PHISH TALES PART 3

A moment later, the question of his profit arose in Troy’s mind. He had thirty of the sixty bucks that Mark expected, fifteen wraps and he was now getting “on” and extremely hungry again. “Fuck it!” he thought, “gotta eat” and stopped at a vendor to order two more slices of pizza and a soda.
Twenty bucks now.
The acid began to take effect, and Troy simply walked back and forth with across the lot with the bag hanging from his wrist. People everywhere were gathered and talking and he joined them in groups here and there enjoying tales of other shows and such. He amused himself by watching a group of pink robed Hare Krishna’s handing out pamphlets for a little while. He was starting to relax, he could feel the drug beginning to take its full effect by the time the show let out a few hours later. It had taken its time, but was quickly gaining in intensity.
Somewhere around eleven thirty he stood in a daze near Russo’s stand, who had blown him off completely as he had been warned. A group of dreadlocked tour kids hung around the front of the stand which he now noticed was only a row toward the arena from the Hare Krishna’s Winnebago. They were getting rowdy, and for some reason Troy had the feeling this night of partying was going to be far different from the others.
Suddenly out of the dark, approached Mark. He had not seen him all night. He immediately gave him a hug.
“Hey , kid. Been looking all over for you! Thought you got into the show! Did you?”
“Naah.. I’m tripping man.”
Mark looked concerned and said “you shouldn’t do that shit.”
Troy was surprised at the response.
“Did you get the wraps sold?”
He tugged at the bag with the remaining wraps Troy had hanging from his wrist. Taking the bag, he opened it and peeked inside, then began to count them. Troy felt like a little kid being caught stealing from the cookie jar.
“Yeah, man I had a hard time selling them.” He proceeded to hand over the twenty bucks he had to the furry figures outstretched paw.
“Aww man, we needed to make FIFTY!”
Surprisingly he did not look angry, just disappointed. Troy was embarrassed and turned bright red. Mark then surprised him and gave him a compassionate hug.
“That’s ok.” He said as almost an aside. He had the equivalent to fifty in his hand.
“We can’t take you any further, kid I’m sorry. I’m sure you’ll find a ride.” He then gave Troy one last long hug of goodbye and left off toward the van saying “I’ll see you at the next show! Get a ride!”
Getting a ride turned out to be as hard as it had been in Camden, and he was a bit more panicked due to the acid taking hold of his thought. Car systems blared as they lined up in rows moving five miles an hour to exit the dirt parking lot. Their headlights confused and blinded him as he walked around thumb outstretched toward the gate. He even asked one of the Hare Krishna’s for a ride. “No, sorry” he had said and simply closed the door of the camper.
After this, he decided to go back to his Camden plan, get off lot first, and then thumb it. He had no more turned to walk this direction when the passenger door of a Saab flew open and nearly hit him. An incredibly cute brown haired girl leaned over the passenger seat from the drivers’ and asked “Hey, you need a ride to camp?”
This girl was smoking hot. He hopped in the car and shut the door, remembering how long it had been since he had gotten laid. Wow, what a break.
“I’m Liz,” she introduced herself, shaking his hand with a delicate pause. “I saw you a ways back and figured you were headed for camp. I’m glad you decided to come with me.”
“Me too.”
They crossed the ten foot high gated entrance boundary and he saw directly across the road something he had missed on the way in. It was a sign for a campground. What a break. The headlights and taillights of the cars in front of them seemed to swell and sway, open and close in their stop and go traffic. It was a light show to his acid puddle eyes. The stars began to connect in webs, what few he could see through the windshield and he noticed he had a hard on. The girl drove them across the road directly into a hundred car line for the gates of the campground. They rounded the right handed curve in the road, and Troy saw what appeared to be a pay booth with a guard issuing passes to enter.
As they approached the booth, Troy’s hopes were dashed of getting any action with this girl. She spoke up.
“I don’t know if you are here with somebody else or what, but if you are in the car, they are going to make me pay for both. So if you are here with others, I guess you should get out and walk. “
Two things entered his mind. He had no money with which to hunt this fresh game, and he did have to get in. He immediately made up his mind.
“Ok, thanks!” he said and practically leapt from the passenger side and walked to the right of the line cars. The sound of hundreds of drums beating in mixing rhythm filled the air from what seemed to be a short expanse of woods ahead. His heart began to beat rapidly as the air filled with swirling masses of color brought on by the increasing loudness of the drums.
He began to run for the woods, running free toward sound the size of the concert that night itself. He saw dozens of blazing bonfires like the eyes of giant spirits staring back him through the dense shrubbery. He ran faster and faster, and began yelling at the top of his lungs, ignoring the bushes and tree limbs scratching at him. He just kept echoing the awesome sound of the dancers cries all over the hill of bonfires toward which he sped. The cries were varied; many and it all seemed so ecstatic, so wild. Troy had been transported in time to some sort of surreal tribe of gypsies all gathered together in fire and drum, smoke and spirit, dance and shouts, singing and celebrating the glory of the twisting spiral stars and the full moon hanging blood red and immense low on the horizon of the hill.
He passed through the forest and there they were, campfires stretching off into the distance up a series of hills that seemed to amount to a mountain as far as his eye could see.
A man seated by the fire nearest to the thicket from which he emerged must have heard him coming and appreciated his spirit. He stood now, and beating his chest began to scream at the top of his lungs.
“WOOOOOOOOOOYEEE!!!WoooHoooo!”
Troy broke to a slow trot and was filled with adrenaline. His trip had begun its peak. The throbbing of the drumbeat was an endless series off bass beats and loops, opposing rhythms and answers from various sites. Suddenly the chemicals coursing his veins seemed no more than the natural state. The skyline was a horizon of conical flaming bonfires dotting his upward climb like the stars that seemed to circle and dance around the bloody lunar splotch in a pastel sky.
Ahead and above, there seemed to be a central point to all of this wonderful madness. It glowed with wisdom, with ancient knowledge that these ways had survived through our modern time to now, that they held power and meaning beyond what centuries of scholars could ever describe. We were the beat, the rhythm of the universe ever so small and receiving the wisdom of the gods in our subconscious ancestral genes. These nights brought forth that raw power.
Troy walked on up the hill in a daze. Finally he saw the center of the organized chaos. It was a band equipment truck from which had come these dozens of instruments. Fifty strong stood in a circle behind the truck, talking in their rhythmic pounding. Troy stood for what seemed hours, his heart pounding with them when it intensified, lulling into still Zen quietness as they echoed talking round the circle. It seemed often the children in the group were the ones to send forth a new rhythm. In their innocence they would play something original, something somehow missing from the dozens of beats already going on, and a wave would pass through all of us as the new rhythm spread and was interpreted.
Over the next few hours, Troy wandered from sleepy campfire to sleepy campfire when the sky cracked open and began to turn pink. He started toward the east, the top of this hill built on hill campground. For ten minutes he climbed past endless sights, until finally he reached the plateau that was the highest point.
There was literally no pun in this as he realized all around him was a constant whoosh. In the corner of the hill was a tent with lights and strobes, dancer gathered around obviously all on “e”. The nitrous tanks were everywhere, and all that could be heard over the music was a loud “whooshing” as if some hundred foot tire was going flat all over the campground. Dozens of balloons were in sight in the hands of partiers. Coolers of beer were strewn everywhere, and there were dozens of loaded guys and girls. This was definitely the high point of the camp.
Troy walked to the peak of the hill, and watched the sky. To his hallucinating eyes it was a shower of comets among interconnected spider webs amongst the vanishing stars. The dancers and he were being eaten by the god that was the sun, revealing the redness it had given the moon in its nighttime law laying gravitational light source. The redness seemed like a sea of spilled ink creeping down through crazy fingers, splintered sunlight renewing and creating all of them on that high plane in its life giving light.
It seemed to Troy he could hear in his head the somber tune of a flute calling him to descend the mountainous height. He did so, finding that the embankment on the other side was hundreds more campers all sleeping in their tents now along its gradual grade.
He reached the bottom of the hill and began to feel somewhat panicked. The high did not seem to be relenting, and his eyes were pasted open to swimming colors and abnormal thoughts of which he could not make sense, and yet was no longer numb enough to escape the pain of his hemorrhaging brain.
He remembered his Buddhist studies, and now concerned for the state he was in decided for the betterment of his panic to sit and still himself at the pond by the road which led out of this camp. An inner eye relaxed to seeing the drama realizing, yet remaining separate from it all. His inner voice began the experience.
“From out of the looming dream of the night before I remembered the spiral darkness of stars coming through my thought. You are, all of you, inside what could not be but was now part of everything but my own thought. The thought of this blanketed open the sky of a pond whose reflected interior had turned from ripples and fish to the skyline of New York City now in ruins over the ages as a European city that had reacted favorably only to decay.”
“This was a wavelength, a band of rotted evolution. The people were there still and the same wavelength from which we had always emanated. I died in my mind and hoped the next second be reborn knowing it was me. Me who had not just created the moment, created it from the minds of the passersby behind me. They were honking the horn at my fresh adolescent scream knowing that I would need a ride off of the lot. As yet I had no way to go there. I seemed to think from other peoples minds. Minds that probably had not been transported with me into this strange world. I was on a small dirt path in the middle of a herd of animals who called myself human.”
“The car stopped, not the one I had been driving the day next door to the minutes in the city in the pond , but another. The minute they stopped I had stopped turning my head to look at them for fear of seeming sinister. I was good and alone in this world and I had no immediate control over my desires. I realized that a few hours had passed during which they could no longer be the same people, strange people who seemed to know me like the family we were as they laughed.”
“They had suddenly disappeared several times into the distance in my sight via the car that never was there but just the dirt road.”
"I need a ride," I thought.

“It was the ride from one temple I remembered, this ride. The Hare Krishna’s in my mind felt naked in their chemical absence yet had some strange need. They were here too. This was thirst and hunger, no maybe the need to defecate then pee all over the warm substance that jellylike slid over my body. It was like a warm egg yolk erupted, its goo all over me lulling me into a lapse of sight that bolted me upright with a flash of pure white light.”
“I was only internalizing to spring up from the lotus I had been born into the moment I had sat down in the night before.”
The pond released Troy, and he sensed a car passing him on the road. His tired mind wondered nonsensically if it were the same people he had seen leave his sight a few observations ago. He realized he was almost down now from the drug, and that he would need sleep.
Across from him on the dirt road leading alongside the pond a kid of High School age came practically skipping toward him. He stopped to pick a flower, and then approached Troy.
“Do you need a ride?” he asked.
“Yeah, I do.” Troy said in a very tired drone.
“I’m Chris…Follow me!” the kid smiled the brightest of Cheshire grins and began literally this time skipping off in front of him. They began to make their way up the hill Troy now saw was clearing almost entirely of campers. He must have blacked out at the pond. The thought of death crossed his mind, and he felt weak again.
The girl Chris was talking to nearby and nearly shoving the flower at turned to a guy in the group who pointed directly at him. They both nodded their heads, and Troy realized Chris was asking for him to get a ride. He approached him and said “What did you ask them?”
“For a ride for you. I told them I have one and they said no. Selfish pricks.”
“The audacity of his comment even being directed toward the betterment of his situation struck Troy numb. There was something about Chris though that was a glowing reminder to him of how naively reliant on a higher force to intervene he had been in Camden, how in blind faith it somehow worked.
Sure enough, the next couple they came on said they were headed to Deer Creek in Indiana, where they would camp out for the entire week of shows. They took Troy on board into their pickup truck. Never was he so relieved in his life. What a night! He waved to Chris as he skipped off into the distance, leaving this new girl friend of Troy’s with the flower. Seated between the homely looking brown haired girl and her volunteer fireman husband, he soon succumbed to his exhaustion. He was vaguely aware that the girl found him attractive and wished to talk to him on the trip; however he passed out for almost the entire trip anyhow.
The following week of shows were being held at Deer Creek Music Center in Noblesville, Indiana. Deer creek was a large property which included acres of land to camp on. The property was in the middle of farm country, and surrounded on all sides by cornfields.
As they arrived, Troy woke to two strange faces and a pangs of hunger the likes of which he could not remember. The girl on his right was shaking him to waking very lightly, and announced to him that they had arrived.
“Your welcome to hang out and have lunch with us, there is plenty of food.”
It was just the news he had needed. The campground they were pulling into was huge, even larger he thought than the one from which they had just come. The guard at the gates told him they had better dig into get a spot, as they were expecting about four thousand plus to be camping here this week.
Josh, the guy driving the truck looked annoyed at Troy’s presence. Josh said to him in an almost mockingly backwoods drawl “don’t ya’ll mind ma’ wife now, y’hear. She be jibing about dis and that awl the goddamn fool time.”
They were country folk, for sure. Country folk Troy decided to hang onto for all they were worth on getting him a new spot in this campground.
They set up tents with what seemed to be a group of friends they had planned to meet. Troy could never be sure, though. Amongst the new campers he was meeting while having a ham and turkey sandwiches with fresh lettuce and chips was a kind of plain girl with long brown hair who seemed to be all about having Troy in her tent.
“Please, share my tent with me, I will be here every night, I have got room for ten in that thang.”
She seemed to be trying to flirt with him at the same time, and he couldn’t help but laugh. Room for ten, huh? Obviously Indiana folk also, and damned kindly they were. Here in a place where they left daylight savings alone for the cows.
Troy learned that there would be two days of Phish Lesh and Bob Dylan before Phish arrived on the scene to play three more shows. It was going to be almost a full week there.
In the distance a camper’s stereo blasted music “Lately it occurs to me, what a long strange trip it’s been...” their neighbors began shouting and a set of bottle rockets went screaming into the sky, banging to a halt in the midday sun.
Troy had gone for a walk into the nearby woods to explore after lunch. He intended to gather some firewood for the night to prove his usefulness to his fellow campers. It was a peaceful walk about the forest, and he found on the other side lay a pond where a fishing hippy told him you could fish if you had bought a pass to. He started on his way back with an armful of kindling roughly an hour later.
He was met on the way out on a trail that ran beside the woods. A security officer asked him if he knew he was trespassing. He asked what number camp he was on. Troy was forced to leave the kindling and climb on board the golf cart beside the man. He drove them to the campsite where Troy’s friends had been. There he asked a blank faced crowd if he indeed was camping there. No one amongst them was willing to give him the information, Troy guessed fearing he done something really illegal. The security guard informed Troy he would have to escort him off of the grounds. He drove him to the front gates. There he told him that he would have to leave him, and not to be caught in the woods again.
Another guard at the gates walked to Troy and told him there was nothing stopping him from walking back onto the grounds. What a senseless ride! He had been thrown out of the grounds to be told that he could now walk back into them. When he reached the truck where Josh and his wife were, he found them packing to move the truck down to shakedown for the show. They had tickets, however were going to tailgate and try to sell some sodas beforehand.
Moments later Troy was seated on the back of the truck Indian style, watching the concertgoers pass by. He stayed there in silent meditation until the gates were about to open. His fellow campers asked him if he could watch their truck while they were in the show. He said he could, and they were off, leaving him seated on the tailgate.
A girl dressed in full fairy costume came skipping down the mile long trail that was shakedown toward him. She stopped by Troy, and stopped to give him a kiss, share some of the glitter that covered her whole body. She was cute, and Troy did not resist. She leaned over to him and kissed his cheek, as she did so pulling the wand from the bubble jar hat was hanging from her neck. But rather than blowing bubbles, she put the wet stick on his forehead, leaving several dribbles of liquid there before winking at him and floating away.
An hour later it was clear that he had been acid dropped by the fairy. The shouts of his neighbors selling their beer began to echo in the hollow of his mind. “Icy cold Sammy Smiths! Icy cold New Castle!!” It was as if suddenly there were five of him. The inner space of his head began to swim as he lost his equilibrium.
He wandered around the campground and found that shakedown here wound through several dirt paths. It was more like a town carnival, with hundreds of actual stores represented. He was profoundly happy and at peace with the next few hours just exploring the little community of shops. He stopped here and there to meet the owners, talk to other campers. He saw Chris doing the same all over the camp. Each time he passed by, Chris seemed to have something new on... a bag, stickers, a necklace. As he wandered past with an airy _expression on his face, he flashed a peace sign with one hand. The next time he passed he was holding a five inch long nugget of marijuana asking for a ticket trade. Troy had seen several other people working trades with nuggets, pot was as good as gold in this little village.