Are You Experienced? (10 page)

What would it be like to know there was a fifty-fifty chance you'd suddenly go insane, with no chance of a cure?

As Arlo was getting ready to play, Debbie said, “I'd hate to be him.”

It felt kind of great to finally know what she was talking about. “The disease?”

“Yeah. I mean, how do you live, knowing it might all be for nothing?”

“Why would it be for nothing?” I asked. “I mean, he's getting to play at the biggest concert in history. He's a famous singer. He sounds like he's having fun up there, right? Isn't that something? Whatever happens later, doesn't this matter?” Actually, Arlo sounded like he was completely high. Between songs, his voice was all sniffly and giggly, his words were strangely elongated, and he kept losing his train of thought.

“Well, but … okay, what if you knew right now that you had even odds of getting Huntington's disease? Would you bother to study in school? Would you bust your butt in college, or would you drop out and go live on a commune somewhere? I think I might just drop out and stay high, or something.”

I thought about that. It was hard to ignore what I knew: that Arlo Guthrie was not going to go insane. As far as I remembered, he would still be plugging away, old and white-haired, singing these same old songs on Woodstock reunion tours in the 2010s. “But then, what if you did screw around and mess up your future, and you never got sick?”

We sat for a while, listening to the music and wondering together what it would be like to be semi-doomed. Then I looked over at my sleeping father, and my uncle's legs sticking out of his tent, and asked Debbie, “What if you could know?”

“Could know what?”

“Your fate. Would you want to?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, let's say you were Woody Guthrie, and there was some kind of blood test you could take that would let you know for sure whether you were going to get the disease or not later on. Would you want to know, or would you want to wait and see?”

“Shit, Gabriel, that's hard. I couldn't do anything to change the results, right?”

I shook my head.

“And I wouldn't be able to forget them once I knew them. AND there's no treatment for the disease, so knowing in advance doesn't do any good, right?”

I shook my head again.

“Yup, I'd just stay high.” She laughed, but it wasn't a ha-ha kind of laugh. I wondered about David and Michael. Was my uncle doomed, or semi-doomed like Arlo Guthrie? Could I change Michael's fate, or was it already written somewhere? And if I couldn't change it, would he want to know what was coming? Was there any point in trying to influence anything that happened this weekend? Was I here to tell my uncle something, to tell my father something, or to learn something for myself?

Another thing hit me: What if Michael knew exactly what was going to happen? What if he already was planning to kill himself, and this was his big last party weekend? Maybe going to Woodstock with his girlfriend and his brother was Michael's version of staying high. If so, I just didn't get it. He was definitely on edge at times about something—I had seen that. But he had calmed down again as soon as Willow had touched him. And yeah, he had awful parents, but so did my father. And clearly, my dad was going to make it to adulthood. Plus, Michael had Willow.

Just then, Willow's leg wrapped around Michael's, and even over the music, I could have sworn I heard a little groaning noise coming from the tent. I felt a blush spread across my face. I absolutely didn't get it.

The last performer of the night was a folk singer, Joan Baez. I didn't know too much about her, other than that she had an old-fashioned kind of voice that had always annoyed me on my parents' old records. I turned to Debbie and said, “She's not very rock-and-roll, either, is she? Kinda like that Broadway dude.”

Debbie almost bit my head off. “Gabriel, show some respect. She's Joan Baez. She's my idol. She played with Dr. Martin Luther King at the March on Washington. She was fighting for civil rights when we were still learning to spell.”

I was stunned. “Uh…” I replied intelligently. In my defense, I hadn't even been alive when Debbie had been learning to spell, so what did she expect?

“And do you know where her husband, David, is now? Right now, while she's standing up there onstage, pregnant, her husband is in prison for refusing to register for the draft. She's a real American hero. So don't mock her, all right?”

“I'm sorry,” I said. “I didn't know.”

After a few really political songs, with speeches in between, I built up the courage to speak again. “So, uh, do you know anybody who's been drafted?”

“My cousin Marty. Last we heard, he was with the Hundred and First Airborne, getting dropped by helicopter right in the middle of jungle firefights.”

Wow, I had never known a single person who was in the army. Even though I had lived through the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, they hadn't really touched my life. I didn't know what to say.

“And my other cousin, Frankie. He came home last year pretty messed up. He has three Purple Hearts. From what my aunt told my mom, he got shot in one leg trying to save his buddy, but then the guy died anyway. Then when Frankie recovered, he got sent back to his unit, and the boy in front of him stepped on a mine. A piece of the kid's helmet sliced into Frankie's arm and cut an artery. He needed something like sixty stitches, but the army sent him back out to fight again. The third Purple Heart, nobody will even tell me about. I heard my parents whispering once, and I almost got the feeling he might've shot himself to avoid going back out into the jungle again. All I know is, since he got back, he doesn't do anything but sit in his old room and listen to the Doors. It's really sad.”

I wondered what the draft meant for my father, and for millions of kids just like him all across the country. It occurred to me that, in a way, my dad was an Arlo Guthrie, but Vietnam was his disease: He was going through high school, studying or not studying, trying or not trying, without knowing whether he would just get drafted and sent to Vietnam at the end anyway. How many of the guys around me were worried about the draft at that very moment? How many had already fought in the war and come back? How many would flee to Canada, or go to jail, rather than report for duty? How many would die?

Of course, I wondered again whether it would be better or worse for a man to know his fate. With a whisper, I could release my dad from worrying about getting drafted, but if I could get him to believe I could really see the future, then I'd have to tell him about his brother. It was a pretty classic no-win situation.

Joan Baez sang a duet with some guy then, and they made a big deal out of dedicating it to someone. I was too lost in thought to catch the dedication, though. “Wow,” Debbie said, “it's pretty funny that they're singing a song for that idiot Ronald Reagan.”

“You mean President Reagan?” I asked.

“Don't even joke around like that,” she said. “It's bad enough he's the governor of California. I can't even stand to imagine he could ever get elected president.”

A few songs later, Joan handed her guitar off to somebody, stood alone in a spotlight, and sang a totally a capella version of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” that felt like a magic spell. I could feel a silent awakening all around me. David woke up and sat upright; Michael and Willow stuck their heads out of the tent. I know I said her voice had always bugged me, but suddenly, hearing it here, I understood. I don't know how to explain it, except to tell you this: When Joan Baez sang about a sweet chariot coming to carry her home, half a million people felt like we were riding right along with her.

Michael put one arm around David and one around Willow. As soon as the song ended, he said, “I'm glad we're here together. Remember this, okay? Just promise me you'll remember this.”

Joan put her guitar back on and started singing “We Shall Overcome,” the last song of the first night of Woodstock. Debbie lit a match and squinted at her watch. “Hey,” she whispered, “it's almost two in the morning!”

At the edges of the dim matchstick glow, I could just make out the smiles on the faces all around our little circle. Out of nowhere, I suddenly felt a tear running down my own cheek as the match blew out. Without a word being said, Debbie curled into my shoulder to sleep, and I lay there thinking about Michael … and the sixty-two days he had left.

 

MORNING SUNRISE

SATURDAY, AUGUST 16, 1969

 

It rained on and off during the night, so by the time I woke up, our blankets had begun to sink and slide in the mud. The right side of me was tangled up with Debbie, and would have felt somewhat warm and snuggly if her head hadn't cut off all the circulation in that arm. Also, that hip was throbbing where the hood ornament had nailed me the day before, and her knee was somehow curled up against that exact spot. Meanwhile, my left side was hanging off the blanket, and that hand and foot were sucked into little mini-vortexes of gritty, slick mud.

It wasn't one of my comfier wake-ups, although Debbie would have felt kind of sweet against me if I hadn't been numb, tingly, and throbbing all at once.

Oh, and I had to pee like a madman.

Escape was a necessity. I lay there for a moment, attempting to gather my wits. I got a whiff of the air around me, and noted two things. First, half a million smoking, drinking, partying people getting rained on all night in a titanically huge cow pasture, between long rows of portable toilets, creates a fairly stupendous odor—picture what it would smell like if the Goodyear Blimp dropped thousands of tons of manure inches in front of your face just as you climbed out the bathroom window of the world's most revolting greasy fast-food restaurant. Behind a garbage dump. Next door to a smokers' convention. Second, Tina's orange juice-scented puke cut right through the general funk with a power all its own.

It wasn't even dawn yet, but I could see by the faint, diffuse light around me that nobody around me was awake. I got my arm and leg free from Debbie's—which was like playing Twister with two completely immovable limbs—as gently as I could. She snorted, but didn't open her eyes. Debbie was kind of a sweet snorter.

David was on the other side of Debbie, sandwiched between her and a face-planted Tina. Not only did I have to escape, but I had to drag him with me. Whatever attempts he had made to rinse his shirt the night before had been rendered completely ineffective by his sleeping arrangements. Even in the dim half-light, I could see that he and his date were both centered in a dried pool of recycled citrus.

I remembered from the Woodstock movie that there was a big pond somewhere downhill behind the stage, where people had gone skinny-dipping throughout the weekend. I figured David and I could grab some soap, and maybe some tooth-brushing supplies. Then, if we hurried, we could get down to the water and clean ourselves off before most other people were even awake.

Because there was one thing I was sure of: I had to make sure my dad's clothes got super-duper clean before he started looking around for his spare outfit and realized it was on me. I'm not even a big fan of orange juice when it's new.

I tapped David on the shoulder and whispered in his ear to explain the plan. He nodded after a moment and stumbled to his feet. His pants and shirt made a sickly
swick!
noise as they peeled away from the blanket. Then he grabbed his backpack, and we started walking down toward the stage. If I remembered correctly, we would have to walk around behind the stage and pass into a little wooded area to reach the water.

Progress was slow, and we definitely caused a few sleepy people to cry, “Hey, watch it, mannnnn!” However, we made it onto the road that edged around the stage, passed under the huge wooden walkway that the musicians traveled to get onstage, and found our way down to the water. Sure enough, we were the only people there.

It was a little bit lighter at this point, so that I could get a decent look at David. He needed more than a little splashing-off action. Aside from his involuntary vitamin C rinse, he was also so covered with mud from head to toe that he resembled an extra from a zombie movie. Glancing down at my own clothing, I realized that being pinned down by Debbie all night had kept me partially clean; only my left side had the zombie makeover look. Still, we were a hot mess.

I started taking off my shirt. What had to happen next was horrifying, but unavoidable. We were going to have to take it all off and do some major scrubbing if we were going to survive this weekend—and we were going to have to do it fast, before the world's biggest nude swim party started up again for the day.

“David,” I said, “do you have any soap, or shampoo, or something?”

“Yeah, sure,” he said. “Michael's an Eagle Scout. He packed a whole survival kit. We've got soap, shampoo, baking soda for emergency toothpaste.…”

“Okay, perfect, let's strip and scrub.”

He looked at me kind of funny, almost like I had woken him up at six a.m. after a wild party night, dragged him to a secluded pond, and ordered him to strip. “What?”

“We have to strip and get clean.”

“Strip?”

I sighed. I reminded myself that he didn't know we were going to be in the middle of one of the world's most infamous nude movie scenes if we didn't hurry. “Yes. Listen: I'm wearing your only spare clothes, right?”

He nodded.

“Well, look at them.”

He did.

“And it was incredibly nice of you to lend them to me, but … uh … they're pretty messed up now, and even if you did want them back like this, I don't have anything to change into. So I have to get them clean, right?”

He nodded again. I noticed I could see the white of his teeth now. The sun was going to break out over the trees any minute.