I watched an empty field become a city overnight. People flowed into its streets and found it easy to forget the cities they left behind. As the summer sun rose on the first full day of the festival in 2023, most people had claimed their plots of land and set up tents in rows behind cars, with porta-johns and showers neatly dispersed throughout the communities. Closer to the main festival grounds stood the more established, official vendors of food, drink, and other commodities. Farther out in the neighborhood where I set up my tent, entrepreneurs of a different sort walked the lines between cars and tents.
“Nitrous! Get your nitrous here!” yelled a man wearing an old festival t-shirt and cargo shorts. He might as well have strutted up with a top hat and cane. “Step right up, folks! Get your nitrous here! Fresh nitrous here! Ten dollars for ten seconds! You can’t get a better deal than that on this side of the park! Nitrous! Get your nitrous here! Best in the street!”
His massive black tank of nitrous oxide nearly bounced out of the little red wagon at every bump as he made his way down the dirt road between cars and past another unsanctioned popup vendor along the edge of the park.
“Get your motherfucking bag of ice! Yes! That’s right! We got ice! Ten dollars a bag! You’re in the park now! You’re fucked! You can’t get this stuff cheaper! Get your motherfucking bag of ice!”
Park security quickly shut down the street ice dealer. The nitrous man continued hobbling along down the lane.
I had never tried whip-its and was not sure if ten dollars was, in fact, a fair price. And besides, I was late for the pregame, so I began walking to the campsite where my friends were starting their day. I drove down separately and had to camp separately since I entered the park at a different time. All around me people were recovering from the night before. A long line extended from the porta-johns, straight at first then curved to dodge the gap between tents that served as a road for people and vehicles.
I stepped onto the road but slipped. The man next to me grabbed me and pulled me back to keep me from getting hit by an ambulance darting past. The ambulance, really a four-wheeler with an EMT on it, came to answer the cries for help coming from a group camped along the highway. I heard a struggle of bodies inside a large tent as one collapsed from what was most likely a dose of bad powder. It was a little after nine in the morning.
I only stopped for a moment before continuing onto my group’s pregame.
“Dave, help me out, why the hell would we see Baby Keem when we can see Apashe?”
It didn’t take me long to answer, “What dumbass wants to see Baby Keem over Apashe? What are we even doing here?”
I sat down and let my friends finish their debate as they simultaneously offered me a sip of a joint and a warm beer.
“Aw c’mon Baby Keem will be fun! I talked to another group last night that saw him last summer at Coachella. They said it was lit as hell!”
Another member of the group responded, “I don’t give a fuck about Baby Keem and that festival sucks dude. It’s not even a festival, just one big influencer septic pit. No way I’m seeing Baby Keem over Apashe. I’d see Apashe by myself if I had to.”
The group of six friends continued arguing over the day’s lineup for a bit. I was a last-minute addition to the group through a mutual friend, so I wasn’t too invested. I was fine, so long as I had my elixir. I just kept sipping down beers up against the side of a truck in a little campstool under the canopy they had hastily, and rather poorly, set up before going into the festival on the first night. Day two was our first full day and we were determined to maximize our time, so my friends continued discussing the lineup.
“We should go in at three to catch AFI”
“I’m on the fence on that one. I like them but I might not be at the right level yet. Not tryna pay twenty bucks per shit beer all night, ya know?”
“Ya that’s fair. Worst case we meet after them at Matt Maeson a little after four.”
“Ya we gotta see Maeson.”
The group sat around the speaker talking quietly and drinking slowly for a couple hours in the shade. There was no sign of rush in their campsite or those around them. Each had a different group of friends enacting the same scene. Our speaker moved between various songs we expected to hear later that day. We had several hours to elevate ourselves to a proper level before entering the park. Every thirty minutes or so a member of the group cracked open a grinder, filled up a roller paper, and passed around a joint. Gradually, the joints slowed down and the drinks picked up. I’d lost track of drinks and of time when one of my friends stood up to prepare to enter the park.
We each got our supplies strapped on and headed together in the direction of the festival’s main grounds. But first a bathroom break. The lines were surprisingly short, so I got in, did my business, and dashed out but landed shakily in the soft mud and skidded forward into the body of a gray-haired baby boomer who was, decidedly, not on the same level. He looked old and strict and generally disapproving of the day I was having, but he was not dressed that way. He wore a denim jacket atop a fractal-patterned shirt.
I turned the bump into a hug, said “Happy Fest!” then turned to leave, but our admission wristbands got caught together and pulled us back.
We both cursed to ourselves and tried to work out the tangle. I lost patience and ripped myself free to run off and catch up with my friends. The baby boomer in the denim jacket atop a fractal-patterned shirt folded the ripped strands underneath those that held as best he could and walked off to meet his own group.
My group caught the back half of AFI, reloaded on drinks, then made it to Matt Maeson. We got solid spots close up but were quickly swarmed all around by bodies and locked into place. I was having so much fun dancing to Matt Maeson I didn’t notice the group of baby boomers next to us getting down to this younger artist as if they were back in the early 70s and young again. Through it, their structures and symptoms melted away as old dances looked new, and for just a little bit, they became the scene.
The sun set as the party continued into the night.
My group broke apart during the Baby Keem vs. Apashe debate but came back together for the last performances of the night. I was drunk and kept on drinking. I do not remember the lasers or the lights and their synchronization with the melody before the bass drop then back to the melody. I do not remember the taste of the beer. I do not remember losing my friends, but I do remember giving up trying to find them and just dancing by myself.
I was dancing with my eyes closed when someone bumped into me, making me spill my beer. I only caught the blur of an orange-tan baja pullover and yellow-rimmed sunglasses before the man, who was about my age—in his twenties—yelled close to my ear, “Happy Fest!” and ran off into the crowd. With beer now empty, I mumbled angrily and drunkenly meandered to the bar line but found it closing shop for the night, so I stumbled alone back to my tent for sleep.
_______________
The next morning I could barely move.
I’d had bad hangovers before, but this one felt different. Pain coursed through my body as blood pumped, each heartbeat feeling more powerful than the bass drop at Apashe. All I wanted was sleep, but it was getting too hot in the tent.
I slowly got out, stood up, and burped. Puking would have been a mercy, but my body wanted me to understand the damage I had done. I could taste my insides. At first there was the stomach acid singe, but that quickly subsided in favor of an earthy flavor. It tasted like my insides were dying, slowly turning into fertilizer to provide nutrients to the grass under my feet.
I found I could keep water and food down, so I sat outside the tent for a bit, drinking water and eating beef jerky. I threw on some shorts and a red t-shirt with the name of an old festival I had been to a few years before with the lineup on the back. After a while I felt well enough to venture back down to my friends’ campsite. I passed through the same area as I had on the day before. Today, there was a group with empty coolers asking one another “Where’s the motherfucking bag of ice man?”
I made it back to my group’s campsite, where I sat down in the same spot as the day before and cracked open a beer.
Our group pre-gamed the second day as deliberately as the first, then went into the festival around four. The pace of music was slower and more relaxed for the first few hours. As the sun went down the energy and volume increased throughout the festival. Right before Sofi Tukker took the stage one of my friends pulled out a small bag of powder, took some and shared the rest. The first half of the set had some of the best performance minutes we experienced, but as the powder faded so did the scene. We left that set early to make new friends and find more powder, but first I split off to use the head.
While in the bathroom I started zoning out. The people around me carried on fast conversations through grinding teeth. My teeth were less clenched, eyes less dilated, since my tolerance was fairly high and the points I took earlier were starting to fade, leaving only a dull pain in my chest. I was in line between points. We only had a few points each and needed to ration them throughout the night.
I snapped into focus when I was next in line and saw the man at the urinal in front of me using a dollar bill as a funnel to send powder into the face of the man next to him, all while relieving themselves. The gentleman on the receiving end snarled and snorted it down. The bathroom cheered as if they were the headliner for the evening.
The baby boomer I had bumped into the day before with the denim jacket atop a fractal-patterned shirt watched the scene disapprovingly but silently from a few urinals over. I was too focused on the scene in front of me to notice him.
My group naturally grew with the addition of the bathroom duo, four or five of their friends, and their totem. Many groups bring totems into festivals to find each other more easily in a crowd. They generally have a funny picture attached to a pipe or a stick. This group’s totem had the fat caterpillar from Bug’s Life with cute little wings on the verge of taking flight. You couldn’t miss it.
The two groups combined into one under the totem. One of our new friends was a young woman in her twenties with dyed red hair. She wore jean overalls with nothing underneath, save a case of glitter. It was dark outside but she wore red sunglasses and so did I. I smiled at her and she walked up to me slowly. I took off my red sunglasses, then so did she as she introduced herself.
“Hi, I’m Jen. What’s your name?” she said with a small bounce.
“Hey, I’m Dave. Great to meet you.”
“Where are you coming in from?”
“I drove down from Charlotte the other day. What about you?”
“We all drove down from Indianapolis. I’m friends with one of the other girls from high school but the rest are friends of hers from college I don’t know as well.”
“Oh, nice. I’m in kind of a similar situation. I asked my buddy over there from work if he was going and he linked me up with this whole group. Just met them for the first time yesterday. Good dudes but different tastes in music.”
“Ya, we’ve had our fair share of disagreements over the lineup.”
“Oh ya, it felt straight-up political yesterday,” I responded. “Most of the guys wanted to see Baby Keem, which makes no sense to me when you have a perfectly good Apashe set at the same time.”
“Oh my God I couldn’t agree more! Baby Keem is okay, but why would you go to him instead of Apashe? I actually just lost a similar sort of argument for the next set we’re going to see. They want to see Yung Gravy, but why in the hell would I do that when Elderbrook’s on at the same time?”
“Wait, I couldn’t agree more. I’d see Elderbrook but I don’t have someone to go with.”
“Well now you do, Dave.”
Jen and I split from our group and agreed to meet back up for the night’s headliner: Bob Dylan. Jen led the way and I followed closely behind as we weaved through the crowd for a closer view of Elderbrook. I couldn’t believe how lucky I was to be following this beautiful woman with none of our friends to get in the way.
The set got underway and we started dancing together, completely separate at first, then occasionally coming together at the swing of the beat until we were fully together and the beat couldn’t separate us.
Of all the ways my festival could have gone, this path was ideal.
Jen moved slowly and sensually to the smooth, rhythmic beat. We swayed closer as the house music progressed, a natural crescendo that had me enthralled enough to turn her around and lean in. She started to lean in too but then withdrew. I was a bit surprised but before I could say a word, she pulled out a plastic bag with a white powder packed neatly into one of its corners. She used her key to fish out a portion for herself, then one for me, then one more for herself. I leaned in to take a second hit but received a kiss instead. We kissed for a few seconds then I held her head against my red festival t-shirt.
“I love festivals” she said.
“Me too,” I responded. “The bass drop hits so different with a little molly.”
“I like that a lot, but that’s not why I love festivals. Don’t get me wrong, Molly is my home girl, but festivals are more than that. I love being with the people, all connected for a few minutes to the same feeling, the same vibration, all an extension of one thing. Not all of us have a church, a place we call home. For people like me this is my church, this is my home.”
We lingered by the stage about ten or fifteen minutes after Elderbrook finished his set, in no rush to link up with our friends, but time was approaching for the headliner so we started slowly walking to the mainstage.
“Bob Dylan’s been performing at festivals for decades, I can’t wait to see him,” I said.
“Same here. Did you know he performed at this festival the first time it was put on back in the early 70s? He was the headliner back then too,” Jen offered.
“Oh really? I didn’t know that, and I know a lot about festivals.”
“Oh ya? Do you go to festivals, bro?” She smiled and bumped me with her shoulder.
I smiled and had no comeback so moved on with, “That’s the mainstage. Our friends should be under the Bug’s Life totem. Do you want to link up with them?”
“I think I see the totem but they’re really deep in the crowd. Why don’t we stay back here? I can see fine and we can keep to ourselves.”
I didn’t put up a fight as she touched my arm and slowly danced on me as Bob Dylan took the stage and more bodies crowded around us. The performance started strong but the effects of our last hits were wearing off, leaving only a growing pain in my chest. She must have felt it too since she pulled out the plastic bag, opened it, and began using her key to fish out a small pile. She didn’t immediately take her dosage, instead handing me the bag and waiting for me to collect a key bump for myself so we could take our rips together.
Just as I was raising the key to my nose, a man wearing yellow-rimmed sunglasses and an orange-tan baja pullover backed up into me and the powder fell to the ground. I turned around, upset, but before I could say anything the man hugged me and offered me a small, oily piece of paper, about half the size of a thumb nail. Printed on it was a crude, pixelated yellow smiley face with black sunglasses.
“Happy fest, dude! I’m Ricky!” His sunglasses almost fell off his face as he yelled the greeting and flung his head around to the sound of the music and hugged me. It was the same man in his twenties who had bumped into me and spilled my beer the night before. Ricky’s eyes glowed with a slight yellow tinge through his sunglasses despite the inconsistent lighting of the place.
I ate the paper.
Ricky was dancing, dancing smooth but wild. I thought it looked fun and felt good so I started dancing too. Pretty soon we were moving in step with those around us. I could feel my mind drifting with the current of the newly born organism moving all around us and through us. I lost sight of Jen but kept dancing. I could not bring myself to split from the movement as the sound became light and the light became energy that moved our bodies.
“Sometimes you just have to lose your group,” Ricky said.
“Ya man, we don’t need them. Just us and Bob Dylan and this mean roll we got rippin’ through us. That’s all we need!” I responded.
“I’ve been listening to Bob Dylan for a long time. Every time it’s a little bit different, but every time I meet great people. You’re never alone at a festival.”
“I bet the first time he played here was lit as hell,” I offered as I continued dancing.
“You can feel that scene right here, right now. Just let it in and lose yourself.”
We danced together in silence for a song. The volume of the music and the people increased in motion. I was moving along with Ricky and all the girls with flowers in their hair until, all of a sudden, I lost sight of Ricky.
“Hey guys I found him!” A tall skinny man with dark brown hair and an unconnected beard grabbed my shoulders, shook them, and hugged me. “What are you doing all the way back here? Come on, we have to get closer for Bob Dylan!”
The people around me all looked different, but something seemed familiar and friendly about this new guy in his early twenties. He turned toward the stage to push into the crowd, but our admission wristbands got caught together and pulled him back. We both cursed to ourselves and tried to work out the tangle. He lost patience and ripped himself free. I folded the ripped strands underneath those that held as best I could and followed.
My new buddy blocked for me like a fullback as we maneuvered through the crowd and came upon a new group of people in their twenties who welcomed us into their circle like heroes returning from a quest. Here we were tightly packed in with people I had never met before, but that didn’t stop one bigger guy from picking me up and kissing my forehead before spinning me around and setting me down. No phones, only the moment in hand. We were close to the stage now and could see Bob Dylan clearly.
“Damn! I can’t believe how young he looks after all these years!” I yelled out and the group laughed without understanding.
Six beautiful women, all with patterned, flowy dresses and varying sorts of crop tops and slightly different but still kind of similar flowers in their hair, came to hug me and give me cheek kisses. The seventh jumped, wrapped her legs around me, and kissed me squarely. I could feel hair under her arms as I supported her weight before letting her down and smacking her butt. She laughed, took my hand, and pulled me into her in the center of this new group.
We danced fast and then slow. The scene was starting to spin gradually, but I hardly noticed as I continued swaying with my new friend. After two songs like that she pulled a small necklace with an amulet up from under her dress. It was a silver chain affixed to a long green gem with more silver embroidery.
“Wow, that’s beautiful,” I said over the music.
“Hell ya it is!” She unscrewed the top and poured the powdered contents hidden within onto her hand.
She neatly organized the powder into two lines on her fingers without breaking her rhythm as she swayed back and forth. The music picked up as she lifted her hand to her face and cleanly sniffed down her portion. I eyed the fat second line hungrily as she expertly swayed her hands around, playing with me and somehow keeping the precious powder level on her hand. She teased me for a few more beats then gave over her hand.
I ripped it quick. It sank in faster than usual. Something was different about this line. I stopped swaying for a moment to try and understand the change but before I could I was on the floor looking up at her. I laughed and moved to get up but the pain in my chest kept me down. It intensified as my new friends leaned over me, barely cognizant of the situation but slowly seeing that their friend needed help.
Then the convulsions started.
My friends tried to make them stop anyway they thought they could, but it was pointless. They had a better chance of making the music stop and the crowd stand still all around us. From the ground, I reached out my hand to my new friend who had found me farther back in the crowd. My friend’s tears dripped down his denim jacket atop a fractal-patterned shirt. I lay on the ground. I couldn’t talk, couldn’t ask him to explain how he had the exact same outfit and look in his eyes as the old boomer from the day before. The only difference was the darker hair and youthful, unconnected beard. All I could do was reach out and hold my friend’s hand. The last things I saw as my eyes closed were the yellow rims of the sunglasses I now realized were sitting on my face, and the sleeve of the orange-tan baja pullover, worn loosely around my wrist and down my arm onto my torso.
Drool foamed and bubbled from the corners of my mouth. I knew this was it when my sense of smell was overtaken by something different from the odorous bodies around me. It crept in slowly at first, then commanded my full attention as it started to pull me along with it. It was not material but something in between the materials. It was a furnace, burning, a sort of fuel that was not fuel that shimmered in the bodies as they danced and swayed. The smell of the energy needed to propel them forward.
I opened my eyes to a bass drop farther back from the stage where I met Ricky. I was confused and felt different, but the music was the same. Jen was there with me again. I was no longer wearing the orange-tan baja pullover or the yellow sunglasses. I looked down at my hands and recognized the key bump from earlier. It was situated exactly as it had been before, as if Ricky had never bumped into me and spilled it. It was just a very small bit of powder. It was already so neatly piled on the key in my hand. It was so much smaller than the larger lines from earlier. It really was just such a very small bit of powder.
I paused for a moment, but only for a moment, and began raising the powder to my face. Just as I was about to inhale, someone pushed me forward. I turned around angrily to see who it was, but they had already moved off into the crowd.
I turned back around, frustrated, but Jen was not slowed down and followed through with her hit. She collapsed and began convulsing. I called for help, but help was far away and bodies packed us in tightly. The people around us were confused and could do little to help in the narrow window of time. Foam and drool and violence erupted out from her so intensely I could hardly hold her hand one last time. It was only a few seconds before her body stopped moving, leaving only her eyes to look up at me and reveal a bright spark of fear, complete awareness of her situation, and then she was gone.
_______________
I woke up the next morning later than normal and hurting again. I slept through the increasing heat of the summer sun for a few hours before crawling out of the tent. I looked out over the highway to where my friends were likely starting their day. I thought about going back that way, to party one more time on the last day of the festival. I wanted to but couldn’t. I had a singular need to go back into the festival grounds to the place where I lost Jen.
Very few people were milling about the festival grounds. It was still pretty early and last night was a big night, even for that crowd. With few people around I quickly found the mainstage where Bob Dylan had performed.
As I neared the mainstage I could hear the sounds of the night before, but the area looked different, smaller with no one in it. The field was mostly empty with only a few workers picking up trash and a small circle of people closer to the stage. It was a strange looking group. They were all older, maybe in their early seventies, but they were dressed like festival-goers. The seven women wore patterned, flowy dresses and varying sorts of crop tops and slightly different but still kind of similar flowers in their hair. The eight men either had on tie-dye shirts or jean jackets, or both. As I neared, I noticed the older man with the denim jacket atop a fractal-patterned shirt. He was speaking softly.
“We had a great day yesterday. We saw Bob Dylan, of course, but we made our rounds to some of the younger artists like Kendrick and Griz. Oh man, you would have liked Griz! I could just picture you dancing to him. Real upbeat and original, something you’d have liked. Afterwards I was pretty hungry so I took out a second mortgage to buy some chili cheese fries in the park, but it was worth it. I know you always loved those.”
One of the women started softly crying. She looked like an older version of the woman I danced with the night before deeper in the crowd. I looked closer and saw the same green gem on the silver chain hanging around her neck.
“I don’t know who we’re going to see tonight, but I know Ricky will be there with us like he is every year. I know he was with us last night. Dancing and laughing with us, even just standing in line with us. I know you were with us.” Now the man started to cry a little. They were all standing around a small bouquet of flowers beside a pair of yellow-rimmed sunglasses and a neatly folded orange-tan baja pullover.