After the show, Billy, Matthew, some of their friends, and I picked up a ride home from a Phish fan who ran in the same circles as my new friends. Alas, they had partied just a little too hard and taken too much acid and questioned whether they were up to the task at hand.
“I cannot drive in the condition I’m in. I better go over to the Lot and score me some coke so I can sober up for the road in case there’s a roadblock,” the driver reasoned with exquisitely stoned counterlogic.
His pupils were the size of dimes. Dreadlocks hung down from his fitted baseball cap. He was exiting a Phish Lot. A bumper sticker reading, DEAR POLICE: PLEASE SEARCH MY VEHICLE FOR ILLEGAL DRUGS BECAUSE I HAVE A FUCK-TON would have been exquisitely redundant since everything in the man’s manner, clothes, hair, and bearing conveyed the same sentiment more succinctly.
Everyone in the Lot sent out a similar message. The “police” presence in the Lot took on a farcical element. At the car next to us, a shirtless, cargo-shorts-clad man was so wasted he forgot where he put his keys and had cops rifle through his pockets to retrieve them, which they inexplicably did. At the same time, there was a certain safety in numbers: As at seemingly every Phish show, the prevailing philosophy among the stoned seemed to be, They can’t arrest all of us, so hopefully they won’t bother arresting any of us, or at the very least refrain from arresting me personally.
We rambled back to the Lot and bided our time nervously while our ride tried to sober up.
As we drove to the house Billy shared with his family, the dreadlocked driver put some electronic music on the stereo. “Aw man. I went to one of their shows and fell in love. It’s been on ever since.”
He was, of course, talking about the Disco Biscuits. They were Matthew’s favorite band. He’d literally gone to hundreds of Biscuits shows but only about fifteen or sixteen Phish shows.
As someone who grew up in a group home and a series of crappy apartments, I stand in awe of the fully appointed suburban family home. To me it is a thing of infinite wonder and majesty, and Billy’s family had a beauty. It had everything: a basement den with a television and a giant bed, an outdoor pool, and, most spectacularly, a veranda that transformed the backyard of a suburban Buffalo residence into a quaint little Parisian outdoor salon circa 1923.
The house could have been in The Graduate. It was a house with history, with stories. Billy spoke excitedly of his older brother, who had introduced him to the whole scene when he got into the Grateful Dead as a teenager. He was never that into drugs; he just smoked a little weed and drank and listened to the music, but he’d done an about-face as of late, straightened up his act, and gone the MBA J.Crew route.
Billy wasn’t exaggerating. His brother was straight out of the Preppy Handbook. There was pain in his eyes as well. It was a look I recognized in each of Billy’s family members when they looked at him: love mixed with pain and concern.
Billy talked about his brothers all the time. He was blessed and cursed with an exceptional family. They loved each other. The roots were deep. The Grateful Dead was a tradition each brother passed down to the other.
It was all wrapped up in one: the good and the bad, the joy and the pain. Turning Billy on to the Dead meant introducing him to an exhilarating new world of music and people and ideas and energy. But it also meant starting him down a path that would eventually lead to prison. I experienced profoundly mixed feelings when Billy said he’d bought some deemster (the street name for the drug dimethyltryptamine, or DMT) to smoke with his younger brother.
DMT was some serious shit, a total fucking godhead next-level psychedelic mind-bender. The Disco Biscuits fans who had sold it to him said it contained a chemical that otherwise exists only in the human mind in the moments immediately before death. I was not going to fuck with DMT in the frame of mind I was in. I had rolled the dice with my fragile mental health before, when I took acid the first night at Bethel. I didn’t want to push my luck. Who knew what kind of darkness lay within my psyche? I had demons I did not want to conjure up. I didn’t want to confront the messes I had made. I was half convinced I was beyond redemption. Nothing terrified me more than the truth.
At Billy’s family home we were joined by an angel-faced boy with a dodgy reputation and his girlfriend, a smart, tough survivor who conveyed a steeliness and sense of determination beyond her young years.
At one point in the evening everyone else had nodded off in their chairs and the only ones still awake were Matthew and me. Matthew continued to read the Wikipedia entry on different kinds of nitrous gas in a borderline hypnotic monotone. I’m not entirely sure he was aware he was talking out loud; as with the man on the bus, it felt like I was privy to someone else’s interior monologue.
He was a sweet kid but he had staked his entire life on being the guy in the Lot who’ll hook you up with a ticket and help you get fucked up. In the parlance of my people, he was a consummate mensch, but for him a mitzvah involved scoring some Special K or a roll of acid.
Like many of the people I encountered over the course of my travels, he viewed the festival and Phish scene in ways that bordered on animistic; it was all about honoring the spirit of the music and engendering good karma. If you gave out love, you would receive it back sevenfold. So he habitually went to shows without a ticket, trusting that the spirit of the shows would not let him down. By his recounting, it never did.
He told me stories that after a while faded into one long, complicated list of mood-altering substances. Here’s the thing about drug stories: They don’t make sense and they’re not interesting to anybody except the people involved. (Yes, I realize how deeply that statement incriminates me and this entire book.) Yet people who use drugs feel the need to tell them all the same, like a form of contemporary folklore.
Some of the drug stories inevitably involved the sale of bogus drugs on the Lot; for a head, that was a major transgression. “It’s bad enough that we take drugs, but then you gotta have people making you feel even dirtier for it ’cause they’re ripping you off,” Matthew said sadly.
We had all been told that drugs were bad. They changed you. They corrupted you. They turned you into somebody you didn’t know and didn’t like. They alienated you from your friends and families. They cost you your job and your freedom. Yet we took them anyway and tried not to let our consciences keep us up at night.
The ugliness was never far from the surface. The angel-faced kid had a reputation. He had burned people. He had ripped people off. He had lied to people and hurt friends because he cared more about drugs than he did about people. Being a drug person involves being friends with people you don’t like or trust because you share the same weakness. A drug friend is only a friend as long as drugs are around; if things go awry, they can quickly morph into drug enemies.
With drugs, everything can turn on a dime; let the moment linger too long and a hazy narcotic paradise has a curious way of darkening. Billy’s friends had already reached that point. They’d passed it.
“I don’t like the person my friend has become since she got really into drugs,” the angel-faced stoner’s girlfriend said of one of her other druggie friends. She was too smart and too practical to continue making the same mistakes much longer. She looked over at her boyfriend with regret. There was a lot of ugly history there that it’s probably best I didn’t know about.
I looked at a picture of Billy and his ex-fiancée. They looked so goddamn innocent, like the kids they were. “I really love her. That’s my ex-fiancée and it didn’t work out, but I still think of her all the time—she’s in my heart, man,” Billy said when I looked at the picture.
I wanted more than anything to find Billy a nice girl. I wanted to find him a Cadence. I wanted him to find somebody who would tell him to slow down and eat and sleep and take his time and not be in such a goddamn hurry to get wherever the fuck it was he seemed to be speeding two hundred miles an hour toward without brakes.
I worried about him. Everyone else did as well. They were right to. Deep i
nto the night Billy’s father came home and told us all to leave immediately. He cast us out over Billy’s strenuous objections and apologies.
What I saw on the man’s face was not rage but pain. It was pain mixed with love. It was an old pain, an ancient hurt from a culture war that began long ago and never stops raging. It was the old hurt of parents terrified that this strange music and these unsavory characters are going to take their children away from them. It was the pain of parents dreading inevitable phone calls from the cops that their son or daughter has been arrested or killed. It’s the pain of not being able to understand the music and the culture that has taken over your child’s life and the sadness and rage and confusion that come with trying to acclimate yourself to a world whose rules and codes of conduct are incomprehensible.
Some part of me wanted to embrace the man, to tell him that I was with him, that even though I’d only met his son a few days ago I was already unhealthily invested in his happiness. I wanted to save him because I didn’t think I was capable of saving myself.
“I’m only twenty-four and I’m already tired,” Billy said without needing to. The exhaustion on his face said it all.
He had seen too much on the road. They all had. He had seen things he should never have seen. He’d been to prison. He’d been a drug dealer. He’d been a shark. He’d seen money come. He’d seen money go. I thought about the girl behind me on the nighttime Greyhound bus who said that at twenty she was finally ready to settle down, even if it was only with herself.
It struck me as ridiculous at the time, but now I could see how people could feel they had experienced all of the excitement and adventure they ever need for a lifetime before hitting their midtwenties.
Darien Lake was Billy’s hometown show, so it had special resonance for him. To mark the occasion, I bought him a print in the Lot and felt for the first time in a very long while like a halfway decent human being. Perhaps that’s what this journey was about in the first place: the journey to make a friend. Singular or plural. To get out of the prison of my mind and genuinely connect with another human being, if only for a little while.
THE WALKING WOUNDED: COMING HOME
Billy returned to the workaday world after Darien Lake, leaving me to go it alone to Phish’s next stop in Camden, New Jersey. By that point homesickness had kicked in hard. I missed Cadence fiercely. I missed the curve of her lips, the softness of her hair, the contours of her body. I missed the way she smelled. I missed the way she talked, her wit, her flair for drama. In a thousand lifetimes it would never have occurred to me to go see Phish, let alone write a book about them, if Cadence hadn’t turned my life upside down and reintroduced me to the concept of joy. Damn you, Cadence! You can’t miss something you’ve never experienced, and now I felt as if I had driven myself half insane chasing joy through Greyhound bus stations and outdoor arenas and parking lots.
I didn’t talk to Cadence much from the road. How could I? I struggled to put into words what I was feeling and doing and experiencing.
I wasn’t sure I understood what was happening to my mind and my body and I feared I wouldn’t be able to explain it to anyone else, even someone who felt like a part of me, even someone I felt connected to at the soul. I experienced everything intensely that summer. Everything made me cry. Loudon Wainwright III’s music devastated me with its elegiac meditation on worlds lost to time. I wept openly because I was sad. I wept openly because I felt joy. I wept openly because I didn’t understand what was happening to me. I couldn’t quite tell if I liked the person I was becoming or not, but I felt as if I was undeniably changing.
Cadence interpreted my radio silence from the road through a much darker filter. She thought I was planning to break up with her as soon as I returned. The truth of the matter was that I had made a huge decision regarding the future of our relationship, but it wasn’t at all what Cadence had feared.
From Buffalo I took a Greyhound to Penn Station in New York and then a train from Penn Station to Philadelphia, where I called Cadence from an Amtrak train and she uttered words that filled me with terror and foreboding.
“I can move my stuff out of the condo by Monday if you’d like,” she told me with an air of weary resignation.
“No! No!” I screamed out loud to the evident mortification of the perfectly respectable folks seated next to me on the train.
“Really? Because that’s what you seem to want.”
Panic overtook me. I felt out of control. I felt powerless. I wanted to stop the train and get off and regain my composure, but I was hardwired to my seat. With mounting desperation in my voice, I begged Cadence not to leave. I tried to explain that the last thing that I wanted was for her to move out of the place I’d bought specifically to provide a home worthy of her. I wanted to explain to her that she was the reason I was on the road, she was the reason I was writing this book, that she was the reason I was on this journey. But words failed me. Words were all I had, and words were suddenly hopelessly inadequate. The longer we talked, the more distraught I became. Everything felt like it was spiraling out of control, and all I had was my clunky suitcase and a plan that made less sense by the day. I wanted to continue down this road, but everything seemed to be calling me back to Chicago, to my office and cubicle and home and family and soul mate.
By the time the train chugged into the station in Philadelphia and a cabdriver took me to the Sheraton University City Hotel, I was running on empty. The elation of early shows had morphed into an unmistakable weariness, and while I still eagerly anticipated each show, I would be lying if I didn’t concede that there was part of me that deeply resented the way Phish kept forcing their fans to travel long distances to get to New Jersey. It seemed unspeakably cruel.
We finally reached the Susquehanna Bank Center, and I passed a man shouting hoarsely into his iPhone in a thick New Jersey accent, “I swear to God, I spent a hundred and seventy-five dollars on this girl. Dinner, tickets, parking, everything, and I don’t get nothing from her. Not a blow job, no sex, no nothing. So I’m angry, of course, and it’s like, what a fucking waste!”
When it came to towns in New Jersey, Camden was no Holmdel. I experienced a surge of excitement when Phish opened with “Rocky Top,” a bluegrass standard I had once seen Bobby Osborne and the Rocky Top X-Press perform at the Grand Ole Opry. “Rocky Top” is one of Tennessee’s eight official state songs, which suggests the state is both enthusiastic to a fault and has a lot of difficulty making up its goddamn mind. I wanted to concentrate on the concert, but my conversation with Cadence that afternoon had spooked me something awful. Both personally and professionally I had left behind a hell of a mess in Chicago before I left, and I had no idea what awaited me when I returned home.
I just knew that I couldn’t stand to be apart from Cadence any longer, and I wanted to make sure I still had a job to come home to. I feared that any more time on the road might imperil that possibility.
So while the Sheraton was lovely and the Camden show was dynamic and exciting enough to make me forget that I was in New Jersey for a few idyllic hours, I decided afterward that, on the whole, I would rather not be in Philadelphia, so I booked a flight and flew home to Chicago the next day.
I had only been on the road for two weeks, yet I returned home a new man, much worse for wear but nowhere near as emotionally apocalyptic as I’d been when I set out on a dark and scary road just a few weeks earlier.
I looked the way I felt: broken and battered. At six foot two, I was down to 160 pounds. A purple-pink scar now adorned my left eyebrow. I was weary and shattered and in dire need of Cadence. The kindness-seeking missile had returned home.
But not for long! Phish’s annual festival Super Ball X loomed tantalizingly in our near future. I had abused my body and myself throughout my Phish tour as only a single man with no regard for his health, safety, sanity, or survival truly could, but now my solo misadventures were over and I could once again experience Phish with the woman who had inspired this whole glorious, m
addening endeavor.
By the time I returned home from tour, my relationship with Phish was radically different. The connection I felt to the band, its music, its fans, and its scene was no longer vicarious. It was no longer a by-product of the intense love I felt toward Cadence. No, my Phish fandom now had a curious, traumatic, and joyous history all its own.
A few weeks after I came back from the road, I saw my psychiatrist for the first time in several months.
When I talked about the road with my psychiatrist, it almost felt as if I were talking about another person. I talked about how I felt like my center of balance was off and I could topple at any moment, how my mind raced with thoughts, how a thick fog of dread had descended upon me before I headed out on tour and convinced me I would not make it past October, that I would be destroyed somewhere along the way. I talked about how food had lost its appeal for me on the road, how even foods I’d once loved tasted like ash in my mouth.
I talked about how I fantasized not about specific foods but about the very concept of hunger. I talked about my LSD epiphany the first night in Bethel and how in some strange way it and the community of Phish fans seemed to have saved me from myself, how I’d get dizzy and lose track of where I was and who I was and feel like I was about to be hurtled into an all-encompassing abyss.
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 15