“Well, um, I was just trying to find out whether Jimi Hendrix was here yet.”
“You and about half a million other people, my friend.”
“I know, but … it’s really important. I can’t tell you why, but I think my friend—the one from last night? I think my friend and his brother really have to meet him.”
“Listen, Gabriel. Gabriel, right?”
I nodded.
“I’m really tired, man, and I have to go crash for a while. But I’ll tell you this. Jimi’s a friend of mine, and he hasn’t gotten here yet, as far as I know. Now here’s what I’ll do. I’ll write down your name on a piece of paper, and later on, when I wake up, if Jimi is willing to see you and your friends, I’ll have Chip—you know, the announcer?—call you to the stage. All right?”
“Really? You’d do that?”
“I already played a private concert for you, didn’t I?” He smiled. I swear, John Sebastian was like Santa Claus with a guitar. “But I’m not promising anything. I mean, everybody wants to meet Jimi. And sometimes Jimi just wants some hang time, you know?”
“Okay,” Debbie said. “We understand.”
“Wow, thanks, Mr. Sebastian!” I shouted, as he started walking away. He waved over one shoulder.
“Well, that was pretty amazing,” a female Woodstock crew member said to us. “Most of the performers aren’t that nice.”
One of the male crew members snickered and said, “You got that right. Last night, I saw Keith Moon spit on a kid who reached out to touch his arm through the fence.”
I asked the Woodstock people, “Do you think he’ll remember to write my name down? And do you think Jimi Hendrix will really get them to call us backstage?”
All of a sudden, none of them wanted to make eye contact with me. That pretty much gave me the answer I had expected. Debbie and I headed back toward the others.
Debbie said, “That might work, right? I know it might not, but at least it might.”
I said, “Yeah.”
“Gabriel,” she asked, “why is meeting Jimi so important to you?”
I stopped walking. “I’m sorry, Deb, but I can’t tell you. It’s just … I kind of have a reason why I had to come this weekend, and I think getting David, Michael, and Jimi Hendrix together is part of what I have to do.”
She turned to me, took both of my hands in hers, and said, “You know that sounds totally insane, right?”
Feeling myself blushing, I nodded.
“But I believe you. I guess that makes me crazy, too. Either that, or those were some seriously long-acting brownies.” She pulled me close and kissed me softly. Then she kind of pushed me back so we were looking into each other’s eyes at arm’s length. “We’re not going to see each other again, are we?” Wow, this was a new twist: a kissing ambush, with a devastating emotional question attached.
I looked at her for the longest time. I thought of a million things to say, but every single one of them made me a lying player to one extent or another. I could lie outright, and be all Sure, baby, I’ll call you, just to make our last night together buttery smooth. I could make up some half-truth, like I’ll be thinking of you, or We’ll see what happens, or that old online favorite, It’s complicated.
I suppose I waited too long, because she half-turned away and said, “You know, my dad’s a lawyer, and he always says you should never ask a witness a question unless you’re a hundred percent sure you want the whole courtroom to hear the answer.”
She bit her lip, looked at me again, and continued. “But it’s okay, Gabriel. I mean, Tina and I kind of made a plan before this weekend. We have some boys that we sometimes date at home, you know? Nothing serious or anything, just dates. And Tina told me on the bus, ‘Let’s just forget about everybody we know for a few days, all right? I want to pretend that this concert is a little magical bubble of time, and everything we do in this bubble is going to be different—and magical—and beautiful—and separate from the regular world.’”
She leaned in and kissed me, on the cheek this time. “Gabriel … Gabriel, whose last name I will never even know. Gabriel … you will always be the honest, noble boy who escorted me through my magical bubble of time. How does that sound?”
I swallowed. Then I let go of Debbie’s hands so I could put my fingers beneath her chin and tilt her face up to mine, and kissed her as slowly and gently as I knew how. “It sounds perfect.”
We held hands all the way back to the blankets. Just before we arrived, I said, “Wow, who knew Tina was so smart?” But as soon as our little group was in sight, I felt like taking back the question, because Tina and David were enjoying the last few crumbs of an early dinner feast: the last of the mushroom brownies.
“Oh, you didn’t!” Debbie said.
“Oh, we did!” Tina giggled. “C’mon, it’s our last night together, Deb!”
“It’s, like, two in the afternoon, Tina.”
“So, okay, the night is young. But still—”
Michael and Willow were sitting facing them, smoking a joint, eating crackers, and smiling. Willow said, “Hey, we figured they might as well eat up. No sense in bringing anything home, right?”
Oh, you’re bringing something home, I thought. Something illegal that starts with an “H.” I just wish you weren’t.
Debbie sighed and sat down next to Willow. “Oh, what the hell,” she said. “Would you mind passing that joint over here?”
Willow gave her a quick, sisterly half hug and said, “Hey, I thought you’d never ask.”
By the time Joe Cocker’s band started playing, everybody but me was rolling. There were a couple of instrumentals, and then the Woodstock crowd got its first taste of the lead singer’s shockingly powerful growl. I still had the ominous feeling that had been building in me for hours, and the very air around us was starting to taste coppery like it sometimes does before a thunderstorm—but David and Tina were up and swaying in each other’s arms, Michael was yanking Willow to her feet, and before I could say no, Debbie had me moving, too.
The first few songs were mostly slow burners and medium-tempo boogies, and the huge crowd slowly fell into a groove. During the third, a sad tune called “Do I Still Figure in Your Life?” I actually started getting pretty melancholy thinking about everything that only I knew was going to be lost so soon, but then the next song, “Feelin’ Alright,” was a much faster, Latin-sounding kind of dance thing that got Debbie bouncing against me. I forgot to think for a while after that.
A couple of songs later, Joe Cocker burst into something called “Let’s Go Get Stoned”—and the entire crowd became his personal half-million-buddy entourage. People were screaming, yelling, dancing naked. It was crazy. I looked around at the scene and thought, Wow, just when you think Woodstock has stopped surprising you …
We listened, and danced, and made out. Even though Debbie deserved all of my attention, I stole little glances around at the crowd, partly because I had a strange feeling David might disappear again, and partly because I felt like the sky was getting darker and darker. When Joe Cocker started playing his last song, the Beatles’ “With a Little Help from My Friends,” the double storm finally hit.
The song was amazing. I am a huge Beatles fan, but I swear to you, Joe Cocker did it better than they did. Check it out online if you don’t believe me. Anyway, somehow we all ended up with our arms linked. So did tens of thousands of people all around us in every direction. It was the hugest manifestation yet of the Woodstock uni-mind.
One thing about being the only un-high person in a group is that everyone else is living exactly in the moment, and you are basically the only one worrying about the past or the future. I was thinking about the words of the song, and how the Beatles were breaking up right at that moment, even though nobody at the concert really knew it yet. So the song was kind of a lie already. Looking down the line, I noticed that David and Michael had one arm over each other, and the other over their dates. I started wondering whether Michael was David’s onl
y friend. I mean, it would be really sad if your big brother was your only friend, even in a normal situation, but knowing what I knew made the whole thing just unbearable.
And geez, it might be true. Debbie was here with Tina. Michael had Willow. But David had tagged along because Michael was the one person in the world he most wanted to spend time with. And David hadn’t mentioned any actual friends all weekend. I mean, neither had I, but I knew I had some back home—I just couldn’t talk too much about my life at all. And maybe he was just so caught up in Tina, and the music, and his brownie tripping, that he hadn’t had time to make a big speech about his old pals back in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania—but, come to think of it, he had never really talked to me about any childhood friends in my “real” life, either. He must have spent a lot of time with the other guys in the band, but from what I understood, they were really Michael’s friends, and our family definitely hadn’t heard from any of them since I had been old enough to notice.
It was amazing my father had managed to hold it together into adulthood at all.
I broke our little dance line and dragged Debbie over behind David and Michael, just in time to notice two things. First, both my father and my uncle appeared to be staggering a bit. Second, Michael was shouting mushy sweet nothings in David’s ear.
Just as the song’s volume died down into the famous bridge (“Would you believe in a love at first sight?”), Michael asked, “Davey, what would you think if I had to, um, go away for a while?”
Oh, shit, really? I thought. Clearly, male bonding was yet another of the things that should never, ever mix with drugs.
The song went on for another couple of massively triumphant minutes as the audience howled into the sky, gigantic thunderheads massed above us, and Michael gradually grew to understand that his baby brother was working frantically to break his grip and run away into the crowd.
I WANT TO TAKE YOU HIGHER
SUNDAY, AUGUST 17, 1969
The instant the song ended, some guy onstage told Joe Cocker, “Look behind you! The weather!” The storm blew in like something out of biblical times. All weekend long, some brave audience members had been climbing up on the huge sixty-foot-tall metal lighting towers to get a better view of the stage, and now the official announcer, that Chip guy, started asking them to get down before the wind and the lightning made things really alarming up there.
Somehow, the repeated announcements must have penetrated David’s drug-and-emotion-induced fog, because he ripped himself away from Michael and darted off in the direction of the nearest tower. Willow, who had been watching the strange arm-jostling scene, said, “Michael, I think he’s going to climb up that metal thing!”
Now, I have to say, if I had been Michael, I don’t care how super-hot Willow is. I would have been completely incapable of stopping myself from blurting out, No shit!
But to Michael’s credit, he didn’t. Instead, he gritted out, “Looks that way. But he can’t be that stupid. Can he?”
Willow said, “Oh, Mikey. He’s not stupid. He’s hurting. Go!”
Michael went. As the rains came, and the lightning began, I followed. Pushing through the thick crowd and the slippery mud with near-zero visibility was slow going, so we couldn’t have been more than thirty or so feet behind David, and we were both shouting his name the whole way. But between the sounds of the rain, the thunder, and the gusting winds, plus the noise of all the people, there was no way David was going to hear us—even if he would have been inclined to listen.
Halfway to the tower, I slipped on somebody’s abandoned sleeping bag, and tumbled down a little hill. By the time I recovered and wiped the muck off my face, I couldn’t see my father, or even my uncle. I sprinted for the tower. When I got there, Michael was leaning against the bottom, holding his ribs, winded. It was pretty hard to see anything clearly, but it looked to me as though one whole side of his body was covered in mud.
As soon as I slid to a stop, he said, “David pushed me. He actually pushed me!”
“Where is he?” I asked.
Michael pointed straight up.
I looked, and my head spun. My father was at least forty feet up in the air, suspended on the crisscrossed metal rigging of the lighting tower to the left of the stage. The wind was whipping up at forty or fifty miles an hour, and even where I was on the ground, that was enough to make my feet slip and slide in the muck. There was no way he was having an easy time hanging on to wet metal, especially not in his current mental state.
I had to shout to be heard over the gusting wind. “Michael, how are we supposed to get him down?”
“Easy,” he said. “We go up!”
Of course, it would have to be at that exact moment that the first jagged bolt of lightning slashed across the blackening sky. Onstage, the announcer was telling everyone it was their last chance to get down from the towers, and looking up, I could see that even the Woodstock crew guys were scurrying down away from the lights as fast as they could. It looked like what happens when you pour boiling water on an anthill—but one crazy ant was still going in the wrong direction.
In the light of the next flash, Michael looked haggard. “Forget it, Gabriel!” he yelled. “You go back to the blankets and stick with Willow. I don’t want you to get turned into an angel for real!”
“What about you?”
“Come on, man. He’s my baby brother. Now go. I gotta get up there.”
Michael started climbing, and my mind turned over and over. You might as well let him go up alone, I thought. You know he’s not supposed to die today, right? Plus, you know your father makes it through this. The only person who might be in real danger up there would be you.
But then, as I looked up at David way above my head, and Michael slowly ascending, I realized things might be much worse than I’d thought:
It’s one-on-one, and Michael is the one person in the world David doesn’t want to listen to right now. That’s no good. If my coming back here has already changed everything—if all of this might make a difference—then my father and my uncle could both be in danger now, too.
All bets are off.
I reached up and grabbed the lowest rung of the scaffolding. I had thought the storm was already at its worst, but I had been wrong. When I was maybe twenty feet up, the wind hit another level completely, and the rain started blowing sideways directly into my eyes. I could feel the biggest gusts tugging at my T-shirt, making it billow out behind me, yanking me backward so I had to stop climbing and wrap my elbows around the scaffolding. I was also pretty sure I could feel the entire structure swaying.
The lightning got more and more frequent, too, and the thunder was almost constant by the time I got up to where my father and uncle were. They were both crouched down on a flat expanse of wooden boards, next to a huge array of lights that was tied down under a sheet of plastic. Michael reached out, took my hand, and pulled me up next to him.
Once I had stopped climbing, I could tell for certain that the tower was swaying from side to side in the high winds. At this height, the movement had to be a couple of feet in each direction. “Please come down now, Davey!” Michael yelled. “Somebody’s going to get hurt up here.”
A boom of thunder came then, so intense that I could feel it shaking the tower even amid all of the other noise and motion that was going on. Michael reached out to David with one hand and to me with the other, yanking us downward until all three of us were lying on the wooden platform with our heads together in the middle.
“You shouldn’t have followed me, Michael,” David said. “Besides, what do you care, anyway? You said you just want to get away from me for a while.”
“That’s not what I said, David. I asked you how you would feel if I had to go away for a while. I didn’t say I wanted to.”
“Yeah, who would want to go live with Willow when they could stay with me and Mom and Dad in hell?”
“David, that’s not what’s happening. I swear I’m not moving in with Willow.”
&nbs
p; “Then what is going on, man? You’re going to get your own apartment, so you can just party with your chick whenever you want to? It’s still the same thing for me. I should have known when you suddenly changed your mind and got me the ticket for this festival that you felt guilty about something. And now I know what. Looks like this was my bye-bye weekend, huh?”
This was like watching a slow-motion train wreck. I could see and hear every little excruciating detail, and I was totally terrified, but I didn’t have the power to save anybody.
“It’s not like that, Davey.”
“Then what is it like? Tell me, Michael. That way, when you’re gone and there’s nobody to help me when Mom and Dad are bossing me around and passing out all weekend, at least I’ll know why.”
It was almost completely nighttime dark tucked in there between the huge lights and the wood sheeting, except when the lightning flashed. Just then, the sky lit up and I could actually feel the hair on my arms stand at attention. I wasn’t sure which was scarier: the thought of getting fried by a zillion volts and then thrown from the sky, or the pain of watching my father say things to his brother that he would never have time to take back.
In the sudden flat-white glare, Michael looked like he was already a ghost. “I can’t, Davey. I can’t tell you. Please believe me. It’s for your own good. Can’t you trust me?”
David rose to his knees. Michael did, too.
David looked like he was about to smash something. Michael just looked sick. I rose up as well, and inched my way backward so I was near the edge of the platform. I was more scared than ever, but I had a feeling that was the right place to be.
“Yeah, I can trust you. I can trust you to leave me. I can trust you to ditch me, then tell me it’s for my own good, like I’m still some stupid little five-year-old. I can trust you to dose my brownies so you can go off into the woods and ball with your girlfriend, then lie to me about it. I can—”