by the river.”

We resolved to smoke it, Harry, Jim and me, that weekend. Harry’s dad was going to take us to a Sherlock Holmes play on the college campus. We’d have some time before then at Harry’s to duck out and light up.

On Saturday we walked single-file through the woods by Harry’s house. I gazed at Jim’s back in wonder, knowing he carried something awesome, like a loaded gun. When we were good and out of sight we found a boulder to sit on.

Jim withdrew what looked like a fountain pen case from his jeans pocket.

“I thought it was in a baggie,” I said.

“I transferred it from the baggie,” Jim said solemnly. As though the thing were an archaeological object to be dusted and protected, perhaps someday mounted on a pedestal.

When he opened the lid there it was in the little slot where the pen’s supposed to be. Slender, delicate, twisted at the tip. Part of the paper had been discolored a swampy hue.

“Why’s it green?” asked Harry.

“It got wet when I found it,” Jim admitted.

“It got wet?”

“I was nervous, I dropped it in the river,” Jim said a little defensively. “I picked it up as fast as I could. Now it’s green.”

We pondered it, lying in its ill-fitting coffin of purple velvet. It might not be perfect. It might have been fucked up from when Jim dropped it in the water. But it was beautiful.

Jim picked it up tremblingly in the requisite pinch and placed the tapered end into his mouth. He struck a match and lit the other end, drawing as hard as he could. Immediately he erupted in spasmodic coughs, holding the joint away as ashes and sparks flew off the burning tip. 

It was Harry’s turn. He drew on it, more tentatively, but finally exhaled a plume of sweet smoke and handed it to me.

The paper was dry, almost brittle, like the pages of an ancient tome. I felt privileged. Anointed. I placed it to my lips and sucked in. Nothing happened.

“Is it lit?” I asked, pulling it away and examining the other end. A taunting wisp of smoke emerged.

“Yeah it’s lit!” said Harry.

Jim helpfully fired up a match. He cupped it with his other hand against the breeze, like the Boy Scout he was. I approached gingerly, the thing in my mouth. The flame licked the charred paper as I drew again, hard this time. Still nothing. Or was there something? The tip glowed a moment, then not. An ash or two flew off. I held my breath as long as I could and let out a faint gray mist. That was it! Or was it? Could it have been my breath, vaporized in the cool October air?

“I’m not getting anything!” I cried.

Jim said try again and I did. Still it appeared to be lit. The stubborn little curl of smoke. Same thing again. A vague sensation of warmth in my lungs. A dubious exhalation. Jim took his turn again and smoked copiously. He blew a big, white cloud and passed it to Harry, who did the same. It was down to a roach now. Jim stubbed it out on the rock and put it back in the pen case.

Sitting in the theater as Sherlock Holmes rolled up his sleeve to grandly inject morphine into his arm, Watson watching bemusedly, I didn’t know if I was high. But I wanted to be high. I believed that I was high. I was high.

The ticket window was on the side wall of a head shop in an old Victorian in the sad little town between us and the city. My mom dropped me off there to wait in the freezing cold for spring tour tickets. Sweet coffee in a dented thermos. Camel unfiltereds snuck in my coat pocket. Just putting my hand in there would make it reek of that dark, sweet perfume, Turkish and domestic blend. But my mom didn’t know. Or she did.

The line snaked back into the dirt parking lot behind the building, filled with beaters and VW buses. It became amorphous there, people playing hacky-sack or huddled in little circles to get high. I sat on the embankment by the wall and watched. Someone blared a live tape circa 1979, “He’s Gone.”

A Deadhead invited me into his car, a beat-up old boat, to warm up and smoke a joint. He put on Neil Young, “Down by the River.” I’d never heard it before and it took a hold of my brain, that da-da-da-da-da, da-da-da-da-da on the guitar and the refrain, which I didn’t understand at first but then I understood and then misunderstood again, in circles and circles, shudder day, shutter day, shotty day, shut her day, shot her dead, shut a day, shudder day.

Late at night while washing dishes I had an insight that the Grateful Dead’s peak years of cultural influence were not the ‘60s but the ‘80s.

When I got into the Dead I thought I was late to the party. The ‘60s had happened, the ‘70s too. Jerry fat and gray. I wasn’t around for the Acid Tests, the Be-In. The Fillmore, the Carousel, the Avalon. What could it have been like to go to a concert on a Tuesday night, get dosed by Bear and wind up naked in the park, not lost and despairing but with a dozen kindred souls, all laughing ecstatically, scrutinizing the straight world as it awoke to go to work and not giving a fuck except about the universe? This happened, I know. But not to me.

Shows seemed to occur on the fly yet were promoted—and so memorialized—by gloriously psychedelic posters. Cost a buck to get in, maybe five or maybe nothing. For years this band had played in parks, on the street, on campuses, all the while revolution in the air. I know—I saw the pictures in the books. How I wished I was there. All the clothes were cooler. The hair. Everything was happening and nothing was predictable. You could probably go right up there and sit on that stage if you wanted, by the tangle of cables and the speakers with the tie-dye grilles.

When their audience got bigger the Dead responded in kind: a sound system three stories tall, shows that lasted hours and hours, long weird Dark Stars. Egypt on a lark. I missed all that, too. Now the band seemed diminished, constrained; endlessly touring the hockey arenas of the United States, subject to regulations as to when to stop. Set lists, though still varied and unique, had acquired a creeping formality: some songs were openers, some closers; there were first-set songs and second-set songs and everybody knew the encores. The weirdest music all tidied up and filed away in the middle of the second set. There were tendencies for certain sequences. Tendencies for sequences of sequences. Ronald Reagan was president; nothing was happening and everything was predictable.

I got it on good authority that Jerry was a junkie and I thought, my God. The darkness of it. The coldness. In my naive head all filled with flowers it seemed like a betrayal.

But the music was still there. Jerry bent at the neck, playing furious triplets in dorian mode. The drummers never hitting anything at once. Or on the one. Phil. There was a careening, dangerous quality to the music—dangerous in the sense of something big that’s falling over—that could be quite compelling if you were so inclined. And quite not if not, which kind of proves the point. Turns out the formality provided a context, a foil. The deviations, the surprises, they meant more than mere chaos ever could.

In fact the Dead were never more powerful and influential. They reached many, many more people than they had before. If you were a kid in Pittsburgh, or St. Louis, or Santa Fe, you went to the Dead show when it came to town. Like it or not. There weren’t a lot of kicks to be had in this country in 1983. No Instagram and nothing on TV. If you wanted to do anything interesting you’d better see the Grateful Dead.

It only took a few influential stoners to go at first, then next time ‘round there’d be a horde: younger siblings, someone’s preppy girlfriend and all her friends, jocks who got drunk in the parking lot. And this cycle of influence was a machine: for years the band played up and down the East Coast every spring and fall, through the middle of the country every summer and on the West Coast all the other time. It would be difficult to not go to a Grateful Dead concert.

And everyone took acid. Didn’t matter if they liked the band or not. Many did, but for sure many didn’t. I remember the scene at the Springfield Civic Center in the spring of ‘86. I went with my Deadhead friend Bill like always but there were lots of others from our school. Being a devotee I hoped pridefully that they’d get it, that their minds would be blown by the music. Of course they didn’t give a fuck—except maybe one or two that did. There was always the one or two. But most of them were there because it was there, man. I recall watching a friend, a popular kid whose tastes ran toward the Hooters and Crowded House. He roamed past circles of dancing hippies, bemused, while his best friend sat nearby, cradling his LSD-exploded head between his knees. What the fuck were they doing there? Wrong question. How the fuck could they not be there?

The Dead in fact instilled in the American adolescent a reflex for taking psychedelic drugs and going to the coliseum, maybe telling off a cop or two, then finding their way home Gonzo-style to put the pieces back together. Wake up late for school and mumble at their moms. Kids began to do this at every show—not just the Dead. When Iron Maiden came to town, same thing. Clapton, same thing. The Police, Def Leppard, Bad Company. Didn’t fucking matter. No matter the music, no matter the culture it was intended to represent, when performers looked out from the stage they saw thousands of dosed-out teenagers whose perceptions and reactions could not be relied upon too well. The Acid Test continued.

This was the true influence of the Grateful Dead, and their legacy too.

I stood on the beach and waved to my wife and daughter as they waded into the sunset. Just then a ganja man appeared. Just as they always do, just about all the time. This time I decided to buy.

“How much for a spliff?” I asked.

He looked over his shoulder and approached me furtively, like we were accomplices in a crime. Which we were I guess, but it’s a crime that occurs a thousand times a day on this beach. Maybe this was theater. Make the sunburned tourists feel a thrill.

“Here mon, here,” he said, and tried to press a handful of fat joints into my palm. “Forty.”

“I only want one, man,” I said, pulling my hand away.

“OK, OK, OK,” he said in a displeased, slightly disapproving tone. “Here you go mon.”

Now I had three in my hand. His eyes darted left and right.

“Twenty.”

“No, no, I don’t need three. How much for one?”

With great reluctance he took a spliff back from my hand, leaving two. I figured I wasn’t going to do any better than that.

“Fifteen.”

I told him I’d be right back, I had to get cash at our place.

“Yeah mon, come find me. Come find me,” he said, and extended his elbow for a bump. “Ree-spect.”

Back at the villa I got my wallet and took out the cash, thinking to myself what it’d be like to burn a Jamaican beach dealer. Would he glower at me in my shaded chaise every morning as he passed by on his rounds? “Where da cash mon?” he’d ask, and I’d shrug my shoulders and return to my paperback. Or maybe he’d kill me with a knife. Drag my carcass into a powered dinghy and dump me out at sea. Really I had no idea what would happen.

I returned to the beach and found him a few paces from where we’d met.

“Here you go,” I said, placing the money discreetly in his palm, and I did feel that little thrill after all.

“Yeah mon! You wan’ anyting else you lemme know!” he said, and I knew from his tone he meant cocaine.

“Thanks,” I said, and turned away, not knowing whether I’d been ripped off, figuring I had, not really caring, with one more joint than I needed in the damp mesh pocket of my swim trunks.

I wondered briefly tonight whether “The Americans” was an allegory for the opioid epidemic. A middle-class family on a suburban street. Everything looks OK. But the parents are absent unpredictably. Sometimes they return home bruised, maybe missing a tooth. They go to great lengths to explain it all away. And when one day their child sees a crack in reality, and confronts them, they turn it into a family secret. Us versus them. You can’t tell anyone. But the child knows: there’s something Mommy and Daddy love more than me.

How many people live in homes where the sound of jet airplanes routinely pierces the silence, interrupting conversation, requiring the brief rewinding of video programming? A lot, I bet. I really noticed them tonight. Flight paths might have been low on account of the rain. But I like it. Imagining all those people up there, on their way—somewhere, or home.

The ganja dealers always walk awhile on the beach with their marks, or their johns, or whatever you call a drug tourist customer. A paunchy white American and a young, fit Jamaican, walking side by side: It’s not a gay couple down from Baltimore. You could see the white man trying to play it cool. Listening and nodding and laughing a little too hard at the dealer in the middle of his habitual rap, not even thinking. Then the dealer would nod toward an alleyway or a parking lot and the pot would appear out of the trunk of a car or the hand of an accomplice, or maybe it was just rolled up in the guy’s shorts the whole time anyway. What was the purpose of this runaround, in a land where the sale of marijuana had to be considered an essential part of the economy? Maybe the theatre of it was essential. Make the buyer feel like he’s engaging in an illicit or even risky act. Where we going? Who’s that over there? Make scoring feel like a personal victory. They won’t even think about the price. The dealers seemed to know they were selling ritual, not just product. A ritual of connection and belonging, of peril and survival.

Notes Written Upon Waking Up About a Dream I Can No Longer Remember 2

I took acid with Steve and someone else, a friend of his but no one that I know in real life. I wanted to have enough left over to sell. I really felt high when I took it. Felt high in my dream.

The neighbors upstairs.

A bus ride.

Dragging a suitcase through the mud.

Dave

Jeff started telling me weird things about Dave.

“Dude, he’s like, psychic.”

“What do you mean?”

“He knew all about my dad. He knew about his cancer. He told me about it in the woods.”

“He knew about it?”

“He told me about it. Like he knew. He knew what type it was. He knew it was stage four pancreatic cancer.”

“Without you telling him?”

“No, without me fucking telling him. Of course not.”

“Then how did he know?”

“Dude, dude, dude, I just told you. He’s psychic.”

“He told you about it in the woods?”

“Yeah, we went out in the woods on Friday night. We made a fire. He was like, ‘I can tell something’s up with you. Something with your dad.’”

“You were in the woods and you made a fire?”

“Yeah. Out back. Near the airport.”

It was not unusual for us to hang out in the woods. Especially not to get high. Normally we didn’t go out at night though. And didn’t make fires. The fire seemed to make some kind of difference in the story. Flames illuminating faces.

“You guys got high?”

“Yeah, fuck. Shit, Jesus. Of course we got high. We were fucking baked. Dave had the most amazing weed.”

“And he didn’t know about your dad?”

“He didn’t! I mean, I didn’t tell him. There’s no way he would know. But dude, he fuckin’ told me. It was fuckin’ spooky, man. It’s like he knows shit.”

“Wow, that’s weird.”

“Yeah, and plus he did some other shit that was amazing too.”

“What other shit?”

Jeff widened his eyes. “Like I-can’t-even-tell-you-type crazy-ass shit, man.”

Dave was slightly older. He was a new kid at Jeff’s school, moved there for this or that reason. Parents split up, Mom moved to Chaplin of all goddamned places. Or maybe Dad did. Or maybe they both did. Who knows. Why does someone appear in the middle of the school year in a backwoods town in Northeastern Connecticut? Least of all someone like Dave?

I didn’t go to their school. I just hung out with Jeff on account of playing guitar. We had the same teacher and he told us we should get together, since we could both play just about as good. So we did. And we smoked cigarettes. And we smoked pot. We bought cigarettes from the machine at the diner on Route 89. We drank beer. Out on the dyke by the airport. Then we’d go to his place and play Grateful Dead tunes on two electric guitars, recording into a portable cassette player. Anyway, Dave moved into town.

One day soon before Dave disappeared for good, without a warning or a trace, the three of us were hanging out. Dave was a tall guy, short hair. He seemed more relaxed than any other kids I knew. Like he’d already done shit, like maybe had some jobs. Maybe had a kid or something. Definitely been laid.

We went out on the dyke one night and got high as hell, then we went back to Jeff’s house to watch TV. We were goddamned hungry. We made spaghetti.

“Lemme show you how to make the sauce,” Dave said.

I didn’t really understand what the fuck he was talking about. Sauce came out of a jar like it always does.

“What do you mean, make the sauce?” I asked.

“You gotta doctor it, man. You gotta doctor it.”

I nodded stupidly as he found a jar of oregano in the spice rack.

“Watch me,” he said, and I did as I was told.

Dave unscrewed the entire top of the shaker so there was just one fucking big hole there, not the screen with all the little holes.

“You see what I’m fuckin’ doin’?” he asked. Then he proceeded to pour a good fucking tablespoon of oregano into the sauce. The dry, dusty flakes, sitting in clumps now on the glistening, bubbling surface of the Aunt Millie’s. I was astounded.

“Wow,” I said.

“You think that’s enough?” he asked, tauntingly.

“Yeah!”

Immediately he shook out the same amount again.

“Wow,” I repeated. My hunger. My twisted mind. My numb and stricken mind. Ravenous like an animal. Terrified like one too.

“You think that’s too much fucking oregano for this fucking sauce, Pat?” he demanded. It sounded like a threat.

“I dunno. Yeah. It’s kind of a lot.”

He calmly, deliberately shook in some more. Till half the jar was gone. The entire surface of the crimson liquid was now covered, just about.

“That’s enough,” Dave said. He put the lid back on and placed the jar back on the rack.

Then he stirred his concoction a few times and pronounced it done. We poured it on the spaghetti and ate in front of the TV. It tasted pretty good. I was so high anyway. I don’t know. “2001: A Space Odyssey” was on. The apes had just discovered the monolith and were going batshit crazy. I looked over to see Dave gazing at the screen, its light reflected in his eyes. He lifted his fork up to his mouth and ate like anybody does. Like an animal.

We walked around the Notting Hill Carnival this morning, with Richard and Katie. The shops were boarded up behind graffiti’d plywood, their names juxtaposed with tags, making them seem to participate in the festivities just as they withdrew from them. The grill smoke was punctuated here and there by sweet, little clouds of marijuana. Dancehall blared, one sound system competing with the next. As you walked past the cacophony would phase and shift, the rhythms setting and then canceling each other out. But there was always someone right there who knew how to dance.

The Enterprise - 39

I was beside myself, what to do with Melissa. All I could imagine was her disappearing. And me grasping at the space where she had been. She’d been a little quiet lately. What was up? I made mental lists of things to say to her. Little jokes to make. As though to appease some insatiable beast.

Still, our relationship persisted. I shuffled fearfully to her apartment every couple of days, convinced she’d send me right back home. Instead, we’d order out. Watch some old movie. Fuck. Wake up and brush our teeth and that was that.

I began to make a tally of the good days and the bad. I took her out to dinner for her birthday. That was good. I got her drunk enough so she forgot my apprehension.

We planned a vacation. A trip out west. A visit to a friend of mine and to a friend of hers. Hotels, wineries, a drive up the coast. Carmel and Monterey. Some camping. I hated camping. I would have done anything she said.

There appeared a warning light on the dashboard of our rental car and I called the 800 number that was provided in our pamphlet of materials. Ignore it, they said. There’s no problem with the car. There’s a problem with the warning.

The first few days were fine. She liked to get high. As long as we were smoking pot together, everything was all right. That’s what I thought. We sat on the windowsill of a motel room in Santa Monica, blowing smoke into the shaft. Little sparks flew up into the darkness.

The night before it was all over we were staying at an extremely expensive inn overlooking the rocky Pacific shore in Big Sur. We got high on our patio. I sucked each papery hit deeply and held it in as long as I could, drawing every last bit of intoxicating smoke into my lungs in little bursts, trying not to cough. Then we walked the path to the restaurant perched over the foggy cliffs.

We were offered a table facing an angry orange fire; for a moment it seemed lovely and then my hands and knees and face heated intolerably and in my hazy state I felt the thing was ruined and the whole world was sure to end.

"Ask the Maitre d' for another table," said Melissa quite reasonably, so I did, and we were promptly seated at a table by the picture window looking out to sea.

We ordered white wine and oysters and California caviar and when it came we set the oysters between us and slipped them off the shells into our mouths, and everything was fine as gray turned to black outside, and far below us the foamy surf that beat upon the shore receded into darkness too.

Suddenly there was a man standing behind her, his nose to the window. He had wound his way around nearby tables and chairs and appeared to be examining the glass with intense curiosity. His fingers walked upon the surface and its ghostly, gold reflections of faces and hunched bodies, chairs, tables, plates and softly glowing candles. He probed it timidly, hesitantly, like an explorer who has discovered a new world far more mysterious and wonderful and terrifying than he could ever have imagined.

"Sir?" said Melissa.

After a beat more puzzled fumbling he broke out of his trance.

"Oh! I… I thought that was another room!" he said, and pivoted back among the real things from whence he came.

As we watched the lost man and debated the meaning of his behavior—was it some kind of joke? Was he very drunk? Senile?—I became convinced I wasn’t me.

We drank more in the restaurant, got the check, wandered through the parking lot and smoked some more. We tried to break in to the swimming pool, the fancy one that’s in the pictures in the travel magazines. Someone with a flashlight saw us and yelled something. So we went back to our room, drank some more. Fucked in the tub. When I awoke in the morning she was not beside me and I knew right then it was over. It wasn’t my own thoughts that told me. It wasn’t my own voice. It came from outside of me. It had the authority of the other. It’s over. I knew there was nothing I could do. And like an idiot I still tried.

Drugs I've Worked On So Far

Aciphex
Activase
Aranesp
Arestin
Arixtra
Asmanex
Avastin
BeneFix
Boost
Botox
Brilinta
Celebrex
Copaxone
Dificid
Elaprase
Fanapt
Flector Patch
Flumist
Gardasil
Geodon
Gilenya
Humira
Isentress
Juvéderm
Levemir
Lucentis
Lyrica
Multaq
NovoLog
NuvaRing
ParaGard
PegIntron
Picato
Pneumovax 23
Pradaxa
Procrit
Rituxan
Saflutan/Zioptan
Saphris
Seroquel
Silenor
Sutent
Tamiflu
Tobi
Torisel
Tresiba
Victoza
Viramune
Xolair
Xyntha
Zelboraf
Zoely
Zostavax
Zyvox

Oil & Hay - 14

Before I did as I was told, I poured a glass of water from the little carafe on the shelf. Some of it splashed on my trembling fingers. If I can't fill a glass with water, I thought with dread, how can I drive a car at speed? I gulped it down morosely, the last sip of a condemned man.

I pull out, past the Esso sign hanging at the end of the pits, between the bales of hay that line the straight, and down the hill into the first corner, a gently sweeping righter, feeling alright so far. I contemplate the ditch along the steep bank to my left with a shudder.

And all these patches in the asphalt! Had they been laid in the few hours since I'd last been at the wheel? It alarms me that I am just now giving them a conscious thought. The chassis rattles and skids over them. I can feel every seam.

I can also feel cold sweat through the palm of my glove when I grip the gearshift. It terrifies me to be strapped to this contraption, out here alone among the fields and the trees and the silvery sky, each blade of grass oblivious to me, indifferent as to whether I miraculously navigate the course or fly into the woods. Is it at times like these that a man cries out for his mother? What a stupid thought. In a succession of stupid thoughts: This is the moment; this is it, it, it. This is what a man does. He does what he's afraid of doing. What am I doing? Here comes the hairpin. The Nouveau Monde. Downshift, downshift, downshift, and around, grind a little shifting up, get on the throttle, a bit too soon: the tail goes wavy, then I'm back in shape. I love to climb, to feel the power at my back as it wrenches the car from gravity. What was Melanie telling me? Something new is coming. But it's not lurking in these woods, unchanged for a hundred thousand years but for this sinuous band of asphalt and its rude freight. Or is it?

I'm driving now, really driving. Scared out of my wits but driving. To press the accelerator requires a tremendous exercise of will but I'm damned well doing it. This is what a man does. If I can get around this track a few good times I can step back into the pits, tell Tex what he wants to hear, find a dark corner somewhere to hang my head and cry. And be alive.

Finally they call me in.

As I decelerated and pulled into the box I began to quake with relief. They all looked at me with bewildered expressions. Was the motor on fire? The chief mechanic, Derek Owens, leaned in to me.

"What's wrong with her?"

"Nothing," I replied, taken aback. "Nothing I can tell. Why?"

"Nothing?"

I shook my head as he turned to survey the engine and exhaust.

"Are you alright?" he asked with an air of grim concern.

I felt a jolt of shame, suddenly seeing myself as he must see me: freakish, fumbling, incompetent. I decided to let my pride go. To tell the truth. A little.

"I've felt better, if I'm honest. I'm not in tip-top form."

Derek nodded slowly.

"Why do you ask?"

He showed me his stopwatch.

"You're thirty-five seconds off your pace from this morning," he declared.

Oil & Hay - 13

I sat at the back of the pits at Les Essarts with my hand in my race suit pocket, rolling the soft ball of hashish between my fingers. Von Schlosser had given it to me before taking his turn at the wheel of our newest Star.

"Have you smoked?" he had asked me in his oddly melodic accent.

"Ever? This? Before?"

He nodded.

"No."

"Empty out your cigarette a little bit. Put the hashish inside. Smoke it."

"Thanks, Jürgen."

I decided to do as he said. I was done driving for the day, after all. There was naught to do but watch the car come in and out of the pits, to stand over the motor with an expression of thoughtful concern, to occasionally bow my head into the cockpit, pretending to understand my German teammate's breathless observations.

I took it out back, in the paddock by the lorries. Discreetly ground out some shag from a Gauloise and packed the cylinder with crumbs of the claylike material. I lit it up. The thick, sweet smoke settled into my lungs like a fog. I erupted into a fit of spasmodic coughs and as soon as it was over a curious warmth spread over my face and neck. My mouth grew dry. In the distance I heard the Apogee engine whining against the gears as Jürgen wound through the Forêt de la Londe.

It was a grey day. The cold air moved around my arms in streams as I walked back to the pits. Tex was seated at a table, ruminating.

"I been thinkin' 'bout puttin' wings on the car," he declared.

"Wings?" I exclaimed. "Good Lord. Are we now permitted to fly?"

"Upside-down wings. Think about it."

"Won't that slow us down?"

"Yes."

My mind was aswim. Tex bit off a new cigar and spat the tip of the butt at the cinderblock wall.

"It'll slow us down in a straight line," he said. "Ya get my drift?"

I felt my heartbeat quicken. "No."

"But speed us up around a corner."

As I pondered the implications of his remark I felt as though a new world were opening its doors.

"How'd it feel out there, Mal?" he asked after some time.

"Smashing. Bit of understeer." Why did I say that? Had I said the proper thing? It seemed like a reasonable thing to say. I was aiming for maximum plausibility.

Tex clamped down on his cigar and scrutinised me warily.

"Why, Schlossie just told me he got oversteer."

"That so?"

"Mal, I need your ass back out there."

"Beg pardon?"

"You an' the Kraut, ya gotta getcher stories straight. Car ain't that temper-mental."

I felt the cold sting of panic overwhelming my soul.

"Putcher helmet on, Limey," Tex said as he navigated his wide girth off the chair and back towards the track.

8/4/76

Jim picked me up in his rusty blue Duster at a little past three, then picked up Rick, then Rick's girl Jenny. We were between junior and senior year at Neptune High School in Neptune City, New Jersey. It was Wednesday, August 4th, 1976.

Jim wore no shirt as usual, gold chains bouncing on his collarbone as he braked. At a light, he reached into the pocket of his jeans and withdrew a crumpled plastic baggie. He tossed it at me and it floated as it flew.

"Take one and pass it on."

The engine idled rough. Jim had to step on it a couple times. You could feel the vibrations all around you.

"Hell, take two. I'll take two."

I unfolded the package and opened it to find a little square of black paper perforated into nine subsquares, each bearing the image of a gold pyramid with an eye inside. The light turned green.

"Awesome," I declared.

"It's the Eye of Horus, man," said Jim.

"The eye of whores?"

"Horus. Horus."

"The fuck is that?"

"I don't know man. It's the Egyptian God of LSD."

Without hesitation I tore off a corner square and placed it on my tongue. For a moment it tasted a little metallic. Then it tasted like paper. I wondered how anything so small could possibly have any effect on anything or anyone.

I turned around and stuck my tongue out for Rick and Jenny, showing off the dissolving hit for good measure. Rick gazed back sternly and made grabby motions with his outstretched hand.

"Gimme," he said.

"Eye of the Horus," I stated, and tossed him the baggie.

As I stared out at the sun-soaked trees and grass along the Garden State Parkway I swallowed hard. There. Now it has begun.

---

There was a disordered pile on my side, ankle-deep, the characteristic refuse of car life: Styrofoam coffee cups, empty Marlboro reds, a yawning Big Mac box, pull tabs and cans, napkins, stir sticks and spent Heinz packets with ketchup coagulated along their lacerations. Rick's collection of 8-track tapes was carelessly intermingled with the trash. I nudged and burrowed until the soles of my shoes made contact with the floor.

"Grab a tape," Jim said.

I examined the choices. Pictures at an Exhibition, Emerson, Lake & Palmer. There Goes Rhymin' Simon, Paul Simon. Keep the Faith, Black Oak Arkansas. I dug deeper.

"How is this?" I asked, holding up the new Led Zeppelin, Presence. The cover depicted a wholesome family of four in their Sunday best, seated around a white-clothed table upon which rested a highly sinister, abstract object. They contemplated it cheerily.

"I dunno. It's OK. I–"

"Sucks!" yelled Rick from the back.

I looked at the cover more closely. Outside the window behind the family, pleasure boats bobbed in a marina. The title of the first song was "Achilles Last Stand."

"I haven't heard it all yet," Jim confessed.

"Fuckin' sucks," Rick repeated.

"Good. Fuck you. We're listening to it," I declared.

I popped it into Jim's player and pushed play. A creeping guitar figure arose and wound sinuously from the speakers. It was a weary little melody. It sounded like it had been playing for a thousand years and we'd just now intruded upon it. Suddenly a dark beat cracked, charging and throbbing like a pitiless storm. The drums were thunder. The guitars were lightning and rain. Floating above it all was a baleful, moaning song.

I looked out again at the mid-Jersey landscape. Macedonia. Leafy industrial parks by the side of the highway. Billboards for cigarettes and cars. Pontiac Bicentennial Sale-abration. Everything suspended in honey.

Rick tapped me on the shoulder and passed me a balloon filled with nitrous oxide. I emptied my lungs and placed it to my lips, inhaled deeply, and held my breath. Everything inside and outside of my mind fell away like water down a drain. I was in a small, bare room with a solitary light. A room without a door. I was on my hands and knees and gazing at the floor. I was higher than I'd ever been before. I turned to my right to see the window roller knob and for a moment I saw it for what it really was: not a window roller knob. Everything was transparent, porous. Purple petals of guitar and liquid bass. Ah, ah-ah-ah, ah, ah-ah-ah went the song. I realized I was sweating when I felt the vent wind cool on my face and that's when I stopped being high. I handed the rest of the balloon to Rick.

---

Jim had the acid. Rick had the beer. And I had the pot. Jenny just sat back there with her hands clasped between her thighs. Silent. Rick had just hooked up with her this summer. The Good Girl. Studious and proper. She was hot, though. Straight blond hair. She wore a chaste collared shirt under a flower-embroidered sleeveless sweater, but new and dangerous curves strained the seams of her pale pink bell bottoms. I imagined that her prim demeanor belied a ferocious sensuality. I fantasized that I'd get her high later and, at the peak of the bacchanal, sneak her off to some corner of the field to fuck her under the moon.

We were about halfway to Jersey City. I rolled a joint and passed it 'round.

"I'm not high enough," I declared.

"Take more acid," Jim replied matter-of-fact. Almost sharply. A command. He reached again into his pocket and gave me the baggie. He never took his eyes off the road.

I pulled out the blotter. An L-shaped, four-square strip remained. Jim had taken two; the rest of us had each taken one.

"Yes sir," I replied, tearing off another square and popping it in my mouth.

"I'm telling you, it'll sneak up on ya."

"What?"

"You're higher than you think."

"Really?"

"Yeah. Shit's serious."

I turned around.

"Are you guys high?"

Rick stared back at me mutely, bearing an expression of vague alarm. His pupils were the size of dimes. Suddenly, Jenny erupted in laughter. She covered her howling mouth with the back of her hand. She looked out the window. She leaned over with a spasm and appeared to drool between her knees.

"Oh my God," she exclaimed breathlessly. "Oh my God. Oh my God."

Rick turned his eerie gaze to her then back to me. I turned around again. Robert Plant sang:

Nobody's fault but mine

It's nobody's fault but mine

Try to save my soul tonight

Oh, it's nobody's fault but mine

Jim was smiling. "How 'bout now?"

"What now?"

"Are you high now?"

And the moment I thought about it I realized it was true.

---

Laughter is mechanical. It's like an engine. It takes a spark to start but then it goes all by itself.

I had an idea. It was a funny idea. And so it made me laugh – in sputtering starts at first. But soon I was laughing hard, my chest and shoulders heaving. A tear ran down my cheek.

You get a funny idea, you laugh.

What was my idea? My idea was this: I should open the door right now and get out of the car. That'd be funny. It'd even be funnier if I said goodbye to everyone first.

Just imagine. Seventy miles an hour on the Garden State Parkway. Everybody sitting where they sit. Lost in their petty little worlds. Thinking of this or that. Sex. Drugs. Food. Music. I'd break the silence with a jovial salutation: Alright guys, I gotta go! Bye! Then I'd open the door, wind rushing in like crazy. Step out of the car like it was nothing. Disappear into a speck in the rear-view.

There's a lot of different things I could say before I go. Hey! Take it easy guys. I'll see you later. Or: OK everybody, I'm gonna split. All equally funny. I was laughing like hell.

Why was it funny? 'Cause we were in a car. The dashboard and the ceiling and the seats. When you're in a car, you ain't goin' nowhere.

It was funny because of the way Jim gripped the wheel. A little tensely, knuckles white. A little seriously. Driving is serious, man.

I stilled my hysteria long enough to speak.

"Driving is serious, man."

"What?" Jim said, his voice dissolving into an airy chuckle. He looked at me with a bemused but affirming smile. And then he looked back at the road.

I flicked the chrome door handle a couple times. Flick. Flick. God it would be funny. Goodbye!

---

We stopped at a 7-Eleven in Perth Amboy before getting on the Jersey Pike. I was really high now. Trying to keep it together. Trying to let it go.

It was hot outside but not too hot. The hazy realm of summer doldrums. No shoes, no shirt, no service, said the door. When I pulled at the handle it opened quickly, like some spirit inside was eager to escape. Immediately I was enveloped in a blast of frigid air that bore the sickly odor, at once acrid and sweet, of coffee gently burning in its pot, hot dogs rolling on their rollers, the Slurpee machine, stacks of papers and a hundred thousand candies, gums and snacks. An eerie hum played over the cold.

I examined the front page of The New York Times. Each headline exquisitely banal. "Senate Overrides Veto on Coal Fees." They seemed like subtle, clever parodies of headlines. Mockeries of reality. "Italians Wrangle Over Poison Issue." Some bore the haunting ring of something long-ago forgotten. "U.S., West Germany Reach Tank Accord." Every element within them – every name, noun, verb and number – struck me as obvious. Predictable. "Grenade Kills Four in Burma." Of course grenade. Of course kills four. Of course in Burma. "Teen-age Kansas Girl is Missing After Her Father is Found Slain." Might they have been written before the fact? Maybe nothing really happens if it isn't a headline in The Times. Maybe nothing really happens at all.

Jim walked in, bare feet slapping the linoleum.

"I'm gettin' a Slurpee," he declared.

"Fuck yeah. Me too."

"Out!" shouted the man behind the counter.

We turned to face him.

"Out! Out! Now!" he repeated, red-faced, pointing to the door.

Waves of crimson panic pulsed through my brain.

Jim did a squinting double take. "What the f–"

"Shirt! Shoes! Out! Out! Out!"

"The fuck is he saying?" Jim asked me pleadingly, a sheen of sweat on his brow.

"Out! Now! Out! Now! Shirt!" the man insisted.

I understood.

"Jim," I began, as calmly as I could. "You're not wearing a shirt. Nor are you wearing any shoes."

"Oh, Jesus fucking Christ. Jesus. Christ. Fucking scared me half to death."

The man, silent now, stood like a statue, arm outstretched.

"Get me a Slurpee and a pack of reds," Jim told me.

"What flavor?"

"Blue," he replied as he walked back out, holding up his middle finger all the way. Not once even looking at the man.

---

I returned to the car and handed Jim his Slurpee and cigarettes. Rick and Jenny were still fucking around inside the store.

"What kind did you get?" he asked.

"Coke and cherry. Mix."

"Was he a prick about it?"

"About what?"

"About mixing the flavors."

"Nah. He was normal. He was normal about it."

"Fuckin' prick." Jim slurped loudly from his.

"He was humming a song."

"He was humming a song? What song?"

"Late December back in '63."

I drew a copious mouthful of dark-pink goop with my straw. First there was a shock of sweetness. And then I perceived strange and complicated molecules, concocted in flasks and beakers, tripping across my tongue. Fruit tastes. Lime and cherry. But the tastes were two-dimensional, transparent. Abstract. It occurred to me that they weren't the tastes of fruits so much as the tastes of the names of fruits. The taste of the word lime. Thin, flat, pale, cold. The word cherry. Florid. Freighted. Rich. I also tasted metal for some reason. Lots of metal.

"Song fucking sucks my balls," Jim remarked.

Suddenly a spike shot up out of my heart and traversed through the center of my fevered brain. Cold. Sharp. Merciless. It was the distillation of every truth in the universe penetrating once and for all my cluttered and benighted mind.

"Ahhhhh! Ahhh! Ahhh!" I moaned, rocking back and forth in my seat. "Aaaaahhh!"

"Brain freeze!" Jim declared cheerily.

---

When we got to JC we sat in traffic on Route 440 for about half an hour. Finally we pulled into the looping driveway around Roosevelt Stadium, ringed with parking lots. We drove a full counterclockwise lap, slowly, taking the measure of the place. Along the sidewalks, and spilling out into our path, were boisterous streams of people: Some freaks, tie-dyed and bandanna'd; some kids like us. Some older people. Many of the guys were shirtless. Practically every single man and woman wore blue jeans.

The stadium itself was a forbidding monstrosity, a hulking and ominous presence, somber in the summer light. It looked like a prison or some Soviet ministry.

"That place freaks me out," said Rick.

"Yeah," I agreed. "Don't tell me we have to go inside of that thing."

"Ooh!" Jenny exclaimed. "I don't want to go inside!"

"There doesn't even seem to be a door," Rick noted, his voice full of dread.

"We are going inside," Jim stated. "Everyone is going inside."

The right front wheel ran over a beer bottle, crushing it with a muffled pop. A man in overalls and a green tie-dyed shirt turned toward us.

"Fuck you!" he exclaimed.

I leaned my head out the window and stared dully at him. He punctuated his insult with a defiant nod.

"Wow," said Jim.

We parked deep in one of the lots, beside a red-and-white VW bus. As soon as I got out a man in the driver's seat passed a burning pipe to me through his window. I took a big hit and held it as a spark ascended from the bowl into the sky. My lungs convulsed against the hot, raw smoke.

"What's your name, man?" he asked.

I exhaled a glorious, sweet white plume. "Alex."

"Cool, cool. I'm Doug. This is Magic Girl," he said, indicating a drowsy blonde in the passenger seat. "Cerberus is sleeping."

I peered into the back of the bus to find a German shepherd coiled on a dirty mattress, sheets and crocheted blankets in a tangle. It smelled of sweat, dog and patchouli.

Doug and Magic Girl got out and said hello to everybody else. He wore a poncho and a floppy leather hat; she wore a peasant dress with little red flowers. We passed the pipe around.

"We were in Hartford the other day. We been on the road all summer," said Doug.

"This is the last show," said Magic Girl.

"Then where you gonna go?" asked Jim.

"Anywhere but home, man," said Doug.

"Anywhere but home," Magic Girl repeated.

Cylinders of purple light extended above their heads.

"Why you called that?" Rick asked Magic Girl.

"'Cause she can tell your future," Doug said. Magic Girl was silent.

"Tell it then."

"OK. You," she said, pointing at me. "You're afraid."

"Me?"

"You're afraid something's gonna happen tonight."

"Happen? Like what?"

"Like something." She shrugged. "Anything."

"Something bad?"

"Good-bad doesn't matter, man. You just need to let it happen."

Doug nodded in assent as he relit the bowl and took a hit. "Don't recoil from experience, man," he said, holding his breath. Little wisps of smoke emerged with every word.

"It's all there is," continued Magic Girl. "Whatever's gonna happen, you need to let it."

I felt like my entire body was vibrating.

"I don't think I'm afraid," I protested.

"That's because you are," she said.

---

There were two worlds within the stadium. A world of light and life in the center. There the eternally young and beautiful basked in the golden sun. On folding chairs and blankets. Playing cards. Smoking pot. Stretching languorously.

Encircling this world was a world of shadow and death. The covered grandstands, cold concrete and steel. They were occupied by a desultory patchwork of clannish groups. There were even outliers among these outcasts, sitting way far up where it was darkest. Someone let out a fearsome hoot and a bottle arced high, end-over-end, and exploded in a splatter of shards and foam at the opening of the tunnel from which we had emerged.

We walked the littered path that formed the border. Jim and Jenny in front, Rick and I each carrying a handle of the cooler. We were scouting a location on the grass. To the left of the stage, where the stadium opened to the east, twin rectangular forms shimmered in the distance. Someone else shouted from the stands. Pure abstract shape. Identical. The objects seemed to oscillate in and out of existence. The breeze picked up a bit, kicking up a little dust. In the haze they were barely distinguishable from the sky. Only their outlines, tinged with gold, rippling like the sun upon the sea, were seen. I heard a woman laugh. Though I knew what they were, they appeared to be a phantasm. Their presence was exceedingly tenuous. They did not seem to be a part of this world.

A Frisbee glided across the foreground to break my reverie. The clock on the scoreboard was stuck on six to nine.

"Wait!" said Jim.

We stopped behind him.

"Check that out!" he exclaimed, his voice nearly trembling with wonder.

He was pointing at an object in his path. Rick and I put the cooler down and we all approached to have a closer look. It was a tube of something. Toothpaste. It was a tube of Aqua-fresh toothpaste. Brand new, apparently. Pristinely resting on the dirt and full to bursting. We scrutinized it with some awe.

Passersby walked around us at first. Then a few stopped too, to look at the thing that we were looking at.

Jim got down on his knee. He touched the cap first, with the tip of his index finger. Then he knelt on both knees to get a little closer. He ran his finger along the cool, white, unblemished surface of the metal skin.

"Wow," he whispered.

"It's beautiful!" Jenny asserted. She sounded like maybe she was about to cry.

We all knelt down now, forming a circle around the toothpaste. The crowd around us grew, peering over our shoulders. We admired in silence the very slight italic slant of the navy-blue lettering: Aqua-fresh. The toothbrush flat on its back below it, bearing a sleek dollop of blue-white-blue-white-blue striped paste.

After a time, Jim took his jackknife from his pocket and opened up the blade. Jenny let out a worried moan. Jim looked at her and then at each of us, his knife poised over the turgid belly of the tube. I nodded slightly, as though to give our assent. He punctured it up near the neck, working the tip in with a little twist. Then he drew an incision down across the letters, almost all the way to the tapered end. He withdrew for a moment to observe his work.

The opening act had just begun. It was the Marshall Tucker Band. They played a song called "Can't You See."

I'm gonna take a freight train down at the station, Lord

I don't care where it goes

Gonna climb a mountain, the highest mountain, Lord

And gonna jump off, ain't nobody gonna know

A thin band of white toothpaste had emerged from the slit. Jim leaned in again and made a careful vertical incision bisecting the original one just past the capital A. Then he made a similar one at the other end, between the H and the bristles of the brush. He made a third between these two, between the F and the R in "fresh." He paused again and we stared in wonder at the tube, which now began to ooze blue-white goo from its wounds.

Can't you see, oh, can't you see,

What that woman, Lord

She been doin' to me

Jim looked at us again, his expression conveying utmost solemnity and seriousness of purpose. Jenny stifled a sob.

"Do it!" she cried.

Jim carefully peeled back the middle segments of the tube, and then the four corners, to reveal a mass of sticky, viscous material in four perfectly symmetrical bands of alternating white and blue. We gasped. It was beautiful. It was horrifying. The crowd around us whooped and cheered. He wiped off his knife on the knee of his jeans.

"Touch it!" someone shouted.

"Yeah, touch it!" someone else repeated.

"Touch it! Touch it! Touch it!" the crowd began to chant.

Jim dipped his finger into the splayed-open tube and examined the dab left on its tip. Then he put it in his mouth. We awaited his reaction, expecting some revelation perhaps.

"Minty," he declared with a frown.

Then he dipped two fingers in the blue and brought his hand up to his face. He hesitated a beat then painted the tip of his nose. Then he took some white and painted stripes on his cheeks, his forehead. It was twilight now. He looked up and we studied him, the first initiate to a new religion. We understood that we were all to paint our faces.

---

We glommed a patch of lawn somehow, maybe fifty feet from the stage, and huddled around the cooler. I looked back at the stands. The sun had set behind them; its last rays shone through the gaps that ran along the very top, making silhouettes of the most remote.

"Hey man, be cool," the man to the right of me said in a terse and demanding tone.

"I'm cool."

"You're in our space, man."

I made myself small as his girl stretched back out the corners of their blanket. Someone else nearby had planted a Confederate flag.

We drank cold cans of Ballantine Ale. I squeezed a dent into the middle of mine. Like I always do. I took rapid sips, sucking the beer through clenched teeth. It, too, tasted of metal. Was I able to taste the can? I looked down at it and noticed the logo: three interlocking rings.

"What do the rings mean?" I asked.

"Deaf, dumb and blind," said Jim.

I looked to the others for an alternative answer. Jenny shrugged. Rick was sitting cross-legged and fiddling with the grass.

"How's it going, Rick?"

Just then the band came on. Most of the crowd stood up so we did, too. As I examined the stage I discovered that each of the drummers' bass drums was painted with an Eye of Horus.

"Jim, look at the bass drums," I said.

"Well I'll be damned."

"Are you sacred? I'm a little sacred."

"What do you mean, sacred?" Jim inquired.

"Did I say sacred? I mean scared. Scared."

I looked at him pleadingly. He appeared to be formulating an answer when he suddenly spat out a sudsy mouthful of beer and leaned over, clutching his knees and howling with laughter.

The band began to play. It was a lazy, lilting country song:

When they come to take you down

When they bring that wagon round

When they come to call on you

And drag your poor body down

---

I turned around to check on Rick. He was sitting down again, a forlorn, huddled figure in a forest of swaying blue jeans. He opened his mouth at me.

"Aaaah!"

There appeared to be some feathery material on his tongue. I leaned towards him.

"What is that, man?"

"Aaaaaaaah!"

"What's that in your mouth, man?"

Rick promptly fell onto his back and spouted out a flurry of grass. It landed on his face and neck in damp clumps. Jenny knelt down beside him and began to rub his chest.

"Ooh! Ooh! Ooh!" went Rick.

I elbowed Jim's arm and indicated Rick with a nod.

"He's high as hell," I said.

"Good. He's alright."

"You think he'll be OK?"

"He's got Jenny."

Rick tore off his T-shirt, got on his belly, and began writhing against the ground. At first I thought this was some extreme dance, but his gyrations did not appear to conform to the music. Now he drew his pants down to his knees.

"No, Rick, no, Rick, no!" Jenny shouted.

He spread his arms, gripped tufts of grass in each hand, and began humping furiously. The crowd had opened up a bit to give him space. Some looked on with vague curiosity as his pale ass throbbed in the fading light.

"What are you doing, sweetie? What are you doing, honey?" Jenny asked.

"I wanna... aaahhh!"

"You wanna what? You wanna what?"

"I wanna fuck the Earth! I wanna fuck the Earth!"

Jenny grabbed the waist of Rick's jeans and pulled them up as best she could. After a time he rolled over on his back and lay prone, defeated, one arm extended and one across his chest.

"It's OK baby, it's OK sweetie, I know, I know," said Jenny.

"Do you know!?" he wailed.

"I know. I know."

She lifted his head onto her lap and caressed his brow. His wide eyes appeared to be fixed on something far away.

---

It was not a band that I was very familiar with. Their iconography was in favor among a certain element at school. It was creepy, that's for sure. The type of shit that Mom and Dad do not want you scrawling all over your three-ring binder. But it wasn't ghoulish; it had a sort of jaunty, old-fashioned prettiness, a lot of it. Skulls and lightning and roses and ravens. It seemed like it had been stolen from some mythical frontier in a lost decade of the American past. What was most disturbing – and therefore most exciting – about it was its whimsy. There lurked a devilish joke behind it all. Death. Ha!

Based on these factors I had imagined – and hoped – that this band would tear my heart out with their electric guitars. Pound my spleen with drums. Make good on their morbid promise. But everything about them – the way they looked, the way they acted, the way they sounded – defied my expectations. They dressed like normal. They didn't particularly acknowledge the crowd. Their music was faint and faraway. The harder I struggled to focus on it the more it deflected my attention. They played a song – something about rowing – and I swear I forgot each note the moment the next one passed into my ears. It only left me with a feeling. A feeling about nothing.

---

Now it was night. I shook my head to paint the sky with zigzag moon-streaks. Across the water the antenna was aglow and poking at the darkness, sending "The Bionic Woman" into hundreds of thousands of cozy homes. The punchcard pattern of lit-up windows below it had to be some kind of code. I thought I might just break it if I really let go. Really let go now.

Lord, you can see that it's true, sang the band.

I tried to make myself innocent. I tried to make myself worthy of the truth. I remembered what Magic Girl said before. Was something happening now? Surely something was happening. Something.

The bass player was out of tune and he tried to fix it in the middle of the song, playing a note again and again as he adjusted. He made it sharp before he made it right, and he played three slow, sharp notes in a row that sounded like the moaning of some beast from another universe. I was staring at the towers at the time. Ohhhw, ohhhw, ohhhw. Everything – all I thought I knew and trusted – disappeared – not from sight but from being  – and I hung in the void, alight with terror. Ohhhw, ohhhw, ohhhw –

For a moment I saw it. The thing without a name.

The song ended. A pop went off and bright-red, incandescent trails arced across the sky.

I felt some kind of warm fluid flowing over the corner of my mouth. Blood? Was I bleeding? I touched it and examined my fingers. No. I was crying.

"Hey!"

I turned around to find Rick leaning weirdly towards me and Jim.

"Hey! Hey!"

"Hey what, man?" said Jim.

"Hey!"

"Hey man, what. What's up?"

"Jenny," Rick replied. More fireworks popped and cracked behind us.

"What about her, man?"

"She's gone."

"What do you mean, gone?"

"Gone can't find her, man."

---

Rick was in a state of great agitation.

"Where'd she go?" Jim asked.

"She told me she was coming back!" he cried.

I told Jim I'd sit with Rick while he looked for Jenny. I opened the cooler, got two beers, and handed one to Rick.

Up onstage the song went like this:

Well I ain't often right but I've never been wrong

It seldom turns out the way it does in the song

"We'll find her, man," I said.

He was weeping. "You sure, man?"

"Of course, man."

He gulped his beer and shook his head.

"What if something happens to her?" he moaned.

"Nothing's going to happen to her," I answered reflexively. I felt a stabbing certainty deep in my heart that something was going to happen to her. And to us, too. Something big. There seemed to be no truer truth.

Jim came back.

"I dunno, man. Can't find her," he declared.

"Where did you look?!" Rick howled.

"I looked around. Jesus."

"We have to find her!"

"Let's stay here for a little while in case she comes back," I said. "Then we'll go find her."

The band took a set break. The stage lights went down and an old black-and-white film was projected onto a screen behind the drums. The title came up: the Three Stooges in "Healthy, Wealthy and Dumb." The crowd cheered lustily as the doughy men barked, whimpered and jabbed at each other. I felt a second darkness encroaching upon the night. So this is it? I wondered. This is what it comes to? I hung my head and muttered a grim, despairing prayer. We were doomed. That much was clear.

I looked up, expecting to see my anguish mirrored in Rick's face. Instead he gazed blankly at the screen. Movie light flickered faintly on his mentholated warpaint. He took a sip of beer. Moe hit Curly with a hammer and he laughed.

---

Jenny had not returned. I turned to Jim.

"We should go or something."

Rick was mesmerized by the set-break show. A W. C. Fields short played now. The ornery man's tiny eyes peered out at us from his pale, bulbous face and a ludicrous top hat teetered on the edge of his head. I couldn't bear to look.

"Rick," I said.

No response.

"Rick!"

"Huh?"

"Dontcha wanna go find Jenny?"

"Jenny," he repeated airily, his eyes gravitating back to the screen.

"Let's just go," Jim said to me.

"Yeah, let's go. Let's get up and go."

Jim and I stood up.

"Rick, up. Up, man. Up," said Jim.

Very slowly, without losing sight of the movie, Rick uncrossed his legs and got up.

"What about the fucking beers?" I asked.

"Drink 'em," said Jim. "Chug 'em."

There were nine beers left. We started drinking as fast as we could. Onstage the movie ended and the lights came on. There appeared a man holding the hand of a tuxedo-clad chimp. He introduced him as Mr. Jiggs. There was a pitiable crackle of applause. Mr. Jiggs scampered around on roller skates, knocking heedlessly into mic stands and monitors.

I hiccuped and opened up another can. "This is pretty weird," I said.

Mr. Jiggs lit a cigarette. Some in the crowd laughed. Others booed. He blew smoke into his master's face. Then he got on a little motorcycle and rode around in circles. A venomous roar erupted from the audience. Finally Mr. Jiggs mixed himself a martini and gulped it down at once.

"Get out! Go home!" someone shouted. Man and chimp were rained on by glow sticks and change.

"They hate the chimp," Rick said hollowly. "They really hate him."

"Ready to go?" said Jim. "Let's go."

We took our last beers with us and headed out the back of the field.

---

Behind us the animal act exited the stage in ignominy. The trainer hung his head, his face twisted into a quivering grimace. Mr. Jiggs seemed fine.

"Why did the chimp wear a tuxedo?" asked Jim.

"I give up. Why?"

"It's no joke."

The band was playing again. We crossed the encircling path, past barefoot figures swaying in the moonlight. Somewhere a man howled incessantly, incoherently, in proximate rhythm to the music. Before we knew it we fell back through the tunnel. In the halls below the grandstands green cinder block walls and the gray floor glowed pale and sickly under fluorescent light. Along the walls were scattered circles of cross-legged pot smokers. There was a concession window with an elderly black woman in a hairnet and red uniform. She stood with her chin on her fist, elbow on the counter, gazing at the opposite wall. Hot dogs cost seventy-five cents.

We gravitated toward the ladies' room. A weary hippie in a flowing granny dress appeared to be standing guard at the door.

"We're looking for our friend," Jim said. "She might be in there."

The woman contemplated us with a frown.

"What does she look like, your friend?"

"Blonde. Normal-looking." Jim turned to Rick for elaboration.

"Pink pants," Rick said. "Toothpaste on her face."

"Like the three of you," the woman remarked pensively. "I don't know that I've seen her but we may be able to help you."

"We?" I asked.

"Which one among you is most pure?"

We looked uneasily at one another.

She nodded sharply to Rick. "You!"

Startled, Rick pointed at himself and did a double take.

"You're to enter the circle. When the high priestess asks you how you enter, tell her that it's in the light and the love of the Goddess."

"In the what of the what?"

"In the light and the love of the Goddess. Then tell her you're looking for your friend."

"What's going to happen to me?" Rick asked with a trace of alarm.

"You'll receive a blessing."

She opened the door for Rick. Inside we could see five women huddled in the middle of the room. Around them four candles burned, one on the counter by the sink and the others on the floor. One of the women held a small, very sharp dagger. They chanted:

As above, so below, by our will, by our will

As above, so below, by our will

Isis, Astarte and Diana

Hekate, Demeter, Kali, Inanna

Rick walked in slowly and the woman let the door close after him.

She smiled at us. "He's only going to be a minute."

We sat down against the wall. Jim lit up a cigarette and I rolled a joint.

"Didja see that knife?" asked Jim.

"Yeah. What are they gonna do to him with it?"

Jim exhaled a plume of smoke. "Prolly fuck around with his dick."

"Cut up his dick?"

"Cut it up a little. Drink the blood."

"Drain blood from his cock into a little dish? A ceremonial dish?"

"And pass it 'round and sip from it. Yeah."

"Won't they fuck him first? Worship it before they fuck it up?"

"Maybe. Yeah."

We sat numbly for a while, sipping the last of our beers. In the distance we heard a song:

Tell you where the four winds sleep

Four lean hounds the lighthouse keep

Wildflower seed in the sand and wind

May the four winds blow you home again

---

After a time Rick emerged, none the worse as far as we could tell. He did look a little spooked. Jim and I stood up and I handed Rick the joint.

"What happened in there?" I asked.

Rick took a deep hit. "They gave me a feather," he croaked, holding his smoke.

"They gave you a what?" asked Jim.

Rick opened his fist to reveal a small, white feather, damp with sweat.

"What's it for?" I asked.

"Luck on my journey they said."

"Did they fuck you?" Jim interjected.

"What journey?" I asked. "You're not going anywhere."

Rick shrugged and stuck the feather in his pocket.

"Better not fucking lose that," I said.

"They didn't do nothin' to your cock?" Jim persisted.

"What happens if I lose it?"

"I dunno. Something bad? You should know. You're the one that was blessed."

Rick looked down the front of his pants to assess whether the feather would be secure.

"I can't believe they didn't do nothin' to your cock in there."

"They're not that type o' witch," Rick protested.

We stood and smoked in silence, listening to the band. They sang:

The wheel is turning and you can't slow down

You can't let go and you can't hold on

You can't go back and you can't stand still

If the thunder don't get you then the lightning will

A wild-eyed man without a shirt insinuated himself into our circle.

"What it is, what it is, fellas! Can you lay some of that fine-smelling shit on me?" He was hopping a little, foot-to-foot.

Jim passed him the joint.

"Cool, cool, cool, much appreciated, much appreciated!" He took a hit and passed it to me.

"What are you guys doin', man? Fucking enjoying the show?"

"Yeah. Actually we're looking for someone right now," said Jim.

"Cool, cool, cool. Who? Who?"

"His girlfriend," Jim replied, indicating Rick with his elbow.

"Yeah? What she look like?"

"Pink pants. Blond hair–"

"NO FUCKING WAY!" the man shouted abruptly. "Blond chick? Young chick?"

We nodded.

"Holy FUCKING SHIT, man! She DISAPPEARED!"

We stared at him, perplexed.

"Yeah," Rick said. "That's what we're saying, man, she dis–"

"No, no, no, no, no! Dig it, man: she DISAPPEARED!" He was clutching his head now. "I fuckin' saw it happen, man! So far out!"

"What did you see, man?" asked Rick.

"Check it out, check it out, check it out: I was up there, dancing, you know?" He nodded in the direction of the field. "And there's this chick just like you describe, fine chick, blond chick. Dancing. Pink pants."

"Yeah?"

"The band was jammin', man, it was so intense. And suddenly, I swear to God, a, like, bolt of pure fuckin' energy came out of Jerry's guitar and fuckin' zapped the chick!"

"Pure energy?" I said.

"And she fuckin' disappeared, man!"

"Disappeared?" asked Jim.

"I mean like she was there and then she was not there, man! Fuckin' blew my mind!"

He shook his head and smiled, his whole body swaying now. He took another hit of our joint.

"Uh, we gotta go look for her now," said Jim.

"I told you she disappeared," the man said emphatically. He looked at us sharply. Sternly, even.

Outside, the band sang:

If I had my way

If I had my way

If I had my way

I would tear this whole building down

"She'll turn up," I offered.

"Dude, turn up. Forget it. She turned out."

"We'll find her."

"Dude, she's gone, man. There's nothing to find."

"Yeah. We're gonna go looking anyway, man. Thanks."

"Good fuckin' luck, man. You're lookin' for nothing."

---

We began to wander back to the tunnel. A man caught up with us.

"Hey guys, guys, guys. Wait up," he said.

We stopped and turned.

"Don't listen to Billy. He's a fuckin' tweaker."

"Yeah, thanks. We figured," I said.

"He's a good guy and all, you know. He just gets–"

"Yeah. S'OK."

"Listen, I think I saw that chick though. For real."

"Where?" Rick asked hopefully.

"She was with a couple dudes. She was headed up above," he said, gesturing with his thumb.

"Into the stands?" I asked.

The man nodded solemnly.

"When did you see her?" asked Rick.

"First set. End of the first set."

"Cool, man," I said. "Thanks."

We emerged from the bowels and turned around. You couldn't see much up there. But you could sense a roiling presence. The shadows teemed with fitful souls. In the farthest corner of the darkness there burned a fire.

I looked back at the stage. The drummers played alone now. Sinister tattoos blurred into cacophony and started up again. The Eyes of Horus peered urgently into mine as cymbals whispered warnings only I could hear.

"Let's head up," said Jim.

We climbed the concrete steps, scanning each row. A group of drunks stood unsteadily on their seats, shouting simpleminded chants: Hoh-oh! Hoh-oh! Hoh-oh! Hoh-oh! Hoh! Hoh! Hoh! Hoh! A man drank from a gallon jug of wine, letting it spill down his chin and the front of his shirt. His girl vomited copiously beside him; her pink puke flowed across the aisle and dribbled down the steps. On the other side a woman, lost in ecstasy, bounced on her lover's lap. Clouds of smoke drifted over it all.

No sign of Jenny.

---

As we ascended, the band began a malevolent vamp. It had an urgent, martial quality. March music for the armies of the damned. I thought everybody was gonna die.

"Saint Stephen!" someone shouted.

We took a left and walked along the landing between the upper and lower stands. Far off in the distance was Manhattan, dense and bewildering in its cloak of lights.

"I'm worried," I remarked.

"What about?" said Jim.

"How much more time do we have? As a race on earth."

"Twenty-five years. Thirty, tops."

We found some empty seats up near the top and sat down for a spell. The music quieted and distended and finally disintegrated into burbles and pops. Hums and silence. Purple and green spots appeared before me, trembling and dissolving and shifting into whimsical configurations.

"What if it's all true?" asked Rick to nobody.

I eyed him with some concern.

"What if what's all true?"

"What if it's all true?"

I wasn't sure what to say. He seemed fairly serene. I ventured a reply.

"I guess maybe it is."

He plunged his face into his hands and began to howl.

"I can't take it! I can't take it! I'm not gonna be able to take it!"

I grabbed his shoulder. Jim leaned in, observing quietly.

"It's gonna be fine, man," I said. "It's gonna be fine."

The last row was occupied by a shadow rhythm section, freaks on tambourines and bongos. One of them saw us and stopped. He wore only cutoff jeans and the Cat in the Hat's red-and-white striped stovepipe hat. It tilted and swayed as he clambered over the seats to join us.

"What's going on with your friend?" he asked. He had a bony chest, long stringy hair and a beard.

"He's having a bad trip," I said.

We all looked for a moment at Rick. He'd lifted his head and now gazed out to sea. His mouth hung slightly open.

"We're looking for his girlfriend," added Jim. "We lost her somewhere. She lost us."

"Lemme talk to him," the man said. He climbed into the empty seat to our left.

"Here man, hold this," he said, handing his drum to Rick. It was one of those hourglass-shaped drums with bands that stretch from top to bottom. Rick took it and beheld it with a vaguely pained expression.

"You wanna find your girl?"

Rick nodded.

"You can't just expect her to come back, you know. She's not gonna just come back."

Rick blinked and nodded again. What the man said did not appear to surprise him.

"You have to make her come back. You know that, right?"

Rick mouthed the words "I know."

"Play the drum."

Rick placed it under his left arm. He smacked the membrane with the flat of his other hand and squeezed the strings against his ribs with a spasm. The drum made a sound:

Ohhw!

And with it something shot through my mind. I understood exactly what the drum was saying.

"Play it again."

Ohhhw! Ohhhw! Ohhhw!

"She'll come back if you make her come back. Play the drum."

Ohhhw! Ohhhw! Ohhhw! Ohhhw! Ohhhw!

Onstage the music resumed its previous, ominous cadence. Rick played in time to it.

Oh-ohw-ohw, oh-ohw-ohw, oh-ohw-ohw, oh-ohw-ohw

The other drummers had gathered behind us. They handed tambourines to me and Jim and we all began to play. The band sang a chorus:

Coming, coming, coming around

Coming around, coming around, in a circle

Rick played with mad abandon, his drum shouting and pleading over the din. Every jangling impact of my hand on the tambourine electrified me. Like I was beating myself out of my own head. I thought I could let go now, if I wanted. I wanted. Don't think. Don't want. I banged the tambourine and then I didn't think.

At the peak of our frenzy it felt like something was moving. Shifting under and around us. Then someone near us screamed and it was over. The charging music melted into a ballad; we slowed and quieted, too. Everything had changed.

"She's back now," the man announced cheerily.

"Really?" asked Rick.

"You brought her back."

"Where?"

The man just laughed. We thanked him, handed back our instruments and descended to the field. Practically everyone was standing now. The stage lights edged each silhouetted head in gold. We found our original spot, marked by the abandoned cooler. Rick stood on it and looked around.

"Where is she?" he said, climbing down. "She's supposed to be back."

"She is back," I insisted. At that moment I honestly believed that any expression – or mere apprehension – of doubt might impede the delicate, mystical process of her bodily return.

"She's back, Rick," Jim echoed wearily, peering at the crowd around us. "She's back."

The band sang:

Don't lend your hand to raise no flag

Atop no ship of fools

We dutifully took turns standing on the cooler and scanning the field. Nothing.

I looked back at the stands. I wondered what it was I'd felt up there. What I thought I'd felt. I thought it was something. An indication that something had fallen into place. That Jenny was back. That we had brought her back, in fact. Was I so easily seduced by superstition? What an idiot I am, I thought. Just another link in the chain of suckers who'd sooner trust a vision than a sight. I felt a flash of shame.

In my sorrow and confusion I considered whether Tweaker Billy might've been right. Something must be right. I found myself trying to calculate the odds that Jenny had been a shared hallucination all along. Every time I drew her face in my mind's eye it turned into another face. She deflected conjuring. She did not seem to be a part of this world.

The pattern of lit-up windows on the towers had grown sparser over time. Now the code it sent into the dark was stark and bleak, a curt summary of the truth. I struggled to understand it. I begged to know. Only to know.

And then I had a dark epiphany. There is no Jenny. Now that was just a plain fact, there. I permitted myself some grim satisfaction for conceding to cold reality. There is no Jenny.

The band played a rousing finale and then an encore. After it was all over we sat for a long while, the crowd dispersing around us.

"We can't just stay here," Jim said finally. "We have to go."

"We can't go home without her!" cried Rick.

"We'll call the cops, man. Report her missing. We gotta get to a pay phone though. We gotta go."

We got up and walked slowly across the trash-strewn field. We stood by the path a little longer, looking left and right. When an acceptable period seemed to have elapsed, Jim turned to lead us out the tunnel. We walked in silence across the ring road and through the parking lot. People were still drinking, smoking, playing music out the backs of their vans.

When we neared Jim's car we found a dark form curled up on the hood.

"Jenny!" Rick shouted.

She sat up groggily and squinted at us.

"Where were you?" he asked.

"I dunno," she said. "I couldn't find you guys."

"Couldn't find us?" Jim said. "We couldn't find you!"

"Are you OK? What happened to you?" asked Rick.

"I'm fine, Rick. I was fine. Fine."

"What the fuck do you mean, you were fucking fine?" asked Jim.

"I mean fine. I was fine. Jesus."

"All this time. You were fine."

"What, are you guys my dad now or something?"

"Well, where did you go?"

"I dunno. I went to the bathroom. Then I couldn't find you in the crowd. I couldn't see shit."

"What did you do?" asked Rick.

"I listened to the music. I danced. Hung out with some people. Met some people."

"Met some people?"

"I had fun! Jesus Christ."

We all got in the car and rode in silence. A little after we got back on the Jersey Pike I heard a snore. I turned around to find Rick and Jenny asleep, leaning on each other's shoulders.

"I really thought something was going to happen tonight," I said to Jim.

He shrugged.

"But nothing happened," I continued. "Did something happen?"

He lit a cigarette. "Nothing happened, man," he said, taking a drag. "What was supposed to happen?"

"I mean, something. Something was supposed to happen. Don't you think? Felt like that type of night."

Jim didn't answer.

I had a funny sensation on my face. Rubbery and numb. I felt around my cheek and was startled to find a smooth patch of second skin stretched thinly over the first. It cracked and peeled off in flakes. I rubbed a pinch of it into dust and sprinkled it over the trash around my feet.

Jim looked at me. Then he turned and looked back at the road.

I absently put my finger to my tongue.

Minty.

Grateful Dead lyrics quoted with permission from Ice Nine Publishing.