Are You Experienced?

by Jordan Sonnenblick

  At some point Willow, Tina, and Debbie all went off to wait in line for the bathrooms, which left me with my dad and uncle to watch a guy named Country Joe McDonald. Country Joe got the crowd’s attention with a rowdy cheer that started with “Gimme an ‘F’.… Gimme a ‘U’…” and then burst into the strongest anti-Vietnam song of the whole weekend. It was called the “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag” and featured the line “Be the first one on your block to have your boy come home in a box.”

  People went crazy for him. It made me feel kind of sad for my generation, because it seems to me that we don’t really have a cause or spokespeople in the same way my dad’s did. Then again, I wondered whether I was making too much of one song, because at that moment, Michael went into the tent, fished around in his bags, and came out with another lit joint. “Too much heavy politics, man,” he said. “We’re here to give my brother a good time. Right, Davey?”

  I kept refusing the pot when it got to me, but it didn’t take David and Michael long to polish it off. This time David didn’t get all giggly. Instead, he got mellow and started reminiscing with Michael about their childhood. “Hey, Mikey,” he said, “do you remember that time in kindergarten when you caught that frog for me? And I asked you if it would live forever?”

  Michael smiled. “And I promised you it would.”

  “Yeah. And then it died. So you caught me another one and didn’t tell me.”

  “Yup.”

  “And that kept happening for, like, a year?”

  “Yup.”

  “You know what, Mikey? I never told you this, but really, even then, I kind of knew. ’Cause the spots on those frogs were in all different places. And Mrs. Gross read my class a story about how leopards never change their spots, right? So one day I went up to her desk at recess time and I asked her whether frogs ever change their spots, and she said no, not as far as she knew. And then I thought, ‘Wow, I discovered a new species of frog!’”

  Mike laughed and rubbed his brother’s hair. “You were always such a funny kid, Davey,” he said. “Stay funny, okay?”

  I felt my eyes stinging.

  The girls were gone for more than two hours, which meant they missed the entire next act, another solo guitar player named John Sebastian, whose music I really liked. Then a heavy blues-rock group called the Keef Hartley Band came on, and I saw another new side of my father: the drummer geek.

  “Check this out, Gabriel,” he said. “Keef Hartley is supposed to be a really good drummer. He replaced Ringo Starr in Rory Storm and the Hurricanes when Ringo quit to join the Beatles! And then he played in John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers!”

  I was like, Hey, that’s obscure. Dad talks about drummers like I talk about guitarists.

  Meanwhile, Michael and I bonded over the guitar sounds. “Hey, do you hear that lead tone?” he asked. “That’s beautiful, man. It’s gotta be a Telecaster neck pickup!”

  Of course, we were too far away to see what guitar anybody was playing, which almost made me wish for the gigantic Jumbotrons of the 2010s. I was pretty good at telling apart the sounds of different guitars, but I wasn’t sure. “How can you tell? I play guitar, too, and I can hear that it’s a single coil, but why not a Strat?”

  “With a Strat, you can hear the whammy bar springs in the sound. Trust me, it’s a Tele. Wanna get closer and see?”

  “Uh, sure.”

  “David, do you want to come?”

  “Nah,” David said. “I want to wait here for the girls.” Truthfully, David looked too blissed-out to move.

  “All right,” Michael told him, “you can watch our stuff. Just don’t go anywhere, okay?”

  It got more and more crowded as we got closer to the stage, and I started to feel a bit too much like a sardine, but Michael was really determined to check out the lead guitarist’s gear. With a lot of excuse mes, we eventually got close enough that if I really squinted, I could see that he had been right about the guitar, which was, indeed, a Fender Telecaster. I was impressed.

  “Wow, you have golden ears,” I said. Actually, I half-shouted it, because the music was way louder this close to the stage. But this was my first chance to talk with my legendary uncle alone, so I didn’t mind expending a little extra effort. “Hey, your brother told me you’re in a band together.”

  “Were,” he said. “The other guys don’t know it yet, but I’m gone.”

  “Gone? What happened? Are you going away to college?”

  He snorted. “Me? College? I don’t think so!”

  I didn’t know what to say. My dad was so big on education, I had just kind of assumed college would have been part of my uncle’s plans if things hadn’t gone off the rails somehow.

  Michael ran a hand through his hair. “Listen, I don’t even really know you, all right?” he said. “But Willow gets … feelings about people sometimes. She told me she thinks we met you for a reason. Crazy, right?”

  What was I supposed to say to that? “Um, I don’t think Willow’s crazy. I think she’s amazing.” What the heck, I figured. Half-truths have been working great for me so far.

  “And you know something else? I didn’t tell my brother or Willow this, but I wasn’t looking down at the radio when we hit you. I was looking right at the road. I didn’t just say you appeared in front of the car—I meant that you literally appeared in front of the car. I’m talking, like, BOOM! Flash of light—instant kid!”

  I didn’t say anything.

  He ran that hand through his hair again. He looked like he was about to jump out of his own skin. “I don’t know, maybe Willow’s not the crazy one. Maybe I’m finally going insane. Between all the shit from my old man, and the letter, and what’s going to happen to Davey when I’m—”

  What letter? In all the piles of my uncle’s stuff, I hadn’t seen a letter, and nobody had mentioned anything about any drama with a letter before this.

  “Wow, man, you must think I’m crazy. First, I run you over with a damn Caddy, then I tell you I didn’t see you until you suddenly appeared in front of the car like some kind of crazy Captain Kirk. And now I’m laying this whole trip on you about my life, and you probably have no idea what I’m even talking about!”

  I still just stood there. It felt like anything I said would be the wrong thing.

  “Come on, kid. Say something!”

  I flashed the dorky Star Trek hand signal. “Um, I come in peace?”

  He smiled, but didn’t laugh. “I’m serious.”

  “Okay, you’re right. I don’t think it’s just random chance that I met you and your brother. I think I was meant to be here for a reason. I swear I don’t want to do anything bad to either of you. All I want is to help. Can you trust me?”

  As the Keef Hartley Band wailed away a hundred feet from us, my uncle Mike stared into my eyes for a disturbingly long time. Then he took hold of both my shoulders and said, “I do trust you. I do. But if you hurt my brother, I swear I will haunt you forever.”

  He was going to haunt me? He couldn’t know how he had already haunted my entire life. Every hair on my body stood on end. “Michael,” I said, “you mentioned a letter. Can you tell me about it?”

  TEEN ANGEL

  SATURDAY, AUGUST 16, 1969

  “I can’t tell you about the letter,” Michael said. His face looked absolutely ravaged. Whatever had been tormenting my father since 1969, this letter had to be part of it. I needed to know.

  “Why not?”

  “Because … because … listen, my brother can’t even know about this. I’m sorry. I know I said I trust you, but I meant I trust you to hang with us for the weekend, share our food, watch David’s back when he’s high. But if you slip and tell him about the letter, he wouldn’t be safe around our father if…”

  Half a song went by.

  “If?”

  “If anything happened to me.”

  Oh, shit. This was it. “Michael, listen to me,” I said. “You have to tell me about the letter. I swear you can trust me. Will
ow was right. I don’t know exactly how it happened, but I did just appear out of thin air in front of your car to help you.”

  “Prove it.”

  “All right.” Great, I thought. How am I supposed to prove that? Then I realized I probably could at least make Michael believe I could see the future. I grabbed his sleeve and dragged him through the crowd to the nearest guy in a Woodstock uniform. “Hey, who’s playing next?” I asked.

  “Some band called Santana!” the guy shouted back.

  Perfect. Because I had spent about a million hours practicing guitar along with Santana: The Woodstock Experience on my iPod. “Michael, if I predict every single song in order, and sing along with the drum solo, which by the way will be in the seventh song, then will you believe I might, umm, have been sent here?”

  “Uhh, sure, I guess so. Or I might just believe somebody laced my weed with something, man.”

  I laughed. “No, I am dead serious. Listen, I will make you a deal: If I convince you I know what’s coming during this next band’s set, then you have to tell me about the letter. But there’s one other thing. You have to promise me you won’t tell your brother anything about this, okay? He can’t know. That’s really, really important. I don’t know exactly what would happen if he found out, but I know it would be a huge disaster. Deal?”

  “Deal,” he said.

  For the second-to-last time, I shook hands with my uncle Mike.

  We started back toward the blankets, and I asked, “What did you mean about your brother not being safe around your father?” I had tried a million times to imagine the kinds of neglect my dad must have suffered as a kid, but it had never occurred to me that he might have been abused, too.

  “Listen,” Michael said, “our dad smacks me around all the time, okay? But he only ever hit David once that I can remember. It was on a Sunday morning when we were pretty little. Mom and Dad were sleeping late, and Davey was hungry. I looked through the cabinets for something to give him, but there wasn’t really anything. So I decided to run down to the store.

  “You have to understand, this kind of thing happened all the time. I would go into my dad’s wallet or my mom’s purse and take a dollar or two. Usually, they carried a bunch of cash around, and they never remembered exactly how much they had spent on a night when they had gone out, so it wasn’t like they were going to catch me stealing from them.

  “This one time, though, Dad only had a twenty in his wallet. Mom woke up while I was gone, and asked David where I was. He said he didn’t know. Then she woke Dad up, and he asked David again where I was. David said again that he didn’t know. Dad must have looked in his wallet, because David told me later that he started shouting about how his last twenty was gone.

  “When I walked in, I was carrying a loaf of bread, a jug of milk, and a dozen eggs. I had eighteen bucks in my front pocket, and a penny piece of bubblegum in my mouth. Mom, Dad, and Davey were standing in the kitchen, waiting for me.

  “First, Dad slapped me across the face, and I dropped the eggs. He called me a ‘goddamned sneak-thief.’ Next, he smacked David. I kept trying to say, ‘Davey was hungry,’ but Dad just kept getting madder and madder. Then Mom snatched the bread and milk from me and started in about how now she had to clean up the eggs. So then they were both shouting, and Davey was still just standing there, holding his face with one hand, his little stomach with the other, and looking at the bread like he had never seen food before.”

  Listening to Michael’s story made me ashamed. I thought about times when I had wasted food and my dad had yelled at me about it. Years too late, I understood.

  “So I tried to give him a piece of the bread, but Dad flipped out even more. He said, ‘Oh, Davey was so hungry, you had to go out and spend my last goddamned twenty dollars on gum for yourself, huh?’ Then he whirled around, grabbed David’s arm, and said, ‘You knew! You knew where your lying thief of a brother was! I think one no-good liar is enough for this family, don’t you? But if you’re going to share his lies, you can share his breakfast, too!

  “Then Dad forced my lips open, yanked out my gum, and shoved it into David’s mouth. It was horrible. And he wouldn’t let David eat anything—or spit out that gum—all day. Even now, Davey can’t look at a stick of gum.

  “If Dad went that insane over a penny’s worth of gum, he’s going to want to kill over what’s in this letter. And that’s why Davey can’t know about the letter. Because my father will know about the letter, and when he does find out he’s going to want someone to blame. That someone can … not … be … David. I don’t care anymore what happens to me, but David doesn’t get blamed for anything I do, ever again.”

  Wow. My father had always made a huge issue of not letting me chew gum, which I had thought was completely psychotic and random. I had gotten explosively furious at him so many times for his weird little rules. Now I knew that for the rest of my life, whenever he came up with some restriction that seemed bizarre, I was going to picture little-kid Dad chewing gum in that kitchen, and try really hard to bite my tongue.

  “All right,” I said. “Let’s not worry about the letter right now.” Every time my father or Michael told me anything about their home life, I just wanted to curl up in a corner and cry. I decided that, if Michael’s mission was to give David the most awesome Woodstock weekend possible, maybe I could start by just promising to help out with that. It wouldn’t make up for the gum torture, but it was something I knew I could deliver.

  After all, I was pretty darn sure I could deliver Jimi freaking Hendrix.

  “Listen, Michael, you want your brother to have a weekend he’ll never, ever forget, right?”

  He swallowed, then said, “Yeah. I promised.”

  “Then here’s what I promise you: Within the next twenty-four hours, you and your brother will be on a first-name basis with at least one major rock star.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Seriously.” Unless my time travel had messed everything up, in which case, we wouldn’t meet Jimi, and I’d be stuck here forever. But then I also wouldn’t be born, in which case I wouldn’t ever get to come back here in the first place, in which case … “I mean, I’m ninety-nine percent sure. Well, ninety-eight. Well, umm, maybe you shouldn’t mention anything to David, just in case. But yeah. I think so. Hey, we’d better get back to everybody else before Santana starts. By the way, Santana will be playing a superb-sounding Gibson SG. He’ll have a bunch of percussionists, a keyboard guy, and an African American bass player with a rockin’ Abe Lincoln beard.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “An Abe Lincoln beard? It’s like a normal beard, but without the mustache part. You know, sort of Amish looking?”

  “Yeah, I know what Abe Lincoln’s beard looked like. What’s an African American?”

  Whoa. Slang crisis alert. “Uh, he’s black.”

  “Willow was right about one thing: You talk funny. Where are you from again?”

  “Maybe I’ll tell you sometime. But I think I’ll wait until you’re either not high, or a whole lot higher than you are now. I’m not sure which.”

  When we got back to the blankets, the girls were back, and everybody was guzzling down a bunch of Cokes that they had brought back from their travels. Debbie tossed one to me, and I noticed again how much better 1969 Coke tasted. It had to be the real sugar.

  Mom had always said high fructose corn syrup was poisoning every cell in my body, but she had never told me it was also so much less delicious than what it had replaced.

  Anyway, a couple of minutes after we sat down, Santana started playing. I named the first couple of songs for Michael and sang the guitar lines in his ear, but then I had to stop, because I had to live in the moment. Yes, I had been listening to these exact performances on my iPod for years, but the difference between that and seeing them live in the middle of a huge audience that was experiencing Santana for the first time was like the difference between being shown a sketch of the most beautiful girl in
the world dancing, and actually dancing with her. Because we danced. So did everybody as far as I could see. You couldn’t not dance.

  Then came the seventh song, “Soul Sacrifice,” which may have been the most musically exciting eleven minutes and thirty-five seconds of my entire existence. I couldn’t resist; I stopped dancing with Debbie for a moment, tapped David on the shoulder, and said, “Check out the drummer. His name is Michael Shrieve, and he’s a teenager. He’s going to play a solo in this song that will blow—your—mind!”

  David was dancing with Tina. He leaned over and shouted in my ear, “How do you know?”

  “I, uh, saw these guys at the Fillmore East in New York a few months ago. This song is the drummer’s big solo showcase.”

  When the solo came, David stopped dead in his tracks. Michael Shrieve started out loud and fast, then got slower and slower, quieter and quieter. Next, he built back up to a roar so powerful and pulsating that it didn’t seem possible it could be coming from a single person with only four limbs. Tina wrapped herself around David’s neck and kind of nibbled at him, but he was completely absorbed. I knew my father when he had that level of concentration, and I was pretty sure Tina could have stripped down and done a full-frontal tackle without getting him to tear his attention away from the stage.

  When the band finally broke back in and played the climax of the song, David turned to me in awe. “That was worth the whole weekend. He’s the best drummer I’ve ever seen!”

  I just smiled. I had witnessed my dad concentrating that hard a million times, but I had never, ever witnessed him in awe. He was right; it was worth the whole weekend.

  Santana played one more song after that, then left the stage to the most thunderous applause I had heard all weekend. I think the three Barbers clapped the loudest. Then my uncle put his arm around me, pulled me close, and whispered in my ear, “I believe.”

  HIGH TIME

  SATURDAY, AUGUST 16, 1969

  Right after Santana’s set, Michael and Willow passed around our dinner: peanut butter, crackers, and bread. We had a few spoons to share, but no clean plates left, so things got pretty messy pretty fast. Of course, we had already spent the day traipsing through ankle-deep mud and getting drizzled on intermittently, so it wasn’t like anybody was pristine to begin with.