Are You Experienced?

by Jordan Sonnenblick

  But music was something else. When I was playing an electric guitar plugged into a huge amplifier, the sound waves didn’t have to stop a war, or save a whale, or teach an Eskimo to recycle—they didn’t have to do anything but move the air around me. That was enough. The music pushed everything else away.

  Plus, girls extremely loved it when I played guitar for them. Extremely.

  Yeah. Anyway. I got to Courtney’s house around eight. She answered the door and I forgot to breathe for a few seconds. She was wearing all black, as usual, but she was wearing a lot of layers of tight, sparkly, shiny black with rips and slits in it, so there was skin flashing everywhere. I had a feeling her parents weren’t around, because she grabbed the front of my jacket, yanked me into the house, and said, “Thanks so much for doing this, Rich! You’re the best!” Then she put her free hand on the back of my neck and kissed me so hard I felt her nose ring mash into my face.

  I’m telling you, it’s the guitars.

  Eventually, we walked the few blocks down to the protest scene. She was in a hyper mood, and kept up a constant stream of commentary about whatever cause this protest was about. Unfortunately, I was feeling equally hyper about my performance, and I was also hormonally distracted, so I didn’t do much listening. I heard little snippets, like, “Why should these poor people be in such pain when…” and “This has already been legal in California for years…” I tuned it all out, because my thoughts just kept flashing between three completely different channels:

  1. Mom and Dad Better Not Call Tim’s House

  2. Did I Remember to Bring My Guitar Picks? My Tuner? My Capo? Will I Panic and Forget the Songs? Will I Break a String?

  3. Should We Just Go Back to Courtney’s House and Make Out Some More?

  Downtown, Courtney took my free hand and pulled me into a big tent that had been set up in the plaza in front of City Hall. There were police all around the outside of the tent, but inside there were just lots and lots of grungy-looking people who looked like they had been sleeping in there for days without taking breaks for hygiene. There was kind of a funky odor in there, too—a weird mix of body odor and something that was almost-but-not-quite cigarette smoke—but I was still too stoked up from Courtney’s kiss and the excitement of skipping out on my parents to mind. Courtney never really seemed fully alive at school, but in this tent she was sparking like a jumper cable, practically skipping all over to introduce me to a whole network of older teenagers and even adults. She knew everybody, and everybody knew her. Courtney was a big shot here.

  Our little “Tour de Tent” ended at a raised platform that held a stool and a microphone. Above it hung a banner proclaiming THE SUFFERING ENDS NOW! I still had no clue what the cause was supposed to be, but ending the suffering now sounded like an idea I could get behind. Courtney tapped the shoulder of a huge, hairy old hippie guy with a beard you could have hidden a treehouse in, and he nodded when he saw my guitar case. “Hey, man,” he said to me, “it’s great to see the young people supporting the cause. These people have been down here all day working to get our message out. Are you ready to rally their spirits?”

  “Uh, sure,” I said.

  “Then let’s stick it to the man!”

  Whatever that means, I thought.

  He led me to the stage, leaned way down so that his mouth was only a foot or so higher than the mic, and boomed out, “YOUR ENTERTAINMENT IS HERE!” When the screeching burst of feedback triggered by his enthusiasm subsided, he continued: “So, uh, let’s have a warm, herbal welcome for my good friend”—he paused and looked at Courtney, who mouthed my name—“RICH!”

  I jumped up onto the platform while half the people clapped politely and the other half winced at the second piercing wail of feedback. I took my guitar out of its case, checked my tuning as fast as I could, took a deep breath of the smoky, musty air, and started playing the best protest song I knew: Bob Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released.” I thought my voice sounded pretty good, and I was nailing the guitar part. I mean, I knew 1960s music the way a lot of guys my age knew sports statistics. I studied it. I sweated it. I lived it. I could play Bob Dylan songs as easily as the jocks at my school could throw a lateral pass (whatever that was). In a strange way, I had always felt that I should have been a teenager in the ’60s, when guitarists were at the center of rock music, and rock music was at the center of the world.

  Unfortunately, when I looked up, the crowd wasn’t exactly going nuts. Some people were into what I was doing, and others were at least kind of checking me out, but a lot of people, especially toward the back of the tent, were chatting with the people around them. Then I noticed that there was even one old, sick lady in a wheelchair pulled up near the corner of the platform off to my right. She had an IV tube in one arm and an oxygen mask over her mouth. I thought, What kind of protest is this, exactly? That lady should be in a hospital, not under a smoke-filled tent.

  I finished that song, and most people clapped, but it wasn’t like the crowd went wild or anything. I was sort of embarrassed. Courtney was there. I had to do better. I racked my brain for a protest song that might get the people more involved, and realized it would have been a great idea if I had paid attention when Courtney was telling me about the event. Now if I asked her what kind of protest this was, she would think I was the biggest idiot ever.

  There was only one thing to do: keep playing. I busted out with another big song: a civil rights anthem called “We Shall Overcome.” I wasn’t expecting the whole tent to break into a gigantic sing-along or anything, but the response was still exceptionally dead. Dead? That gave me a genius idea. When the song ended, I beckoned Courtney over, and asked her to go to the sick lady to see whether she had any requests. I almost said “last requests,” but caught myself.

  While I was waiting for Courtney to come back, I played a John Lennon song called “Give Peace a Chance.” Even a freaking Beatle didn’t get much of a reaction. Despite the coolness of the fall night, huge droplets of flop-sweat began forming on my forehead. If you can’t get a liberal hippie protest crowd going with the Beatles, you might as well just hang it up.

  Courtney came to the edge of the platform, leaned down, and whispered in my ear, “Her name is Emmy, and she wants you to play Rainy Woman Something Something? I don’t know, it was hard to hear her. She can’t really talk very well. But it was definitely about Rainy and a Woman. Oh, and she said something about Bob Dylan?”

  Wow, I actually knew what song she meant. It wasn’t a protest song, though. It was called “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35,” but the title doesn’t have much to do with the lyrics. In terms of what the song is actually about, let me just say most people think it’s called “Everybody Must Get Stoned.” I knew how to play it, although I wasn’t allowed to play it at home. My parents were gigantic Bob Dylan fans just like I was, but they were also crusading anti-drug and -alcohol fanatics. They almost never talked about it in front of me, but I had caught enough slips of conversation over the years to know the basics of the situation. My dad’s father, who died when I was a baby, was apparently a raging alcoholic. In case that weren’t bad enough, my dad had had an older brother named Michael who died at age eighteen of a heroin overdose. Michael’s name was almost never spoken aloud, but I knew a few things about him. I knew I had inherited his lefthandedness, his guitar talent, and his jet-black hair. I also knew he had died in the fall sometime, because every year there was always one week when my dad would get even more strict, quiet, and morose than usual. Then one night, Dad would lock himself in his basement office for hours and listen to 1960s music until way, way into the middle of the night. His mood would gradually return to what passed for normal afterward, and we would sort of agree to forget to say anything about Dad’s long-lost sibling for another year.

  So, yeah. I knew the song, and had played through it a couple of times. There were two reasons why it seemed like an odd choice for me to play, though. First of all, it had a huge harmonica part, and I didn’t have a harmonica. I t
hought really fast, and decided I could probably fake my way through by whistling it. Second of all, though, the song wasn’t about protesting at all. It was about getting high. But I looked at Courtney, who was looking at me the way a girl looks at a boy when she thinks he’s about to do something really nice for an old lady in an oxygen mask. Then I looked at the old lady, who looked at me like she was an old lady in an oxygen mask. I sighed. Well, I thought, it’s not like anybody’s really listening anyway.

  Turns out I was wrong about that part.

  I cleared my throat and said, “The next thing I’m going to play for you isn’t what you would call a traditional protest song. It’s a special request for a lovely lady over here named Emmy. Can we please give her a big hand?”

  I gestured in Emmy’s direction, but I didn’t have to. She was a popular figure in that tent. If there had been any seats, I was pretty sure the very mention of Emmy’s name would have gotten a standing ovation. As it was, she got some serious rocking applause. Then everybody turned to me. Now I actually had the undivided attention of the entire audience. In fact, the sudden burst of approval had been so loud that the police outside had even edged their way under the flaps all around. So had dozens of little boys in—oh, God—Cub Scout uniforms. What was that about?

  I gulped. I hoped the cops were Bob Dylan fans. I strummed the first chord of the song, and started whistling the harmonica part, just as one more person pushed his way through the Scouts in the back of the tent: my father.

  THE ROAD TO TRAVEL

  FRIDAY, AUGUST 15, 1969

  I stared at the girl. “Nineteen sixty-nine? Woodstock?”

  She nodded. I felt faint. This wasn’t possible. It really, really wasn’t. Although it did explain the new-old cars. The clothes. The lack of cell phones. “Did you hit your head when you fell?” she asked.

  I rubbed all around my skull, very gingerly. Nothing hurt. In fact, aside from my throbbing hip, I felt pretty good for a kid who’d just flown back through forty-five years of time and then gotten T-boned by a Cadillac. “No,” I said. “Uh, why did you say I was all white like an angel?”

  “Because you are!” she said. She reached for my hair again, and pulled a lock down in front of my right eye. It was white. Shiny, satiny white. “Michael, David,” she called, “come here! And can you bring some clothes for the angel here to put on? It’s all right, Michael, I don’t think you killed him!” As her friends detached themselves from the side of their car, she said, “I’m Willow. Do you have a name? If you’re on the run from the heat or something, you can just tell me a name to call you. Nobody’s going to hassle you, man.”

  I thought about it. I had seen way too many movies about people from the future messing up the past, so even in my state of blinding panic I knew I shouldn’t use my real first name. “You can just call me … Gabriel.”

  Willow grinned. “That’s groovy, man,” she said. “Like the angel Gabriel, right?”

  Actually, Gabriel is my real middle name, but when a beautiful girl thinks you’ve done something groovy, you go with it. I just smiled in what I hoped was a mysterious manner. Just then, the two guys crouched down beside the ditch. The younger one put a paper bag on the ground next to me and mumbled, “Clothes.” He didn’t look me in the eye. I guessed he felt guilty about his friend running me over.

  The older one locked his gaze right onto mine and said, “Hi. I’m Michael, and this is my little brother, David. You’ve already met my old lady, Willow. Are you all right, man? I’m really sorry about this whole scene. I don’t know what happened.… One minute, the road was clear. The next, WHAM! Anyway, you okay?”

  I told him I was.

  His smile was as warm as Willow’s. “That’s great news! I didn’t know what we were going to do if we had to call the fuzz, man. I mean, what if they wanted to, like, look in the trunk or something?”

  I didn’t understand, so I just looked at him blankly.

  Willow leaned down and whispered in my ear: “We’re holding, man.”

  Holding what? I wondered. Then it dawned on me. I had read a ton of books and articles about Woodstock, plus I had seen the famous documentary movie, and they must have been holding the same stuff in their car that hundreds of thousands of other people had brought to the concert: drugs.

  I was still completely naked, and although the crowd had dissipated once it became apparent I wasn’t dying or anything exciting like that, I actually felt more embarrassed in front of three people whose names I now knew than I had in front of a couple dozen strangers. “Um, could you all maybe turn around for a minute or something so I can put on whatever’s in this bag?”

  Michael and David retreated to the car, and Willow just stood at the edge of the ditch with her back to me. I looked into the bag, which contained a tie-dyed T-shirt, underwear, blue jeans, and a beat-up pair of Keds sneakers. I put the shirt on first, because there was no way to stop hugging my knees without exposing myself to two lanes of slow-moving hippie traffic until I had that on. It fit perfectly. Then I got the underwear on with as little uncurling of my legs as possible, and finally, I lay back in the ditch and wriggled into the jeans, which also fit me. I gasped when they touched my injured hip, though. I twisted around to look at the damage for the first time, and saw that I had been branded by the Cadillac’s hood ornament, so that my skin was bruised in the shape of a broad V with a fancy shield in its center.

  I buttoned up the pants and did my best to stand. My right leg buckled under me and I almost fell, but Willow whirled around and caught me. “Michael, David, help me!” she said. “Gabriel can’t walk by himself.”

  Michael sprinted the few steps over and put his shoulder under mine. His brother just stood next to the car, paralyzed. Willow’s eyes flashed as she barked at him, “Get over here!”

  As David finally stepped toward us, I got my first really good look at his face. Even though Willow and Michael were both pretty strong, I almost fell over again. Willow said, “David James Barber, sometimes I just don’t know where your mind goes.”

  My knees went. David James Barber was my father.

  The three of them got me into the backseat of the car, where I proceeded to give in to a massive case of the shakes. David—Dad—got in right next to me, while Michael ran around to the driver’s side and fired up the engine, and Willow threw herself into the passenger seat. “Come on, Michael,” she said. “We have to get to the festival. Maybe there’ll be a doctor there or something. I think Gabriel might be in shock.”

  In shock, I thought. Why would I be in shock? It’s thirty years before I was born, and I’m sitting next to my fifteen-year-old dad, in a car full of illegal drugs. Oh, and the driver is my dead uncle. Who just ran me over. Stop me when we get to the shocking part.

  FROM THE PRISON

  FRIDAY, OCTOBER 17, 2014

  “What were you thinking?” my dad thundered at me, as he held an ice pack to his swelling left eye. Like he really had to raise his voice to be heard from half a foot away in our five-foot-wide cement holding cell.

  “I don’t know,” I mumbled, my head in my hands.

  “Lying to your parents? Sneaking to your girlfriend’s house? Leading a sing-along of ‘Everybody Must Get Stoned’ at a medical marijuana legalization rally? In front of dozens of police officers … AND five busloads of Cub Scouts?”

  “Um, technically, the song is called ‘Rainy Day Women #12 & 35.’ Plus, I didn’t exactly know what the rally was for. Courtney just told me it was a protest. And I had no idea everybody was going to sing along like that. Oh, and the Cub Scout thing—that was just freaky. How was I supposed to know they were having their annual field trip to the mayor’s office? You know, if you look at this the right way, it’s actually kind of amusing. I mean, don’t you think the whole adventure made their field trip a lot more memorable than—”

  “This is NOT funny, Richard Gabriel Barber. You just incited a riot. You just got yourself arrested. You just got ME arrested. Dammit, you just got m
e smacked in the face with a flying IV pole.”

  As it turned out, that old Emmy lady might have needed an oxygen mask and a wheelchair, but she still had plenty of fight left in her. When the Cub Scouts had started to join in with the sing-along, which admittedly was a horrifying moment, the mayor had appeared and ordered the police to turn off my microphone. But when the first officer got within five feet of the stage, Emmy went berserk, wheeled her way over to me faster than I would have thought possible, grabbed the mic pole, bent it down into her face, shouted, “MARIJUANA FOREVER,” and started swinging it in all directions. I just sat on my stool, not knowing what to do, as my father came barreling toward me through the suddenly milling mass of charging police, angry protesters, and screaming Scouts. By the time he reached the stage, there were five officers doing battle with Emmy and the huge bear-man who had introduced me. Emmy had lost her mic stand and had switched weapons. When her IV pole caught Dad’s forehead, I tried to jump off the stage to drag him away from the center of the storm. Unfortunately, one of the officers saw me stage-diving, grabbed my arm, and cuffed me to Dad.