by Tim Weed
“Terrapin Station” into “Franklin’s Tower” into “Big Railroad Blues.” This is my third Dead show, my second time on acid. Now I’m channeling some kind of historic trip, a vein of nostalgic imagery from a lost America. “Wharf Rat” into “Cumberland Blues,” “Sugaree” into “Brown-Eyed Woman.” I see broken-down gold mills, bootleg whiskey stills, hoboes sitting around a fire inside a rusty boxcar. The images are clear but fleeting, except for one that keeps cycling back: a riverbank at the edge of a pine forest that rises up in a series of steep ridges to a range of snow-covered mountains. At the edge of the forest, a clothesline is hung with colorful dresses that snap in the wind. I can smell pinewood burning; I can hear distant female laughter and singing. The scene shimmers around the edges of my consciousness, bittersweet, luminous, maddeningly hard to pin down. Everything about it seems so familiar—so charged with emotion—that I think I must be remembering a real place, a campground or a music festival I might have visited as a child. But I’ve never been out of New England, and there are no mountains or forests like that around here. So I figure it must be the memory of a dream, or maybe a fleeting prophecy of something yet to come.
A week of rain at the end of May turns the lawns green, and the buds on the beeches and maples burst overnight in leaves so perfectly formed they seem altogether too good to be true. High school is grinding to an end, and the future stretches out like an empty highway. For my girlfriend Otter, the future means Dartmouth, and after that—she hopes—medical school. For me, things are up in the air. I’ve gone to three more Dead concerts since Portland. At each of them, I’ve had the same vision. It’s 1983, and the band is at the top of their form. You can travel from place to place on the money you make selling T-shirts, trail mix, or jugs of Tang.
The weekend after graduation, Kevin Rodgers’s parents go away and he has a keg party at his house. He’s captain of the baseball team, normally not my crowd, but Otter wants to go and I hate to let her go alone. She lives in the same neighborhood as Kevin—the rich, Republican neighborhood—so we agree to meet at the party. It’s a new house built to resemble something older: hardwood floors and a big, open kitchen with pots and pans dangling from hooks on the ceiling. The nucleus of activity is the spacious living room, spilling out onto the redwood deck where the keg is. I scan the crowd for Otter, already wracking my brain for an excuse to get us both out of there, but when I see her my stomach drops. She’s sitting on the couch with Rick Morgan, the baseball coach.
Morgan is from Florida. He has an overgrown, swashbuckling moustache, like General Custer. He’s blond, tanned, young for a coach, and highly charismatic; all the baseball players are trying to grow those moustaches. He and Otter are deep in conversation, gazing into each other’s eyes with rapt expressions. It chills me to the bone.
You see, Otter’s special. She’s completely unconcerned with standard high school issues like popularity and good looks. She’s smart and funny, and she has a generous turn of mind. Her instinct is to give people the benefit of the doubt, which is probably the only reason she’s ended up as the girlfriend of an oddball like me. If you saw her in a picture you might think her jaw was a little too prominent, and her eyes a little too close together, but in person she just has this aura. And she has a great body. One day she came to visit me at the IGA, where I was working as a stock boy. My boss, Mr. Mayo, was impressed. “Jesus, kid,” he remarked after she’d gone. “Are you man enough for that?”
At the time it didn’t bother me, because Mr. Mayo had a big square head and brushy hair coming out of his nostrils and kept five or six pens in his front pocket. Rick Morgan, though, is a different story.
When Otter sees me, she gets up and makes her way through the crowd. Morgan watches her ass the whole time, eyes shining and lips pursed appraisingly beneath the Custer moustache. Then he looks up at me and gives me the most evil smile I’ve ever seen.
“Fuck you,” I mouth, but he’s already turned his attention to someone else.
Otter takes my hand, and I follow her outside. We fill our beers and stand at the railing of the deck, gazing out over the Rodgers’ expansive lawn, which rolls down in graded berms to a mist-shrouded hedge of brambles along a small brook that runs through the property.
“What the heck were you doing in there?” I ask.
“Oh, just chatting. Why?”
“Just chatting, Otter? Didn’t you see his face? If it were up to him he would have fucked you right there in the middle of the party.”
“Good thing it wasn’t up to him then, isn’t it?” She smiles, but when I fail to smile back she turns serious. “I’m sorry, Jeff. It was harmless.”
“He’s thirty years old.”
“I said I was sorry. Do you have a list of people you don’t want me talking to, or are you issuing a blanket injunction?”
Down by the brook, a red-tailed hawk lands on the crown of a young hemlock, glancing sidelong at the humans on the deck. It leaps free, flapping its wings twice before presenting them to the wind. Otter laces her fingers into mine and pulls me closer. I take a deep breath, beginning to feel more at ease.
“What would you think if I hit the road with Josh next year, instead of college?”
“Is that what you want?”
“Maybe. I’ve been thinking a year off before college might do me some good.”
“If it’s what you want, Jeff, then that’s what you should do.”
“Would you miss me?”
“Of course. But we’re going to be in different places anyway. If following Jerry Garcia around the country is what you really want to do, then you should do it. Listen to your heart.”
We leave the party looking for a place to have sex. Her parents’ car isn’t in their driveway, so we’re in luck. We go inside, close the door to her bedroom, and take off our clothes.
Afterwards, I feel better. I feel reassured that Otter’s love for me is unconditional; that I can stop worrying about the likes of Rick Morgan; that she will wait patiently as I follow my dreams.
The next day Josh and I take the Magic Bus down to a show in Hartford. I’m tripping nicely, an internal strobe light flashing split-second frames of white nothingness to the percussion beats coming from the speakers. Between beats I try to bring back the vision. For a while there’s nothing, just a flashing white void, and I start to worry that I’ve lost touch with it, but then it comes, flickering weakly at first and then materializing in rhythmic bursts like a slide show in my head: riverbank; pine forest; snowy mountains. Three calico summer dresses pinned to a clothesline, flapping and dancing in the wind. The mountains look familiar, although I’m sure I’ve never seen them in real life.
The band goes into a holding pattern, a long, rolling drum jam. Then there’s a disturbance in the crowd. In front of me on the floor of the stadium people are separating as though choosing sides in a universal, unspoken argument. An aisle forms, and I’m standing in the middle of it. Everyone’s looking at me. It’s as if the aisle has been created for my benefit.
The next thing I know, a figure comes dancing down the aisle toward me. He’s about my age and height, but slimmer, with a blond ponytail, and the surprising thing is that he’s buck naked. He seems lost to the world, crouching and spinning like a demented shaman, his penis bobbing up and down in a blond bush of pubic hair. People are pushing back against each other to give him room, grinning as they follow his progress. Some raise fists in the air to cheer him on, mocking him in a way that strikes me as unnecessarily cruel. The boy’s face is flushed, and his expression is rapturous: a fierce, sanctified smile. A rivulet of drool glistens on his chin. I want to turn away, but my feet are rooted in place. People are laughing openly at the guy now, giving him playful little shoves as he dances past.
When he’s ten feet away he stops. He looks up at the jeering crowd, confused, and suddenly he seems to awake from whatever dream he was having. He glances down at his naked body. Then he looks straight at me. His face changes—his expression
that of a small child about to burst out crying—and he runs up and throws his arms around my neck, locking in a tight embrace and mumbling nonsensically into my shirt.
“Get off!” I shout, putting my hands on his shoulders to try to pry him loose. He chokes out a sob and clings even tighter, and I can hear the jeers and laughter from the people around us. The boy’s sweat is acrid with fear, and his wiry limbs seem to possess supernatural strength. I have no idea what to do. It’s like a nightmare. I look around for Josh, but he’s nowhere to be seen.
Eventually, a phalanx of security guards comes pushing through the crowd to rescue me. Twisting the naked boy’s arms behind his back, they lead him away.
My trip is irretrievable, all jagged edges and dissonant noises and harsh flashes of light from the stage. The jam crystallizes into “Black Peter,” one of my favorite tunes, and the stadium erupts, but I can’t get back in the groove. I can’t shake his memory, the way he danced down the aisle, crouching and spinning like some kind of reincarnated medicine man. And the way his face dropped when he awoke from his dream into the nightmare. The way his face changed when he saw me, as if he recognized a kindred spirit, and imagined that I was the one who could save him.
After the show, I tell Josh to go by the police station. I want to find out what’s happened to the guy, and help him if I can. I think maybe, if I see him again in a more rational state, I’ll be able to purge the disturbing memory that seems to be stuck in my mind: how desperately he clung to me, as if he would drag me down with him into his own private Hell. The desperate terror in his face as the security guards hauled him off toward the exit.
At the station, a policeman brings the boy out. He’s wrapped in a coarse woolen blanket. His cheeks look slack and slightly bloated, like a week-old balloon, and the vacant look in his eyes is as frightening as anything I’ve ever seen. I feel the panic flooding in. It’s worse than I expected. It’s as if whatever personality he had before has been erased, crushed into a fine dust which has leaked out through his nostrils.
Josh fills out a form for the police, and we take the guy out to the VW, supporting him with our shoulders. Josh gives him an old army-surplus jacket that hangs off his skinny body unnaturally, like drapery on a post. I manage to get an address out of him; he lives in Brattleboro, Vermont, not far out of our way. As we get on the highway headed north, he climbs into the back and collapses among Josh’s assembled worldly possessions.
“Bad trip,” Josh remarks under his breath.
“I know,” I reply. “Have you seen this kind of thing before?”
“Sure. Happens all the time at shows. You have to be careful not to overdo it. ‘Know thyself,’ as the Greeks would have it.”
Soon after we cross the border into Massachusetts, the engine starts making a grinding noise, low scraping clicks like sporadic Morse code. There’s a faint, chemical smell of something burning.
“Pull over,” I say.
We step out into the ink-black night. I follow Josh around to the rear of the bus, and he points at the ventilation grill on the engine hatch. A narrow tongue of flame licks out of the grill and halfway up the rear window, receding into the bowels of the engine only to flare up again, and recede. There are peepers nearby—an urgent, high-pitched chorus.
Josh pounds on the rear window. “Out of the bus, kid! Come on!” I run around and fling open the sliding door.
“Get out, dude!” I yell. There’s no answer, so Josh and I climb in and lift the boy out. We drag him to the edge of a field by the side of the highway, where he sinks into the grass as if his skeleton can no longer sustain its own weight. Josh and I go back to look at the ventilation grill. The engine’s making ominous sounds now, metallic pops and twangs. It’s like one of those dreams where you see what’s coming but there’s nothing you can do about it, so you just stand there, open-mouthed and paralyzed.
The bus rocks a little, and we realize to our horror that the boy’s climbed back inside. We sprint around to the open door and try to drag him out, but it’s impossible. He’s holding on to something inside the bus with nearly superhuman strength. Finally he lets go, and the three of us tumble out onto the pavement.
“Get up, idiot,” Josh says. “It’s going to explode any minute now. Fire! Explosion! Boom!” We yank him to his feet and lead him away, but he’s sleek and boneless, like a seal. He slips out of our hands, runs back to the bus, and dives in. He’s driven by some irresistible natural force—like a moth to flame, or a pilot whale beaching itself. We wrestle him out into the field again, and Josh holds him in a headlock while I kneel on his chest to keep him still. In the distance I hear a siren.
By this time the flames are roaring out of the grill. Then the gas tank blows, sending shards of blackened metal clattering over the asphalt and sizzling in the grass. The flames subside briefly, as if partially satiated, rippling around the body of the bus in a teasing, polychromatic dance. Then the whole bus is consumed in a firestorm that sends a plume of red sparks high into the New England night.
A policeman gives us all a ride home, stopping first to drop the naked boy off at his address in Brattleboro, a slump-porched Victorian just off the highway. Josh and I watch as he staggers up the steps and disappears into the house. An upstairs light goes on. Who knows what his parents think, but for me it’s a tremendous relief to be rid of him. I can’t get the vacant look in his eyes out of my mind. It haunts me.
Josh is philosophical about having lost his only form of transport, which had doubled as his sleeping quarters and contained all his valuables—sleeping bags, rock-climbing gear, and his prized collection of Dead bootlegs. But he borrows money from my parents for another VW bus, a white one this time with brown patches of fiberglass where the body has rusted away. He convinces me to drive out west with him. A series of shows is planned for the famous Red Rocks Amphitheatre, and he knows some people we can stay with in Boulder.
The vision from the concerts is foremost in my mind. I’m deeply concerned about losing touch with it and never being able to revisit it. It’s taken on great significance for me, and I feel that my happiness depends on following it wherever it leads. I’m convinced that I need to go to more concerts to find it, and that I need to take more acid. What if that pine forest and those mountains are somewhere in Colorado?
I tell Otter about the bus explosion, but I never tell her about the naked boy. I describe my vision to her, leaving out the part about the calico dresses and the female voices. I try to explain the bittersweet feeling of destiny I get whenever I think about it. She says she wants to understand, and I think she sincerely does.
It’s hard to leave her. Although she says she loves me, I have trouble believing it when we’re not together, and it occurs to me that I’m taking a risk by going. As we’re loading up the new bus I almost tell Josh I’ve changed my mind, but in the end I climb in, and the drive begins. The Red Rocks shows will be over in two short weeks. I’ll have Otter to myself for the whole month of August before the day comes for her to move into her dorm at Dartmouth.
Vermont, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio. The Rust Belt, Chicago, the endless cornfields of Iowa and Nebraska. As we cross the Colorado line, I turn down the music and tell Josh about my vision. “Do you think it might correspond to an actual place?” I ask.
He shakes his head, smiling. “I doubt it. More likely, it corresponds to Jeff on acid at a Dead show, seeing what he wants to see.”
“So there’s no camp on a riverbank in the mountains somewhere?”
“I’m sure there could be. Who knows?”
“But where’s the center?” I press. “I mean, where do all the Deadheads go when the band’s not on tour?”
He looks at me. “The center’s wherever you want it to be, Jeff. Wherever you are at the time. That’s the beauty of this whole scene.”
I turn the volume back up, wondering if there’s something about the Deadhead milieu that I’ve caught a glimpse of, something that maybe Josh has not. There must be a cente
r, I think, a real center, if you’re just persistent enough and follow your inner vision. And even if it’s not the exact smoke-scented pine forest at the base of the snowy mountains that vision has shown me, it must be something equivalent, something equally mysterious and meaningful and sweet.
Outside the bus it’s dusk. The land is brown and oppressively flat. It doesn’t look like any Colorado I’ve ever heard of. But then I suppose that the best is yet to come.
We arrive late and drive around Boulder looking for Josh’s friends’ place. At length we find it, a low yellow-brick bungalow with no lights on. We let ourselves in. No one’s up so we crash in the living room, Josh on the floor and I on the sofa, which smells like stale bong-water. Before I drift off to sleep I feel a pang of homesickness, missing Otter.
In the morning I’m awakened by a callused foot pressing down on my back. I squirm out from under it, groaning and rubbing my eyes. A troll-like hippie stands over me, holding a bong. Josh sits cross-legged and bleary-eyed on the carpet, with his back to a broad picture window coated with dust and grime.
“Welcome to Boulder, Josh’s little brother.” The troll holds out the bong and a lighter. I seal my mouth over the plastic cylinder and take a long hit, watching the thick white smoke stream through the tube and fill my lungs to the point where they feel like they’re going to burst. I’ve never particularly liked bong hits.
“Wake and bake,” the troll declares, dropping heavily onto the couch beside me. He’s in his mid-twenties, heavy-boned, shirtless, with tie-dyed carpenter’s overalls, long dreadlocks, and a curly red beard. His name is Jack Straw. That’s how he introduces himself, anyway.
There are two days left before the first show at Red Rocks. Time passes slowly. Except for Jack Straw and his ever-present bong, none of the Deadheads living in the yellow brick house pays much attention to me. They’re all at least three or four years older, and I suppose they’re too busy screwing and getting high and listening to bootlegs to bother with a novice like me. Josh takes up with one of the housemates, Amber, a pretty girl from California with silky blond hair, unshaven legs and armpits, very fine breasts, and the disconcerting habit of walking around the house topless. I might as well not exist as far as she’s concerned; even when I speak to her directly she looks right through me. I pass the hours in a stoned fog, mostly regretting the decision to come. Several times I walk down to the 7-Eleven to call Otter from the pay phone, but my timing is off. She never seems to be home when I call.
