TUESDAY, OCTOBER 21, 2014
I woke up in the hospital, with tubes running in and out of me, and immediately had a seizure. The next thing I knew, my father was sitting next to the bed, crying to my mother about Uncle Mike’s death. Everything hit me at once then: who I was. Where I was. Where I had been—and what it meant that my father was telling this story.
Jimi had been right. My trip to Woodstock hadn’t saved any lives.
“Dad,” I said. Well, I tried to say it. My mouth was incredibly dry, my lips were cracked in about a million places, and my vocal cords felt rusted in place. Basically, I said, “Gah.”
My mom heard me though, and shrieked. “He said something! See, I told you he was waking up before. We’re right here, Richard. Can you hear me?”
I attempted to make another noise, but my throat had seized up. This was the most warmth I had felt from my mom in years. Truthfully, I felt like bawling.
Dad even piped in. “Can you hear us?”
“Yek.”
“Marianne, I think you’re right! He did say something. I’ll go get somebody.”
Classic Dad—fleeing as soon as he might have to interact. I couldn’t remember the last time I had actively wanted to be in my father’s presence, but this time I didn’t want him to go anywhere. We had so much to talk about. I cleared my throat—which was a really painful move—and forced myself to enunciate as I said, “Dad. Stay. Please.”
A little bit caveman-esque, but it did the trick. Mom said, “I’ll go,” and her footsteps tapped their way into the distance.
“What is it, Richard? Is something hurting you? Do you need something?”
Suddenly I was crying, harder than I ever had before in my life. “I’m sorry, Dad,” I choked out. “I’m so sorry. I tried. I tried, but I guess I couldn’t change anything!” The tears actually lubricated my eyes enough that I could get them open, but I couldn’t make anything out at first because (a) I was sobbing too hard, and (b) the whole world was blindingly bright. Eventually, I could make out a shadow looming over me as my father sat on the edge of my bed and put his hand next to mine. He didn’t touch me or anything, but he made a somewhat-more-than-half-assed paternal effort.
“Richard,” he said softly, “are you talking about the things you said to me on Friday night? Or the damage to the electric guitar? Or the arrest? Or the fire in the basement? We can discuss all of that later. Right now, we have to concentrate on getting you well, all right?”
Fire in the basement? Damage to the electric guitar? I felt another sob course through me. I forced myself to breathe deeply, though, and said, “No, Dad, I’m sorry about Uncle Mike. And Jimi Hendrix. They were both so…”
I couldn’t even finish. I closed my eyes, and all I could do was picture my father at fifteen, smiling eternally, onstage with his brother and Jimi.
“What are you talking about, Richie? I know you’ve been through a lot. In fact, the doctors weren’t sure you would even wake up. Maybe you’d better rest a bit. I’m sure your mother will be back any minute with somebody who can help us understand what’s going on, and then we can—”
I tried to sit up, but all the wires and tubes stopped me. It hurt. “Dad, you’re not listening to me. You never listen to me!”
“What do you mean, Richard? I’m listening, but you’re not making any sense. You’re talking about your uncle Michael and Jimi Hendrix, but you never met either of them. They both … passed away long before you were born. So, um, maybe you had a dream about meeting them? I know you were asking me about your uncle on Friday night, not too long before your … accident.”
Just then, I had a crazy thought. I closed my eyes again for a moment and tried to concentrate on my right hip. My entire nervous system was beset with pain signals, but I forced myself to wriggle around in bed and attempt to determine whether the hip was still sore. I was fairly sure it was.
“Dad,” I said, “I know this sounds crazy, and I know you pretty much think I’m insane half the time anyway. But could you look under the covers at the front of my right hip bone?”
“Richie, why would—”
“Please, Dad. Can you just trust me for once?”
I couldn’t tilt my neck down far enough to look at my hip, but I felt cold air as my father pulled the blankets away from my torso. Then he gasped.
“Do you see it?” I asked.
“S-see what?”
“The Cadillac hood ornament?”
“Yes. But—”
“Have you seen a scar like that before?”
“Yes. But—”
“When was the last time you saw this scar, Dad?”
“Umm … I—”
“I’ll tell you, and you can tell me if I’m right, okay? I think it was August, 1969. I think it was on a kid named Gabriel. I think your brother, Michael, hit him with your father’s Cadillac. Check out my hair, Dad. Haven’t you been wondering why it’s a completely different color now?”
“Richie, I don’t know how you know all this, and I don’t know when you found the time to put on this … this … tattoo, or whatever it is. But you should know better than to joke around about Woodstock with me. As for your hair, I’m not sure what you mean about a different color, but it got pretty badly singed when you got electrocuted by the Stratocaster, and what’s left isn’t really much of a color at all.”
Great, I thought. On top of everything else, my hair is crispy-fried. Whatever. I still have to prove this to my father, or I won’t be able to tell him the real reason his brother died.
But my throat was absolutely killing me. “Can I have a little bit of water, please?” I asked.
“We should probably wait until a doctor says it’s all right.”
“Come on, Dad. There’s something I really have to tell you, and it’s waited forty-five years already.”
He adopted the father-knows-best smirk that had made me want to strangle him for approximately half my childhood, and I knew my water was not forthcoming. I swallowed whatever meager spit I could force myself to work up, and launched into my big speech, anyway.
“I’m Gabriel.”
Dad laughed, a single bark that hit me in the gut like a round of buckshot, but I kept talking.
“Listen. You were in the backseat. Willow and Michael were in front. It was Friday, August fifteenth, and there was music on the radio. I appeared out of nowhere, and the car hit me. I flew into a ditch. Thanks for the clothes, by the way. Does this sound familiar so far?
“You all invited me to come along with you to the festival, so I did. On Friday night, we met Debbie and Tina. Tina was tripping, and she threw up orange juice all over you. Remember?
“On Saturday morning, you and I went down to the pond to wash off, and I’m pretty sure we started the skinny-dipping craze at Woodstock.
“On Saturday night, we accidentally ate some mushrooms and—”
“Richard Gabriel Barber, be quiet for a moment and listen to me! How do you know all this? I haven’t told a single living soul about most of it. Your mother doesn’t even know about Tina, or the skinny-dipping, or—oh, Lord!—the mushrooms. Did you meet Gabriel somewhere? Has he contacted you over the Internet? I’ve heard about these Web predators. He didn’t seem like the type back when we were teenagers, but then again, I also didn’t think he’d disappear for half a century. We met so fast, and then became so close so quickly. He was like my best friend or something, but then he disappeared so suddenly.…”
“Behind a wall of amplifiers…”
“Behind a wall of … Richard, that doesn’t prove anything. He could have told you that, too.”
“All right, Dad. Why don’t you ask me some questions? Things so specific that only Gabriel himself could possibly know the answers?”
Dad nodded slowly. “I still don’t believe any of this, Richard. But maybe some questions will help to set the record straight. Who made me a treat for my birthday, and what was the treat?”
“Willow, and it was mushroom brownies.”
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br /> “Whom did we meet at the nursing tent?”
“The first time or the second time?”
Dad looked surprised for a second, then recovered. “The first time.”
“John Sebastian and Janis Joplin. They played ‘Me and Bobby McGee’ for us, even though her version of it didn’t come out on a record until after she was dead.”
“What did we have for breakfast on Sunday morning?”
“Easy. Granola, with tea. And you loved the drummer from Santana the most of all, and you were so excited in the car on the way to the concert that I didn’t think you’d ever shut up, but it was really kind of amazing because you never get that excited about anything anymore. We sang ‘Dance to the Music’ in harmony. You were so … alive.”
“Richard.”
“I’m sorry, but it’s true. Anyway, I met such incredible people! You were really nice to Tina. I’m going to miss Debbie. Willow was so beautiful that it almost hurt every time I looked at her. Jimi Hendrix was, I don’t know, haunted. And Uncle Mike was the coolest person I’ve ever met in my life.”
Dad turned away from me without a word and walked out of the room. I braced myself for a door slam, but my father surprised me; he just let the door swing shut with a hydraulic hiss. For a few long minutes, I could hear the heels of his shoes clacking past as he paced up and down the hallway.
When I thought I would go insane from either the suspense or my thirst, Dad came quietly back into the room and did something that was an all-time first in our relationship. He put his hand on my shoulder. “This is completely impossible,” he said, but it almost sounded as though he was talking to himself. Then he looked me right in the eye and said, “Gabriel? You’re really Gabriel?”
I nodded.
We sat there for the longest time, not saying anything, and I kept expecting my mother to come bursting back into the room with an entire medical team in tow before we could finish having this strangest of all interludes. Then I looked past Dad, and saw that Mom was watching silently through the little window from the hallway. I guess even she recognized a moment when she saw one.
Finally, Dad giggled. For a split second, I saw the fifteen-year-old David, high on mushrooms, superimposed on my sixty-year-old father.
“What’s so funny?” I asked.
“I just realized something.”
“What?”
“Well, when we were trying to come up with a middle name for you, your mother suggested Michael, but I was dead-set against it, because I worried that my brother’s name might bring bad luck. So I tried to pick out the name of the one person I had trusted the most, aside from your uncle Mike. In the end, I thought of my old friend Gabriel. So, Richard, as things turned out, I named you after yourself.”
LONG TIME GONE
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 21, 2014
The doctors swarmed over me for a couple of hours, marveling over my miraculous return from vegetable-ville. As far as they knew, most of the damage to my body had been done when I had touched the strings of Jimi’s guitar in our basement on Friday night. Dad said sparks had flown everywhere, and I had jerked spasmodically for a few seconds as my hair started smoldering. Then Dad had pulled the plug from the wall, and I had fallen down hard and hit my head on the bare cement floor of the cellar. Nobody was sure whether it was the electricity or the concussion that had rendered me unconscious for the long weekend. I had a feeling my mind had just been … elsewhere.
All sorts of medical people came in and ran tests on me. There were blood tests, urine tests, brain wave tests, heart wave tests, breathing tests—it went on and on.
Right before bedtime, my parents left my room. Apparently, they had been taking turns sleeping in a family room on the pediatrics floor, and it was Mom’s turn to go home for the night. After they left, one last doctor came by to check on me. I asked him whether he had ever had another patient who had passed out for a bunch of days after an electric shock. He said, “You didn’t pass out, Richard. You flatlined. Your higher brain functions stopped. I don’t mind telling you, it’s a miracle we’re having this conversation. So no, I’ve never had a patient like you before.”
“Um, has anyone? I mean, I can’t be the only person this has ever happened to. Can I?”
“Strangely enough, I have an old friend from medical school who once told me about a case like yours. I didn’t believe him at the time. This case also involved an old guitar amplifier and a teenage boy. Supposedly, the kid found an ancient amp in a warehouse somewhere, plugged a guitar into it, and got a shock like the one that hit you. When he woke up in the hospital several days later, he insisted he had traveled back in time and met the Beatles. Crazy, huh?”
I forced myself to laugh.
He added, “You didn’t happen to meet John, Paul, George, and Ringo while you were out, did you, son?”
I managed to eke out another chuckle and said, “No, but I might have hung out with Jimi Hendrix a bit.”
“That’s a good one,” he said. “Sleep tight now.”
When he left, I stared at the cracks in the mint-green paint on the ceiling over my bed for the longest time, but even though my body was dog-tired, my mind wouldn’t let me sleep. I felt like Jimi and my uncle Mike wouldn’t want me to rest until I had told Dad why Uncle Mike had bought and used the heroin. There was a little buzzer on a cord next to my bed for calling the nurse. I pressed it, and when a nurse came in, I asked her to go get my father. I knew he might be mad, because it had to be after midnight, but I also knew he needed to hear what I had to say.
It couldn’t have been more than two minutes before my father came barging into the room in a pair of flannel old-man pajamas. My first thought was, You’re wearing those in public? My second thought was, Are you going to kill me? My third thought was, Showtime!
“What’s wrong?” Dad asked. “Is your head all right? Do I need to call a doctor? Or your mother?”
“No, Dad. I just needed to see you. It’s about Uncle Mike. I promised him I’d tell you something.”
My father sat down in the chair next to the bed, hard. His hair was matted in seven different directions, his glasses were visibly smudged in the odd fluorescent light, and his face held several days’ stubble. It’s funny, but you never notice how old and gray your parents look on a day-to-day basis. If you could just spend a weekend with your father’s fifteen-year-old self, and then suddenly see him again in his present-day form, believe me, your knees would buckle.
I knew my father was old, but damn.
“This was a secret he couldn’t tell you. He told me your parents always took it out on you if you knew he was doing something against their will and didn’t tell them about it. Do you remember the time he took twenty dollars out of your father’s wallet and came home chewing a piece of bubble gum?”
Dad was staring past me into a shadowed corner of the room.
“Dad?”
“Michael told you about that?”
I nodded. He grimaced.
“I remember. I’ve never told anybody about that day, but I remember. Our father made me chew that piece of gum all day. I can still taste it.” Dad’s voice sounded like he was gargling rocks.
“Yeah, well … so Uncle Mike said if you knew about this one, your father might have really hurt you. He made me swear that if something bad happened to him, then I would tell you the secret. I wanted to tell Uncle Mike it would be a really long time before I would see you again, but there was just no way. Besides, he said this secret would have to wait until either your father was dead, or he was.”
Dad sucked air through his clenched teeth and winced as though I had hit him. He was always pretty tense, but I felt like my father might actually crack at any moment. But I had to keep telling him what I knew.
“So I promised—actually, Jimi Hendrix made me promise—that one day I would tell you the truth about this. I don’t know why Michael couldn’t just trust Willow with it, but it was almost like he thought Willow might not be around anymore, either.�
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Oh, my God, I thought. Willow!
“Dad, what happened to Willow? Did she—” I gulped. “Did she die, too?”
My father sighed and rubbed his eyes. “I don’t know. When your uncle passed away, my parents blamed her. She came by the house once, and they had a huge, screaming argument. She left, and I never saw her again. I mean, she completely disappeared—just blew out of town, with no forwarding address. It was a lot easier to do that in those days. I rode my bike over to her parents’ house, but they slammed the door in my face, and that was the end of that. I’ve thought so many times over the years about tracking her down, but…”
He let that thought fade, and we sat until I couldn’t stand the quiet.
“Dad, remember how Uncle Mike said he was going to take Willow to Woodstock, but then he suddenly changed his mind and got another ticket for you?”
“Yes, of course I do. I’ve wondered a million times why he changed his mind.”
“Well, on Saturday night at Woodstock, Michael and Willow took me for a walk, and he explained the whole thing to me. Dad, your brother got drafted.”
“What?”
“For Vietnam. He got drafted, and he didn’t want to go. He couldn’t stand the thought of hurting anybody. Did you know that about him? There was this turtle.”
I had thought Dad looked pale and sickly before, but he was positively green now as he whispered, “Starkey’s turtle. With the firecracker.”
“That’s the one. But he thought you hadn’t seen what happened.”
“I hadn’t, not really. But…”
Dad started crying. He wasn’t wailing and gnashing his teeth or anything, but tears were definitely making tracks through the stubble.
“But,” he continued, “Starkey showed up at the house in an army uniform maybe a week after Mikey died, and told me the whole story. It’s so funny how things turn out. Starkey became a medic in the hundred and first airborne division—said it was because of that day with the turtle. He said that your uncle was the gentlest and bravest kid he had ever met, and that that one day by the pond had turned his whole life around. I remember being scared of Starkey when I was really small, and then after a while, thinking he was all right, but I never knew why he’d changed. How’s that for bitter irony? So, if my brother got drafted, why did that make him start using heroin and kill himself? Why didn’t he just become a medic like Starkey?”
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