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This book is dedicated to everyone who has endured childhood abuse or neglect.
You can’t change your past, but you can control your future.
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
I Shall Be Released
The Road to Travel
From the Prison
Walking Down the Line
Piece of My Heart
I’m a Stranger Here
Younger Generation
Beautiful People
America
I Live One Day at a Time
Morning Sunrise
Two Worlds
Teen Angel
High Time
Sea of Madness
Bad Moon Rising
Uncle Sam Blues
Shakin’ All Over
Something’s Coming On
I Want to Take You Higher
The Weight
Message to Love
I Don’t Need No Doctor
Amazing Journey
49 Bye-Byes
Voodoo Child (Slight Return)
Long Time Gone
Soul Sacrifice
You Can Make It if You Try
Epilogue: Spring 2015
Acknowledgments
Historical Note
Copyright
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 21, 2014
It only takes one annoying little noise to ruin a perfectly good death scene. I was floating, bodiless, through space—or time—or some formless realm. I wasn’t feeling any of the physical pains or discomforts that we all feel without noticing, not to mention the huge ones that I, in particular, should have been suffering. I wasn’t even aware of the mental agony of walking away for the last time from two new, doomed friends. I felt nothing but an endless expanse of warm light all around me.
And then came the friggin’ beeping, once every second or so. The sound seemed to be coming from incredibly far away, as though my head were wrapped in layers of cotton or something. I was pretty sure it had been going on for a while, gradually annoying its way into my awareness. I tried to turn my head to locate the sound, but the smallest attempt at movement made me so dizzy I decided to just be still and concentrate on my senses.
I smelled burning hair. Burning hair, and some awful mixture of cows, mud, and smoke. I wanted to open my eyes and see where in the world I could possibly be, but even through my closed eyelids, everything looked too bright to handle.
My hands. My hands were at my sides. I could feel cool fabric against the backs of my fingers, and all the way up my arms. There were cold things—tubes or wires of some sort—running along my forearms. I was in a bed. Yikes! I was in a hospital.
The beeping sped up.
“Honey, what’s happening?” a frightened female voice asked. “Is he awake?”
Mom!
“Easy. Take it easy, sweetheart. You heard the doctors. His brain scans are completely flat. People with flat brain scans don’t just wake up.”
My father, the optimist.
All of a sudden, I was shaking and shivering all over, so hard that I could feel my teeth smashing against each other, my mouth filling with blood as my incisors slashed the inside of my left cheek. My body arched, but apparently there was some kind of restraining belt across my chest that kept me from flying completely up and out of the bed.
“Nurse!” my father yelled. He was a strong yeller.
Footsteps pounding into the room, at least two sets. Too many voices for me to sort out. A clink as somebody banged what must have been an IV pole off the frame of my bed, and then a lone female voice saying, “This will settle him down. It’s the strongest dosage of antiseizure medication I’m allowed to give him, at least until…”
Whatever drug she put into my IV must have been super fast-acting, because right in the middle of her sentence, a warm toasty feeling spread up my arm, and throughout my whole body. I’m not sure whether I stopped shaking as soon as it reached my head, but I am sure I stopped caring.
Sometime later, the beeping worked its way into my world again, along with the muffled voices of my parents. This time, I didn’t even try to move. Even breathing was an effort, so I just listened. I figured they were probably talking about me. I admit, I kind of wanted to hear my parents sobbing and crying about how their only son was lying here twitching.
Dad was talking in a defeated monotone. “It was right after high school graduation. He was going to work at the steel factory in the fall, as soon as a job opened up in the welding department.”
I lay there, thinking, High school graduation? What’s he talking about? I’m only fifteen. I’m a sophomore.
“Then came the big concert and…”
Dad stopped talking. It almost sounded like he was too choked up to speak.
“You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to, honey,” Mom said.
Dad launched right back into his tale. He’s pretty abrupt. I have manners, but don’t ask me where I got them from. “Do you know why I went to the concert?”
“I don’t know. You’ve never wanted to talk about it.”
“I was excited about the music, and the party aspects of it. I was fifteen—who wouldn’t have been? But that wasn’t the main thing. My brother had a girlfriend. She was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. He was crazy about her. That’s why what happened afterward doesn’t make any sense.”
He paused again. I couldn’t believe this. My parents weren’t talking about me at all. They weren’t even thinking about me.
“Anyway, he came home one day in the beginning of August saying he had bought two tickets to this amazing music festival in New York State. I was so excited. I started talking a mile a minute about how great this was going to be. One last trip as brothers before he started his grown-up life and everything changed! That was when he laid it on me: the tickets were for him and his girlfriend. I begged him to take me with them. I said I’d buy my own ticket with my lawn-mowing money. I knew Dad would kill me if he remembered to, but half the time when Dad was angry, we could just get him crocked and he would forget all about it. Anyway, it didn’t seem to matter, because my brother didn’t budge. He said he was really looking forward to this trip with his girlfriend, and it had to be just the two of them. I tried everything I could think of to change his mind. I argued. I yelled. I threatened to quit the band. I pouted. I refused to talk to him. But then I got really scared: What if the reason he wouldn’t take me was because he wasn’t planning to come back? That seemed possible. As hard as our parents were for me to deal with, they were a million times harder on my brother. They got on him for everything. I almost wouldn’t have blamed him if he wanted to head out with his girl and just keep going.”
“But you did go, honey. So what happened?”
“That’s the strange part. I’ve never figured out why, but all of a sudden, about a week before the concert, my brother just showed up after work one day with a third ticket and told me I should start getting my camping gear together. I asked him what had changed, and all he would say is that he wanted to give me the best weekend of my life. I’ve spent the last four decades wondering whether I should have known what he was going to do, right then and there.” Dad stopped talking and broke down in heavy sobs. I heard a chair squeak, which must have been Mom moving closer to comfort him.
Typical.
My name i
s Rich Barber. If you want a snapshot of everything you need to know about the first fifteen years of my life, this is a pretty good one. I am lying in a hospital bed, while three feet away, my father can’t get over something that happened forty-five years ago.
FRIDAY, AUGUST 15, 1969
They say we all come into this world naked and screaming, but most of us only have to do it once. The second time I did it, I was fifteen years old—or negative forty-five years old, depending on how you look at things. Like a newborn baby, I was immediately hit by a flash of blinding light as soon as I opened my eyes. Unlike a newborn baby, I was then hit by a Cadillac.
Fortunately, it was a pretty slow-moving Cadillac, so I only spun maybe fifteen feet through the air before landing in a nice, grassy ditch by the side of whatever road I was on. It still hurt, though. Believe me, there’s no such thing as getting gently hit by a Cadillac. The car’s front bumper had nailed me in the right hip, which now pulsed and throbbed with a strange kind of burning ache. I lay on my back in the ditch for a while, catching my breath, smelling the sun-warmed soil around me, feeling the vegetation against my bare skin, and wondering where the heck I was.
I was afraid to open my eyes again, because the first time hadn’t gone so well. But then a shadow and a chill passed over me, and a soft voice said, “Hey, are you okay?” I couldn’t help it: I looked, and forgot all about my hip for a moment. The most beautiful girl I had ever seen was kneeling over me. She had long, dark hair parted down the middle, huge brown eyes, incredibly tan skin, and a look of shocked concern on her face. She was maybe a few years older than I was, and had on some seriously weird clothing: shorts, a tie-dyed T-shirt, tons of beaded necklaces that were hanging almost down to my face, and a fringed leather vest that actually was brushing up against the skin of my chest.
BECAUSE I WAS NAKED. Holy cow.
My first rational thought was that this had to be a dream. I blinked several times really fast to see whether I would wake up. When I stopped, the beautiful girl in the retro outfit was still there, and now she was reaching down to brush my hair out of my eyes. She looked so kind and so worried that I had my second rational thought: Good God. I’m dead! That’s what this is. The blinding flash of light, the car, the flying-through-the-air part, and now this gorgeous hippie supermodel waking me up … it all makes sense. Now she’s going to hand me a harp and a pair of wings.
“Um,” I said, “are you an angel?”
Her eyes widened. “No. I thought you were.”
Wait a minute. Why would anyone think I was an angel? With great effort, I sat up. This allowed me to hunch over so I wasn’t quite so exposed, which was a good thing, because as I got a look around, I realized my accident had drawn a crowd. There were tons and tons of young people in a rough circle around me, pointing and saying things like “Far out!” The bottom of the ditch was a foot or two below ground level, so I was looking up at the road. From what I could see, we were in the middle of nowhere, but for some reason, there was a massive traffic jam all around, anyway. That was probably why the Cadillac hadn’t completely smeared me into the pavement. Speaking of which, it was pulled over right next to me, and two guys who were dressed pretty much like the girl were huddled alongside the passenger doors, whispering frantically to each other. One looked about her age, and I would have guessed the other one was a tenth-grader like me. If one of them had been driving when the car hit me, I wondered why they weren’t using a cell phone to dial 9-1-1.
I suddenly realized another incredibly weird fact: Every single car I could see was incredibly old, but looked new. I mean, the styles of the cars were ancient. There were Volkswagen Beetles like the original Herbie the Love Bug, gigantic rectangular American muscle cars and sedans like the one that had almost killed me, Scooby-Doo-looking vans, and a wide assortment of other oldies that should have been rusted through—but somehow they all looked like they had just been freshly painted.
I had a bad feeling about this … a bad feeling worse than the one from an automobile smashing into my hip and flinging me into a ditch. Sweat burst out on my forehead, and I shivered despite the sun. My heart pounding, I asked the girl, “Where am I? What happened? Who are you?”
She laughed. It sounded tinkly, and I thought of birds playing xylophones. Okay, maybe I had hit my head in the fall, but even in the middle of everything, I loved the sound of her laughter. “Wow, you really must be an angel! You just, like, appeared in the road. Michael was talking to me, and I was trying to change the station on the radio, you know? So I wasn’t looking up or anything. But then there was this flash, and David said, ‘Look out!’ I felt the bump, and there you were, all white like an angel, flying through the air.”
I figured David and Michael were probably the guys having the conference by the Cadillac. “But, uh, where are we?”
She threw her head back and made with the tinkly laugh again. “This is so far out! If you’re not an angel, you must at least be from another planet or something. You’re the only kid for a hundred miles around who doesn’t know about the festival!”
“Festival?”
“You know, the Woodstock Music and Art Fair?”
I stared at her, stunned.
“An Aquarian Exposition? Three days of peace and music?”
I kept on staring.
Another laugh. “Haven’t you seen the posters all over the place?”
Oh. My. God. I had seen one of those posters. A faded, partly torn one, decades old, in a frame on the wall of my father’s den.
She continued. “August fifteenth through seventeenth?”
I swallowed. My lips and throat felt very, very dry. “What … what year?”
“Wow,” she said. “If you’re an angel, you’re a silly angel. It’s 1969, of course. When else would it be?”
I SHALL BE RELEASED
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 17, 2014
I guess if you’re looking for the real beginning of this story, this is it. The day had started out looking pretty promising. I was psyched up, because my girlfriend, Courtney, had asked me to play my guitar and sing at a protest thing outside our little town’s city hall. Well, she was actually my sort-of girlfriend. I wanted to commit, but she said I was too “emotionally inexperienced.” Whatever that means. We were both sophomores at the same high school, and she had reminded me about the protest all day long—in the hallways, at lunch, even via text during classes. I mean, we weren’t supposed to text in class, but Courtney was not exactly a master rule-follower.
Like there was any chance I would forget. I had spent the entire week figuring out a million different protest songs on my guitar, and singing them until I thought my parents would strangle me. Actually, on any given day lately, it seemed like there was a fifty-fifty chance my parents would strangle me whether I played the guitar or not.
The thing about my parents is this: they are ancient. Seriously, seriously ancient. As in, my mom was forty-one years old when she had me, and my dad was a whopping forty-five. Do you have any idea what that’s like? It means that everywhere I’ve gone with them my entire life, well-meaning people have said things like, “Oh, you’re such a cute little boy! Are these your grandparents?” And then my parents have gotten their feelings hurt, but of course they have to act all polite in public, so they just get in a terrible mood as soon as they’re alone with me.
It also means other kids notice. The first time my dad tried to pitch baseballs to my team during Little League practice, he threw out his back and had to go to the emergency room. When my mom attempted to teach me to ice-skate in front of my whole class on a grade-school trip, she fell and dislocated her hip. It took three skate guards to get her off the ice and into the ambulance. I was amazed they didn’t have to call in some kind of special rescue Zamboni. In case that wasn’t humiliating enough, a couple of years ago, my parents had a little ornamental pond installed in our backyard, with a tower of rocks and a pump that shoots a constant stream of water down over them. You know what my friends call it?
Viagra Falls.
Plus, I don’t know if it’s the massive age difference, the fact that I’m an only child, or something else, but my parents are incredibly strict and overprotective. I’m not allowed to do anything my friends get to do. R-rated movies, getting rides from older kids, staying out late on school nights? Forget it. The weird thing is, my dad was a total hippie when he was a teenager. His parents had no control over him whatsoever. He played drums in a rock band and supposedly had gigs all over the state. Once in a while he slips up and tells some story about how he hitchhiked hundreds of miles to go to a concert, or skipped school to go to a Vietnam War protest—but then he gives me some big, stern lecture about how times were different then, and my job is to stay in school and keep out of trouble.
Dad and Mom are both high-school teachers now—he teaches history and she does music—so it seems to me that they survived their crazy hippie teen years in one piece. And if it was good enough for them, why was I supposed to sit in my room alone every Friday and Saturday night playing video games? And not even the fun, Mature-rated ones where you get to blow people up and stuff? But there was no way on earth they were going to let me go to a protest. And especially not a protest with Courtney. Even though, like I said, they might have been rebels in their day, my parents are horrified by Courtney. I think she’s incredibly hot, but she’s hot in a Gothy way that apparently threatens the senior-citizen crowd. She wears lots of black eyeliner, dyes her hair lots of crazy colors, and is pretty pierced up. The first time my mom saw Courtney, she asked me, “Why would a girl need five piercings?” Meanwhile, I was thinking, Oh, you mean five piercings you can see?
Dad calls Courtney “Vampirella.” I’m pretty sure that’s not a compliment.
So I lied to my parents. I took my beautiful Martin acoustic guitar and left. I told them I was walking over to my drummer Tim’s house to work out some songs, when really I was going to Courtney’s, and then from there to City Hall. I wasn’t even sure exactly what the protest was for. Courtney was kind of an activist, so she was always protesting against something: income inequality, or one of America’s wars, or some huge corporation that was raping the environment. I could barely keep track of the news, partly because I spent every spare moment of my life practicing my guitar, or writing songs, or reading about music. Courtney got mad at me sometimes. In fact, she said she wasn’t sure she could ever go out with me seriously until I became a “serious person”—whatever that is. She said I didn’t care about anything, which wasn’t true at all. I just felt powerless to change anything. I mean, give me a break. First of all, I had spent my whole life protesting against my parents’ insane rules and regulations, but I still wasn’t even allowed to chew gum in my house (don’t even ask)—so I knew firsthand that protesting didn’t always change the world. Besides, I also knew that my dad had spent his teen years marching on Washington, and the next four decades bitching about how useless it had all been.
Are You Experienced? Page 1
