Are You Experienced?

by Jordan Sonnenblick

  “Richie,” he said, “it’s pretty bad in there. Don’t touch anything. We aren’t supposed to move anything around until the insurance adjuster has had a chance to inspect the damage.”

  “Okay. I just have to see what I … how bad it is.”

  “All right.”

  We walked over to the closet together. Looking in, I saw that the amplifier had burned until it collapsed inward on itself. Jimi’s guitar case lay in front of it on the concrete floor, blackened with soot, but looking mostly unharmed. The fabled Strat itself hadn’t been so lucky. It was in a corner, with the strings facing up. Apparently, the electricity that had been released when I had played the chord had run along the strings, because the entire fingerboard was charred in six long lines. It even looked as though the strings had melted into the wood in a few spots. Also, the body of the guitar had cracked pretty badly where it had hit the floor as I’d fallen, and the headstock must have banged into either the floor or a wall, because that was broken, too.

  I looked at my father and felt tears well up in my eyes. This was a multimillion dollar treasure, and my parents were teachers. It was the most valuable object we were ever going to own, and I had single-handedly trashed it.

  We stared for a while, and then my father said, “You know, Michael told me the guitar was dangerous. He warned me that nobody should ever play it but Gabriel. He told me Jimi had said that there was voodoo in it. That’s why I tried to warn you.”

  “Dad…”

  “Richard, you’re going to be grounded for everything that happened Friday night. But I’m not angry with you about the guitar. Really, I’m not. If I had listened to you before you played it, you might have listened to me when I tried to stop you. Besides, nobody would ever have believed us about what this guitar was or where we had gotten it, anyway. I’m just glad you’re all right. Houses can be fixed. Sons can’t.”

  “So … um … what now?”

  “Now, Richard Gabriel Barber, you go to your room. And grab your cell phone on the way up. I would imagine you have a few hundred messages from your girlfriend.”

  “I’m allowed to call her?”

  “Well, even prisoners get one phone call, right?”

  Forty-five years before, David would have giggled. Now I was pretty sure I saw the corner of his mouth turn up a bit before he said, “Go!”

  There was one more thing that I needed to know before I went up; it had been at the back of my mind since the day I had woken up. “One last question, Dad. What was Willow’s last name?”

  “O’Rourke. Why?”

  “Just wondering.” I turned and went upstairs before my father could rethink my phone privileges.

  Calling Courtney felt strange. Was I supposed to tell her I had cheated? She was the one who always said we were only “seeing each other” when I tried to push for a commitment, so technically, it wasn’t like I had done anything against the rules. Besides, she hadn’t even been alive yet when it happened. But still … Woodstock bubble or no Woodstock bubble, I had gone farther with Debbie than I ever had with Courtney, and that mattered to me.

  On yet another hand, if I did tell her I had cheated, when was I going to say it had happened? She had seen me on Friday night, and I had basically been in a coma ever since.

  I almost decided to wuss out by texting and saying I was too sick to talk, but when I powered up my phone, I saw that Courtney had sent me more than thirty messages. Thirty messages in seven days, even though she knew I was unconscious for a big chunk of the week—that was a pretty big show of concern. Before I could think too hard and convince myself to stall any further, I called her.

  “Rich! You’re alive!” she shouted so loudly, I had to pull the phone away from my ear.

  “Uh, yeah. I’m fine. I wasn’t allowed to call anyone from the hospital, and—”

  “You’re alive you’re alive you’re alive you’re alive you’re alive! Oh, Rich, I thought you were gonna die, and it was all my fault!”

  “Wait, why was it all your fault?”

  “Your dad didn’t tell you?”

  “Tell me what?”

  “My mom grounded me from my phone and the computer when we got home from jail, right? But then on Saturday morning, the front page of the newspaper had a big headline about your house fire. It said LOCAL TEEN IN COMA, with a picture of you. I freaked, and my mom let me call the hospital. They put me through to your room, and I actually talked to your father. He said the whole thing was his fault, that he had been arguing with you, and then you got so mad that you played an old guitar to get back at him or something … and the guitar electrocuted you.”

  “Yeah, that’s pretty much what happened. But it wasn’t really his fault. I was the one that lost my temper. Anyway, if it was his fault, how was it your fault?”

  “It was the middle of the night after the rally, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You were fighting about the rally, weren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “So it was my fault. I made you play at the rally when you didn’t even know what it was for, and then you got arrested, so everything that happened after it was because of me. I’m so sorry, Rich. I would totally understand if you never wanted to see me again. I know you don’t even care about politics. I used you just so I could look like an important political organizer person, and then you almost died.”

  “Courtney, it’s okay. I’m glad this all happened.”

  “You are?”

  “I am,” I said, and I meant it. I could have done without the parts where I got flash-fried, hit by a huge automobile, and then refried, but other than that, it felt like an experience I had needed. Crazy, huh?

  “You know what’s weird, Rich?”

  “What?”

  “This whole week, all I’ve been able to think about is you. I’ve been going insane. I can’t wait to see you. When are you going to be back in school? I’m thinking maybe we can ditch a few classes, take a walk in the park, and—”

  Oh, man. A week before all this, I had always been the one chasing Courtney around, begging for time. Even hearing her voice brought back how wild she made me feel. But now there was all this stuff about Debbie mixed up inside me, and I didn’t know what to do about any of it. “Courtney, listen. You know how you always said we should keep our options open?”

  “Yeah, but seeing you up on that stage, watching you get arrested for me, and then hearing about what happened to you in the fire made me realize I was wrong about you. I used to say you weren’t a serious person. But you are a serious person—and you’re the guy I want. What do you say, Richard Gabriel Barber?”

  Amazing. I hadn’t been called by my full name this many times in one week in my entire life. “Courtney, I think you’re beautiful and, um, sexy and you make me crazy. But I have to tell you something. Before you told me all this, there was another girl. And I think you should know—”

  “Rich, wait. Does she go to our school?”

  “No.”

  Is she someone I know?”

  “No.”

  “Will I ever meet her?”

  “No.”

  “Will you ever see her again?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure? I mean, do you promise?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Then please don’t tell me anything about her, okay? And I won’t tell you about anyone else I might have been seeing before. We can just start over from right now. I mean, if you want to.”

  “Okay. But I just think we should take it slow. This coma thing was pretty life changing, you know? I’ll be back in school on Monday, and I have a study hall fifth period. Would you be up for a walk?”

  “Just a walk?”

  “Can we see what happens?”

  “Rich, if you want me to keep my hands off you completely, you’d better bring a doctor’s note.”

  As you can see, I am excellent at cooling down a relationship.

  You know what’s funny? Until a week ag
o, I had wanted to spend every second with Courtney, but she’d said I wasn’t ready because I was too “emotionally inexperienced” for her. At the time, I hadn’t believed it, but after my Woodstock journey, I understood. More than that—now, I was the one putting the brakes on. After all, we had all the time in the world.

  * * *

  Late that night, I couldn’t sleep. I went online and decided to see what I could find out about Willow and Debbie. I was less nervous about Debbie, so I started by searching for her. All I knew was her age, her name (or at least, her name back in 1969), and where she was from. I looked for Debbie Jones, from Astoria, Queens, born in 1954, and found her high school class newsletter right away. Unfortunately, Astoria High School was huge, and there had been three Debbie Joneses in her graduating class. I searched the archives and found a whole bunch of updates over the years that could have been hers.

  If her name was Debra Jones, my Woodstock girlfriend went to Yale, became an accountant, got married in 1977, had three children and seven grandchildren, and was now living happily in Upstate New York in semi-retirement. Upstate New York? Maybe she had fallen in love with the area after the concert, and always wanted to spend more time there? Could be …

  If her name was Deborah Ann Jones, she graduated high school, got a job as a secretary to the president of a huge investment firm, caught him embezzling money from the firm’s clients, testified against him in court in 1983, and became the subject of a major motion picture before entering the Witness Protection Program. She had a husband and two children at the time of her disappearance from the public eye.

  Oh, man. If her name was Deborah Sue Jones, she had graduated from Queens College, joined the Peace Corps, helped to feed starving children in Africa for a decade, and never married. On her way home from her last assignment, her plane had crashed over the Atlantic.

  There was a section of the site with yearbook photos, but they only went back to the 1980s. I decided that was probably for the best. If my Debbie was Deborah Sue Jones, I didn’t want to know.

  Then I got to work on the mystery of Willow. It took me about fourteen seconds to locate her. She was on Facebook, which meant that even a technological dolt like my father could have tracked her down if he had ever gotten up the courage to try. Knowing how open she had been back in the day, I figured she wouldn’t have restricted any of her info, and I was right. Her friends, her photos, her contact info: It was all out there for everyone to see. She even had links to all of her other online activity, of which there was plenty.

  Sixty-three-year-old Willow was a busy lady. She ran an organic gardening business in Maryland. I checked on a mapping website, and found out she only lived three hours from our house. There were hundreds of pictures on her page, and she looked really happy in all of them. She wasn’t married, but she had a grown-up son, who had a wife and a daughter of his own.

  Her son’s name was Gabriel.

  EPILOGUE

  SPRING 2015

  I’m un-grounded. It’s been an interesting few months, I must say. Courtney and I have been talking a lot, which I realized we never really did before. I’ve started playing guitar at some of her political events again, with two major differences: This time, I understand what I am playing for, and so do my parents. Dad got Jimi’s Strat restored by a really good local repair guy, and now we have it hanging on a wall in a glass protective case. I have a feeling it’s just a regular, old, beat-up, secretly famous guitar now, but we’re not going to take the chance that somebody might accidentally play it again.

  It’s a Sunday, and my father and I have been making time on Sundays for some father-son bonding trips. A few months ago, we drove a couple of hours north of Bethlehem, to the old Woodstock site. Now there’s a really cool exhibit hall there called the Museum at Bethel Woods, so we checked that out. Then we walked the fields at Woodstock together. Last month, on the first warm day of the year, we visited Uncle Michael’s grave. I spent my own money on a wreath of flowers in the shape of a peace sign. Dad cried. I’m not ashamed to say that I did, too.

  On this particular Sunday, Dad has assigned me the very important job of loading up my music player and handling all of the deejaying responsibilities for the journey. As our car approaches the highway on-ramp, I call up my huge playlist of live Woodstock performances and press shuffle. Sly and the Family Stone start up the funky beat to “Everyday People,” and I feel like we are back on the way to Woodstock again. But this time, my father takes the ramp heading south.

  We’re going to Maryland.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This would have been a different, and far lesser, book without the generous and expert assistance of the staff at the Museum at Bethel Woods. Robin E. Green, Assistant to the Museum Director/Registrar, fielded my phone calls and e-mails, dug up obscure historical documents, arranged a private tour, and was just generally awesome to a random stranger who dialed her number one winter day. Site Interpreter Duke Devlin shared his amazing memories of the original Woodstock festival, as well as his insights on fifty years of counterculture history. Security guard Bill Bertholf drove me around town, gave me a detailed account of where all the traffic jams had occurred throughout the festival weekend, and then guided me around the actual concert site (even though it was technically closed for renovations). In a transcendent moment of kindness, Bill even refrained from laughing aloud while I stood where the stage had been and pretended to play a long Carlos Santana guitar solo.

  If you are interested in learning more about the Woodstock Music and Art Fair, I highly recommend the Museum at Bethel Woods. The staff members know everything, the site is breathtaking, and the museum itself is a trove. Also, concerts are held onsite throughout the warm months. You can find out more at www.bethelwoodscenter.org.

  HISTORICAL NOTE

  I have never met any of the real-life characters portrayed in this novel, and anything they say and do within these pages is purely fictional. Also, I did not attend the Woodstock festival. However, I did a lot of research to make the book as realistic as possible. There are a lot of conflicting reports of what happened, both at Woodstock and in the lives of the biggest rock stars of the 1960s. Where sources differ about events onstage and in the crowd at Woodstock, my main guides were Evans and Kingsbury’s Woodstock: Three Days That Rocked the World (Sterling, 2009), and Gittell’s Woodstock ’69: Three Days of Peace, Music, & Medical Care (Load N Go Press, 2009). Two other fascinating books on Woodstock are festival organizer Michael Lang’s The Road to Woodstock (HarperCollins, 2009), and editor Susan Reynolds’s compilation of attendees’ memories, Woodstock Revisited (Adams Media, 2009). In terms of Jimi Hendrix’s life and personality, I watched a lot of video and read several biographies. The text which most informed my portrait of Jimi was Charles R. Cross’s gripping, spooky Room Full of Mirrors (Hyperion, 2005).

  Speaking of spooky, while I initially thought I was making up the stuff about Jimi’s guitar and time-traveling voodoo magic, I leave you with a quote from the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia, which I only came across when I was already halfway through writing this book:

  “The thing about Woodstock was that you could feel the presence of invisible time travelers from the future who had come back to see it.”

  A FEIWEL AND FRIENDS BOOK

  An Imprint of Macmillan

  ARE YOU EXPERIENCED? Copyright © 2013 by Jordan Sonnenblick. All rights reserved. For information, address Feiwel and Friends, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available

  ISBN: 978-1-250-02564-7 (hardcover) / 978-1-4668-4841-2 (ebook)

  Feiwel and Friends logo designed by Filomena Tuosto

  First Edition: 2013

  macteenbooks.com

  eISBN 9781466848412

  Thank you for reading this FEIWEL AND FRIENDS book.

  The Friends who made

  ARE YOU EXPERIENCED?

  possible are:

  FOLLOW US ON FACEBOOK O
R VISIT US

  ONLINE AT MACKIDS.COM.

  OUR BOOKS ARE FRIENDS FOR LIFE