Quickly, I tuned each string down a half-step. My hands were sweating, and a little shaky. I couldn’t believe I was really playing Jimi Hendrix’s Woodstock Strat! I hit the chord again, and now that the guitar was in Jimi’s real tuning, I could swear I felt some kind of magic zing! emanating through the strings and into my body. It wasn’t like any feeling I had ever felt before, but it was amazing. It was almost as though I were onstage at Woodstock. I could only imagine how amazing the guitar would sound through an amplifier.
An amplifier! Mom had said Dad had one down here. With extreme caution—if all of this was true, I was wearing a two-million-dollar guitar on a forty-five-year-old strap—I walked over to the open door of my father’s formerly always-locked closet. Sure enough, there was a gigantic amp in there. It was a Marshall half-stack, just like the ones Jimi Hendrix had famously used. A piece of faded, peeling masking tape on the front top edge read PROPERTY OF MICHAEL BARBER. An instrument cable was sitting on top of the amplifier, just waiting to be used. There was an outlet next to the amp, and I could see that the cord was even plugged in.
A chill ran through me. Had my father left this setup here for forty-five years, just so it would be ready for this mysterious Gabriel? If so, where was he? Why hadn’t he ever shown up? Had he somehow died like Michael?
I didn’t want to think these creepy thoughts anymore, alone in a basement at 4:30 a.m. with a dead man’s guitar around my neck. I knew my parents usually woke up at around 5:30, so I didn’t have such a huge amount of time left to put all this stuff back in order and sneak upstairs. Still, it seemed like it wouldn’t hurt to just plug the guitar into the amp, turn on the power, and pretend for a minute, as long as I didn’t actually play.
So, of course, my father chose that one day of his life to wake up an hour early and barge in just as I was hitting my best Hendrix pose.
“NOOOOO!!!!!!” he screamed. He didn’t even sound furious. Truthfully, at first, he sounded more scared than anything else. “Richard, you don’t understand what you’re doing!”
“Dad, I’m holding a guitar and pretending to play an E-seven-sharp-nine chord.”
“Richie, please. Listen to me. I know I was harsh before, all right? Let’s just put down the guitar, and we can talk.”
I thought, Oh, now you want to talk? Sure, now that I found your top-secret priceless Jimi Hendrix guitar and massive amp in a freaking hidden basement bunker!
“Dad, I wanted to talk last night, when I tried to apologize and you slammed the door in my face. But now…”
Dad looked kind of green and sick. “Now?” he asked.
“Now I just want to play!” I reached behind me and cranked the volume knob on the amplifier as high as it would go. Then I placed the fingers of my right hand ever so carefully in the correct positions on the fretboard of the guitar, smiled at my father, and played Jimi Hendrix’s chord.
I felt electricity run up my arms and spread through my entire body, but somehow it wasn’t burning me. It was filling me up. The chord got louder and louder, and the sensations got stronger and stronger. Then, when I felt I would explode, everything went white.
The next thing I knew, I was lying naked in a ditch.
I’M A STRANGER HERE
FRIDAY, AUGUST 15, 1969
Woodstock. I was in the middle of freaking Woodstock. Have you ever visited a movie set, like in Hollywood, or at Universal Studios Florida or something? Once on a school trip to New York City, I ended up with my class in the middle of the shooting for a Nike sneaker commercial in Times Square. This was like that feeling—I’m in a movie—but magnified a million times. I was in a movie as it was being filmed, and I was the only person out of the half million in attendance who knew the ending.
Crazy.
We found a space big enough to spread out two blankets a few hundred yards uphill from the stage. Michael said the volume of the music would be perfect there because we were right near the platform with the sound mixing board. For a guy with the problems I knew he had—for a guy who had hit me with a car that morning—he seemed to me like a born leader. I could see why Willow and my dad both looked at him like he was some kind of hero.
If he was the travel and seat master, though, there was no doubt that Willow was the food boss. The instant we sat down, she took over lunch duty. She was all like, “Your parents aren’t here, so I’m going to be your road mom for the weekend.” It was kind of sexist, but I was really tired and hungry, so if somebody wanted to take charge and put together a meal right at that moment, I was all for it.
Willow spread out everything we had bought at the store, along with a bunch of fresher food she must have already been carrying, like cheeses, bakery bread, cold cuts, fancy cookies, and fruit. She even had a little glass jar of mayo, plus a knife for spreading it. I hadn’t eaten anything since lunch—and it was impossible to calculate how long ago that had been. Along with the shakiness I’d already been feeling, now I was practically drooling. I nearly reached out and yanked a roll right out of Willow’s lap.
Michael raised an eyebrow. “Fresh bread? Bakery cookies? Fruit? Wow. Where’d this come from?”
Willow giggled. “Let’s just say I don’t think I can go back to work at the cafe when we go home to Pennsylvania.”
Dad looked horrified. I felt half-horrified, but also half-starved and half-in-love. Wait, I guess that should be a third for each of those. Anyway, Willow was a sexy, badass food thief. “I love you, Willow,” Michael said. That made at least two of us.
“I know,” she said. Then she handed each of us an open roll and started piling on the meats and cheeses. When we finished eating most of the fresh stuff, Willow packed everything else up for later, and we all lay back on the blankets. Michael asked me if I wanted to go and find a first-aid tent or something, but there was no way I could do that. I had been thinking about it: They would ask me my name, which I couldn’t give them. They would want to call my parents, and I’d have to say, “Well, my mom lives in New Jersey. The call might freak her out, though, because she’s four years younger than I am right now.” And if they decided I needed to go to a hospital or something, I’d get separated from my dad and my uncle.
I told Michael I just needed some sleep, and closed my eyes. My mind was going a mile a minute. I started wondering why my father had never recognized me as Gabriel while I was growing up. Was it the white-blond hair? I looked completely different with it, so a few decades later, when I came along, with jet-black hair, it seemed logical that he wouldn’t have made the connection. Then I thought about what would happen if and when I found a way to get back to the future after my “electric three-day pass.” Would my dad recognize me as Gabriel at that point? How would he react? Would the shock drive him insane? Would he keel over with a heart attack?
I realized I was getting way ahead of myself. For now, I had to stick with my father and my uncle. I didn’t know what to do, or exactly how or why I had ended up here—it’s not often you find out there’s a guitar in your basement that’s secretly Jimi Hendrix’s most famous instrument and also, apparently, a time machine. But I figured there had to be a purpose. Jimi Hendrix had left that note for Gabriel, and then Michael’s last wish on earth had been for Gabriel to end up with the guitar. Michael’s writing floated in front of my closed eyelids:
Hold this for Gabriel. One day, he will come for it. Jimi said he will know what to do.
A thrill shot through me as I realized something: By Monday morning, Jimi Hendrix would know us well enough that he would give Michael his Stratocaster, and trust me with some sort of guitar-related future mission. So there was part one of my job: meet Jimi Hendrix. I opened my eyes for a moment and scanned the throngs of people pouring in from every direction. I looked downhill at the stage, and noticed the high wooden fences surrounding it. I thought about the fact that Jimi Hendrix was already a legendary rock star, the closing act at the biggest concert the world had ever seen, and I was a fifteen-year-old who technically didn’t even e
xist yet. Sure, I thought. I don’t see any possible obstacles to getting this done.
Then again, I told myself, I will do this. I know I will, because I’m pretty sure I already have. This was really confusing. But okay, assuming I was going to meet Hendrix, what was I supposed to say or do? Here was the thing: Jimi was going to die of a drug overdose, just like Michael, only his was going to come in about a year, in 1970. Was I supposed to warn Jimi about his own death? No, that couldn’t be, because how would the Jimi I was going to meet in 1969 know I had to warn him that he would die in 1970? Plus, what rock star would believe a fifteen-year-old kid who ran up to him and said, “Hey, a year from now, in London, don’t wash down a bunch of sleeping pills with a bottle of red wine!”
I propped myself up on my elbows and snuck a peek at Michael and Willow, who were lying on the blanket to my right. She had taken off her fringed vest and pushed her T-shirt up so that her stomach was exposed to the sun, while he had taken his shirt off. They were basking in the sun with their arms around each other, kissing and whispering as though they were alone in a dark room. I wondered how he could possibly go from being this in love to killing himself with drugs in just nine weeks.
Hadn’t my mom said my uncle had started using heroin about two months before he died on October 17? And my father had said his brother had died because of Woodstock. That was my mission, then. I would stick with Michael and Dad, and make sure Michael didn’t get his hands on any heroin. In the process, we would meet Jimi Hendrix, who would give us the guitar so that I could come back in time and do all this.
But that didn’t make sense. Because if Michael didn’t die, I would never get the guitar and I couldn’t come back here to save him in the first place. But then I wouldn’t need to. But, but, but.
This kind of crap happened all the time in Harry Potter movies and stuff like that, but then there was always some super-wise old warlock dude to explain how everything worked. And if things got messed up, they always got fixed by the time the credits rolled. But I didn’t have a wise old mentor, or two more showings at 7:15 and 9:30. I had real life, or at least this crazy, time-hopping version of it. What if I screwed this up, and got stuck back in this time for the rest of my existence? What would happen forty-five years from now, when I was born? Would both of me explode?
Or what if I saved my uncle’s life, but changed things enough for my dad so that he never met and married my mom? I pondered that for an extremely long time, and what I kept coming back to was this: What if I did? Selfishly, I had to admit I liked being alive, but I also had to admit my father had been amazingly and consistently miserable for the decades since October 18, 1969. Sure, Dad had flipped out when I said he’d been acting dead for forty-five years, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t true. Maybe he and my mother would both have been better off if my uncle had survived. Then my dad could have grown up to be an older version of the bouncing-off-the-walls kid who had sung along with the Beatles in the car, and my mom could have met some other, happier man. And okay, I wouldn’t be me, but maybe there might be two happy kids somewhere who were each half me and knew their parents were actually joyful people.
Well, maybe I didn’t know how this movie was going to end after all—or even whether I was going to be around for the last reel.
YOUNGER GENERATION
FRIDAY, AUGUST 15, 1969
I fell asleep in the sun for a while, and woke up to the sound of the first Led Zeppelin album playing over the PA system. Drowsily, I realized that these ancient songs were basically brand-new to everyone at the festival except me. Looking around, I saw that Willow and Michael had gone off somewhere. My father was sitting next to me with his arms wrapped around his knees. I decided at that moment I would start thinking of him as “David,” especially because there was a chance I might change the past and he would never grow up to become my dad. Plus, if I slipped and called him “Dad,” it would be pretty much the definition of awkward.
“You’re awake,” he said. You’re a genius, I thought. In the future, I would have said it and caused a huge argument about my attitude that wouldn’t end until my mother sent us both to separate corners of the house. I bit my lip.
When I didn’t reply, he asked, “Are you feeling better? I know you said you just needed sleep, but you really went flying when the car hit you.” He hurried to add, “Not that it was my brother’s fault or anything. You just appeared, like, out of nowhere. What happened, anyway? How did you get here? And where did all your clothes go? Were you tripping? Did someone steal all your stuff and dump you by the side of the road?”
Incredible. My dad never asked this many questions in a row. I had once gone with him to Take Your Kid to Work Day, and what struck me most about his teaching style was that when he put a history question up on the board, he would just say, “Talk to me about this.” Then he would lean on the edge of his desk and wait. But at fifteen, Dad was a motormouth.
“Um, I can’t tell you what happened. All I can say is that my hip hurts, but nothing’s broken, and I don’t need a doctor or anything.”
“Why can’t you tell me? Are you in trouble? Can we help you, man?”
My dad—David—was incredibly hyper, but he had given me his spare clothes, and he looked completely sincere about helping, even though I was a total stranger who refused to tell him anything about myself. I know it sounds odd that I found this surprising, but my father was nice.
“You are helping me. You gave me food, and clothes, and a ride. You’re letting me share your blanket.” I sighed. “So I guess I owe you some kind of explanation, huh? Listen: I can’t exactly tell you how I ended up naked in front of your car, but please believe that I wasn’t doing anything wrong, and nobody did anything bad to me.”
David nodded, and I continued.
“But I guess you could say I’m sort of on the run. Nobody knows exactly where I am. My parents are really strict. They barely let me cross the street by myself, so I’m pretty sure they would have three heart attacks and die if they could see me right now. I had to come here, though. I just feel like it’s something I would regret forever if I didn’t.”
David frowned for the first time that day, and spit, “You don’t know how lucky you are.”
“What are you talking about?”
“My parents don’t care if I’m dead or alive. Michael and Willow care about me more than they do. You know what Mom and Pop are going to spend this weekend doing? Drinking themselves under the table without worrying about whether I’m around to annoy them by trying to get them to eat, or go to their beds when they pass out in front of the TV.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I just sat there until things felt really uncomfortable. Then David said, “It’s even worse for Michael. Dad notices everything Michael does, but he says it’s all crap. Michael practically raised me, but Dad constantly tells him he’s useless around the house. Plus, Michael’s, like, the most talented musician I’ve ever seen in my life, and Dad’s always telling him he’ll never be anything but a noisemaker. And if anything’s broken around the house, it’s automatically Michael’s fault. He smacks Michael around all the time, too. I figure any day now, Michael’s going to decide he’s had enough and move out. Would you rather live at home and be a punching bag, or move in with Willow? Wait, don’t even bother to answer that.
“So anyway, when I have kids of my own, I’m going to be like your parents. I’m going to watch my kids like a hawk. At least that way, they’ll know I care about them.”
Hmm, I definitely hadn’t thought about it that way. It was astounding to think that my dad had been tormenting me all these years in order to show me love.
“That is, if I have kids at all. Maybe I shouldn’t. Maybe I would just automatically be a monster like my dad, no matter what I say now.”
“No!” I said, louder than I should have. David jumped a little. “I mean, you won’t automatically be a monster. Wouldn’t. You wouldn’t be. Because you’re thinking about it, right? So, right th
ere, it seems to me like you’re showing more effort than your dad does.”
“Maybe,” David said. “But my mom is a mess, too. What if I marry a monster, and ruin my kids’ lives that way? Don’t you ever worry about this stuff?”
“Not usually, but I’m worrying about it now.”
“Seriously. How would you even know you’re marrying a monster? Obviously, she wouldn’t act like one while you were dating, or nobody would ever get divorced, because they’d know not to get married in the first place. When I decide on whatever woman I’m going to marry, I think I’ll have to date her for, like, years before we make it official. Then maybe we’ll wait another bunch of years before we have a kid, so we really know what the hell we’re doing before we take a chance on ruining some innocent kid’s life.”
Wow, my dad had deliberately mapped out every single thing about his life that had annoyed me for fifteen years. On the other hand, if I told him not to follow his vision, it would mean I would never be born.
“I’ve thought about this a lot, and I’m pretty sure it’s how I want my life to go. What do you think?” he asked.
“Uh, sounds like a plan,” I said.
Willow and Michael came back, all pumped up with news. “This place is far out,” Willow said. She gestured off to the left as we looked downhill at the stage. “See that forest over there? It’s got trails, and tents everywhere, and little craft shops. Then, if you keep walking a little more, you get to a whole commune. It’s groovy! They have a big kitchen, and art sculptures, and a big psychedelic bus. There’s even a playground for little kids.”
Michael took over without any signal, as though he and Willow didn’t even need words to communicate. Some people don’t need to date for a million years to be sure they’re right for each other, I thought. I couldn’t help wondering how amazing it would be to have parents who connected with each other that way. “Then we walked down the hill, and there’s a helicopter pad. I bet that’s where the bands are going to fly in, man!”