The Jesus look-alike’s buddies were all extremely smart and had wicked-thick Boston accents. So when they’d say things like, “I really like reading historical fiction. Lewis and Clahk wahr total badasses, and I’ll read anything Stephen Ambrose wrote,” it struck me as amusingly incongruous even though it shouldn’t have.
Though the Jesus look-alike could be profiled as a Phish fan from a thousand feet away, his buddies cut more traditionally jockish figures.
One of them was sober. It was of course a long road to sobriety, one with more valleys than peaks. Once upon a time, this gentleman explained, he was just like all his buddies. He loved to party and he loved Phish. He raged and raged and raged until he somehow found himself surrounded by heroin addicts and crack-heads. Partying with his friends had led to a heroin addiction.
With just the right note of pitch-black self-deprecation, he delineated exactly when things changed, when fun stopped being fun and became perilous, if not deadly.
“It’s hard to party when you’re fucking using needles.”
He went on, “I just said to myself, how did I get here? A crack house, broken needles in my arm. Nobody liked me. Nobody. And that killed me. ’Cause I’m a social animal. And suddenly the only people I’m hanging out with are fucking junkies in the back room of a shed and they’re no fucking fun.
“It got bad. Fucking syringe in the heart. It got fucking ugly, it did.”
The man cut a melancholy figure. He was a cautionary warning of the dangers of riding the high too hard for too long. So going to Phish with his friends was a profoundly bittersweet experience.
Like everything in the world of Phish and, if I may extend the analogy a little, the history of the universe, it’s not all good and bad but a furious combination of the two. So when the man looked into the rearview, he saw four overdoses and broken needles and lost nights in crack houses but also wicked fucking awesome nights when Trey and the boys seemed to be playing only for him.
The journey ended with him sipping a can of near beer in a beer cozy while his buddies hunted for Molly, but the journey there was worth it. In the words of Kris Kristofferson, the coming up was worth the going down.
The third night at Bethel, the Golden Boy and Kevin Corrigan’s doppelgänger returned. It’s always fascinating watching friendships from the outside, and I was touched by the tenderness of their bond. Kevin Corrigan’s doppelgänger had fallen on some bleachers a while back and had been racked with seizures that kept him from being able to drive. Then one day the seizures stopped. He was all better.
“It’s amazing how something as simple as being able to drive a car can make a huge difference in your life,” Kevin Corrigan’s doppelgänger observed with a spirit of Zen serenity. Earlier, the Golden Child had claimed credit for the seizure stoppage: “We moved in together and then, bam, they stopped!”
At Bethel that third night I met the third musketeer in their little group, an uptight business student who knew the Golden Boy and Kevin Corrigan’s doppelgänger from Milwaukee. He had never experienced a Phish show firsthand.
It was fascinating experiencing Phish World through a newcomer’s eyes, though it didn’t take long for him to grow comfortable. Phish World is a different universe of one-dollar grilled-cheese sandwiches and glassy-eyed acid casualties, but it can also feel familiar and warm and inviting pretty quickly.
My quest for Molly proved less fruitful than my quest for the demon’s brew known as Four Loko. I should have known better. Nothing good ever comes of drinking Four Loko, not even getting drunk.
The stranger next to me saw me staring intently at a man selling Four Loko and tried to scare me off it, warning, “Don’t fucking drink that stuff. I drank that shit last year. I was puking up blood. For hours. For hours.” In retrospect that man was my half-assed guardian angel. If only I had listened to him.
Four Loko isn’t just bad for you. Booze is bad for you. Caffeine is bad for you. Four Loko, on the other hand, is fucking evil. Toxic. Satan’s frothy essence.
What is it about Four Loko that makes it such a force of pure evil? It’s just malt liquor and caffeine, yet somehow after ingesting a few you find yourself wondering how exactly you ended up boxing a bull naked in front of an arena of enraged spectators.
In my case I went from “How bad could it really be?” to “Why is my brain bleeding?”
I bought my can of Four Loko, rejoined the Golden Boy and Kevin Corrigan’s doppelgänger, then joined a herd of people racing madly to get to the concert as Phish bashed out the exhilarating first chords of “AC/DC Bag.” I was in a terrible hurry. I needed to be where the noise was, where the music was, where the joy was, where the people were.
With Four Loko coursing through my veins, I was feeling no pain. I was part of an ecstatic herd giddy with excitement and anticipation over the grand finale to Phish’s Bethel Woods run.
I was rushing too fast and I tripped. I tripped hard, plummeting to the hard concrete face-first. I broke the fall with my forehead and my glasses.
I was dizzy. The world was spinning. Blood gushed out of a giant gaping open wound above my left eyebrow.
All around I could hear startled, horrified cries of “Oh shit.”
Everyone around me was feeling my pain.
I staggered back to my feet and walked a few steps before bam! I was on the concrete and marinating in my own blood all over again.
“Stay down! Stay down!” a stranger called out as I lay woozy and bleeding on the hard concrete.
“I’m not gay or anything, but you should hold on to me till we get to the paramedics’ tent,” the Golden Child said as he locked his arm in mine. That’s one of the nice things about Phish shows. People are always looking out for each other. So while there are always going to be people going too far—going too far is kind of what a Phish show is all about—there are also going to be people trying to reel them in.
In the medical tent, a grandmotherly medic asked me for my name and address. Great. Now there was going to be a legal document attesting to the inconvenient fact that of all the drunk, fucked-up revelers at a Phish show, I was the one that needed help. I was that guy, the guy people pitied and felt sorry for.
“Not that I care, but how many drinks have you had, hon?” the woman inquired soothingly.
“Just two, but one was a Four Loko.” I paused and reflected on my atrocious judgment. “Fucking Four Loko.”
I looked down at my shoes. I had tripped because I was losing my sole.
The symbolism of the moment couldn’t have been more obvious.
I had been heading for a fall for months now. I was working too hard, eating too little, drinking and smoking too much pot, never exercising, obsessing darkly over a book I wasn’t sure I would be able to write and a future I was convinced was completely fucked. My life had been thrown off balance. Everything seemed off. I felt incredibly vulnerable emotionally, professionally, and financially.
And then it finally happened. I cracked my fucking skull open at a Phish show.
There is something strangely liberating about experiencing the worst-case scenario and surviving.
The guy who had impressed me with how ridiculously fucked up he was when we met two days earlier was now looking at me with brotherly concern.
Yet the fall had not killed me. Dazed me? Sure. Was I in agonizing pain? Of course. But I was a survivor, my daddy’s hardheaded little boy.
“Now, sugar, you’re probably going to want to go to the hospital in Bethel Woods. You’re looking at three stitches at least. If you don’t have that taken care of immediately the blood might glue the left eye shut,” the angelic medic informed me.
I sat in the medical tent in a profound state of humiliation and disorientation. The nurse affixed gauze all over my bleeding eye and forehead until I looked like a deranged hippie sheikh.
I had only been following Phish for three days that tour and already I looked like a complete lunatic.
“Do you want to go to the hospi
tal or do you want to stay, honey?”
My choice was clear. I could either go to the hospital and receive much-needed medical attention, or I could stay and watch Trey shred. It was a defining moment.
When I hit the ground my first thought was, If this doesn’t kill me, Cadence will. That’s all I cared about. I could live with the pain and the bleeding and the ugliness. I could live with looking like a mangled maniac for a few weeks (two, it turned out). That seemed weirdly honest. I couldn’t live with Cadence fretting about her bloody boyfriend in a tent a thousand miles away, helpless, manic, and bleeding.
“I’ll stay,” I announced dramatically. I had chosen. I had chosen Phish over my health and sanity. I looked like someone just barely holding on.
I had ignored all the warning signs. I had ignored that saint of a man who had spent hours puking up blood after drinking Four Loko. Even more remarkably, Phish had tried to warn me. “Cavern,” the third to last song Phish had played the night before, ends with the lyrics, “Whatever you do, take care of your shoes.”
Maybe it was the sinister remnants of the Four Loko; maybe it was the light-headedness induced by the massive blood loss I had suffered, but Phish sounded absolutely amazing that night. The irresistibly catchy “Suzy Greenberg” never sounded tighter or more playfully mean-spirited. The Lynyrd Skynyrd cover “The Ballad of Curtis Loew,” with its affectionate portrayal of a hard-drinking bluesman, never sounded so soulful.
The second set was even better than the first. “Simple” was, appropriately enough, elegant in its simplicity; for a guitarist who usually plays with such strenuous virtuosity, it was refreshing to hear Anastasio bash out some chords, though he did of course afford himself time for a lengthy solo. He wouldn’t be Trey if he didn’t. “Joy,” with its heartbreaking fragility and aching sincerity, spoke powerfully to the quivering vulnerability I’d been feeling since well before I left for Bethel Woods.
The night before, the Slow-Talking Hippie Guy from Survivor had adroitly said, “Trey’s ego is the force that drives the band. He wants to be the best guitarist in the world.” For Anastasio, that is a reasonable, attainable goal, so there was considerable irony when Trey sang, “And you know I play a bad guitar” on a perfectly shambling rendition of “Loving Cup” that night.
“Loving Cup” ranks as one of the all-time great drinking songs, yet Trey is one of pop music’s most famous recovering alcoholics. Drugs were much of the fuel behind Phish’s rise and enduring popularity, yet they were also the force that nearly destroyed them. Trey had to get sober so that the carnival of light could roar back to life and an army of fans could get fucked up watching a sober man play guitar. That is the duality at the core of the Phish drug experience; you can buy a popular KEEP TREY SOBER sticker only a few feet away from places where you can buy drugs. Hell, there’s a very good chance you can buy drugs from the vendor selling you the KEEP TREY SOBER.
I realized I’d reached a tipping point in my Phish fandom when I began to start thinking about, and referring to, the members of the group by their first names. Usually I’d find that obnoxious, but if you’re going to see a band something like twenty-nine times, as I did over the course of my misadventures, you begin to feel a sense of intimacy with them.
I felt like a fool. Much of the left side of my face was black and blue and gushing blood. I looked like I’d gone ten rounds with Mike Tyson. For at least the next week everyone who encountered my mangled visage was like, “Dude, what the fuck happened to your face?”
Inside Phish World, my gesture looked less retarded than heroic. Or at least I had deluded myself into thinking so. I was the fearless fucking warrior who wanted to see Trey and the boys play so badly that he couldn’t be dragged away from a concert even when he was basting in his own blood.
I prefer the Phish World version of events because it makes me seem less sad and desperate and more like a dude who just loves to fucking party, even while bleeding profusely from the head. Especially when bleeding profusely from the head.
My mind raced. I was doing something very, very stupid and self-destructive. I should have done what the nice woman suggested and take a little trip to a lovely country hospital where I imagined a nice doctor with a corncob pipe would fix me up nicely and send me merrily on my way, but I couldn’t leave this joyful madness, this ecstatic frenzy. And the journey had only really just begun.
The Golden Child and Kevin Corrigan’s doppelgänger returned to the real world and Milwaukee after Bethel, and the Slow-Talking Hippie Guy from Survivor slipped back into Phish World for but a single show, so when the morning came I had to figure out a way to get from the enchanted woods of Bethel to the next show in the decidedly nonmagical burg of Holmdel, New Jersey.
So I went back to the Port Authority in Manhattan and was chagrined to learn that the good people of Greyhound did not travel to Holmdel. In fact, Phish seemed to have deliberately set out to play venues not reachable by Greyhound. Greyhound would be my chariot throughout my voyage, so that posed something of a problem. Thankfully, a nice man with a cab looked inside an ancient little book and ascertained it would cost me exactly one hundred and six dollars to travel to Holmdel, plus tip.
So I traveled to Holmdel and told the cabdriver to take me to the nearest hotel. It was a really nice Comfort Inn, though it clearly took everything in her power for the clerk checking me in to keep from blurting, “What the fuck happened to your face?” I appreciated the restraint. If I let it, my mind would replay the fall over and over again, reliving that fateful moment when I lost control and went splat against the merciless concrete like it was Satan’s own instant replay.
The first thing I did when I got to New Jersey was throw my accursed shoes in the trash. My soul was hopefully not beyond redemption, but the sole of my shoe certainly was. I briefly considered burning them in a sacrificial frenzy but thought better of it. Besides, where would I even start a fire?
I really began to miss Cadence. The rush of that first night in Bethel started to fade, and I ached from the fall.
I wanted to send out the friendliest possible vibes at the Holmdel show, but my black eye and giant scar gave me an aura that was less hippie chill than “enraged homeless man with big mouth and no left hook.”
All around me people conveyed joy. People always radiate joy at Phish concerts. That’s what makes them so irresistible to fans and so insufferable to everyone else.
But my joy was back in Chicago, and as exuberant as the people around me might have been, they were strangers. Thankfully, even strangers are friends at Phish shows. Or at least friends with weed. Never in my life have I encountered people so free with their weed, and I lived in a college co-op for two years and have covered hip-hop for fifteen. In Holmdel a skinny boy with shaggy black hair asked if I wanted to smoke a joint with him.
I nodded. “How old are you?”
“Seventeen.”
“Good Lord. I’m old enough to be your father.”
“Yeah, my dad’s somewhere in there,” he said softly, and pointed at the pavilion.
“Have you been a Phish fan for a long time?”
“This is only my third show. I’m really into the Dead. Furthur is more my scene, and this is more my dad’s scene,” he said of a father somewhere on the premises.
The show was a veritable youthquake. In the bathroom I stood in line for the urinal behind a red-faced, jubilant college student who couldn’t have been over nineteen. “Oh man, oh man, oh man,” the baby-faced teenager said to the person pissing next to him in a manner that suggested an LSD trip.
“You have got to read The Portable Nietzsche,” the teenager continued. “I read that book freshman year and it literally changed my life.”
“You might also want to check out some really swell Wittgenstein primers while you’re at it,” I piped in unsolicited, feeling moderately ashamed of myself for being a smartass during a time like this.
“That would be great ’cause my philosophy professor at Tufts is one of
the world’s preeminent Wittgenstein scholars,” he piped back enthusiastically.
I am not going to pretend that this Wittgenstein-loving eighteen-year-old is the typical Phish fan. But he wasn’t as much of an anomaly as you might expect, either.
On the road everything seemed intensified. It was as if upon my thirty-fifth birthday I folded in on myself and regressed back to being a wild-eyed, faintly unhinged seventeen-year-old. I lost my ability to function in the world. I felt incapable of making small talk. The character in pop culture I identified with the most was Michael Shannon in Revolutionary Road. Don’t nobody want to be that guy, myself included. There was some weird, manic part of my brain that thought I should go into people’s homes and expose the emptiness and superficiality of their bourgeois existences for them. As a public service. For their own sake as much as my own. I had no time for trivialities and social niceties. I was after the messy, unvarnished truth.
Before I left for Bethel, all I could see was the darkness and ego and dysfunction in myself, so all I could see was the darkness and ego and dysfunction in other people. I wanted to connect with others but remained locked in the prison of self. Thankfully, Phish World sent me down a lifeline.
As I was leaving my hotel in Holmdel, New Jersey, en route to parts unknown, an acid casualty in his early sixties with the grizzled, worse-for-wear look of someone who had been on the road way too long shot me a very purposeful look.
“Dude, are you Rojas’s friend?” the man asked a little too insistently as he sized me up with inexplicable wide-eyed wonder. He shot me a look that said, “I know you and I know what you’re up to.” I reciprocated with a gaze that hopefully conveyed just as succinctly and unmistakably, “No you don’t.”
“No,” I replied forcefully.
You Don't Know Me but You Don't Like Me: Phish, Insane Clown Posse, and My Misadventures with Two of Music's Most Maligned Tribes Page 12