So Many Roads

I’m staring out the window at the leafless trees on the hills that line I-68, the cool smoke of Isaiah’s menthol occasionally blowing back towards me and tingling my nose. He’s driving with the same charming carelessness he does everything – one hand out the window, holding his cigarette, the other on the wheel. The Allman Brothers’ “Mountain Jam” is blasting from the stereo, shaking the doors of the car. Mitch is lying down in the backseat reading a book by Abbie Hoffman or some other 60s radical, wearing the same T-shirt he always does, the one that says “THINK” in yellow block letters, a relic of his time as a philosophy student, though he dropped out during his senior year when his taste for Nietzsche succumbed to his taste for boxes of wine and painkillers. Now he works at a grocery store back home.

Photo by sacks08[/add_caption_link]

The plan is to take a bus from my brother Tom’s place in Bethesda to New York City for the last night of Phish’s run at Madison Square Garden. After the show, we’ll get on another bus back to Bethesda, sleep for a few hours, and then drive to Charlottesville to catch the last stop of the tour. I’ve been looking forward to this trip all semester; for a weekend, I won’t have to be a 4.0 student, going to classes I don’t care about to learn how to do a job I don’t want, traveling down that Golden Road to Unlimited Regret. I’m graduating a year early, before I even turn 21, so this time next year I’ll be going on interviews for my first job in management information systems. This time last year, I think I was just starting to wipe my own ass.

Outside of Cumberland, an hour and a half from Morgantown, where we started, Mitch has already become enamored with life on the road. “I think I’m gonna travel to festivals and sell egg sandwiches to people.”

“Oh really?” I ask, turning around to look at him.

“Really,” he says back, a bit indignantly. According to him, I get this look when I ask questions that is capable of crushing a person’s dreams, or at least making them feel a little less than adequate. It’s not something I’m proud of.

A few miles later, Isaiah lights a joint, and Mitch sits up and says he wants to do something crazy when we get to New York. I ask if he has anything specific in mind.

“I don’t know,” he says, twirling his hair. “Something involving a boat, a nine iron, ice…and an armed Blackwater guard just for the hell of it.”

“I’m down,” Isaiah says in between smoke rings. I turn the music up.

The rest of our time on the road goes about like this – Mitch spewing an endless stream of non sequiturs, while Isaiah alternates between cigarettes and joints to stay interested in the road, and I shuffle through songs on my iPod, guarding my backpack with my legs, just in case anyone gets any funny ideas.

***

My brother’s apartment complex is on the first exit off of I-495. It’s called The Avalon, named after the island paradise where, according to legend, King Arthur was brought when he was mortally wounded. It has a pool, a three-story parking garage, and a washer and dryer in every unit. Not to mention that it’s a quick 20 minutes (when traffic is light) from the fifth largest shopping mall in these United States. So it’s aptly named.

It’s 8 p.m. when we park the car in the garage and enter the fluorescently lit hallways of the building. They have a smell that’s somewhere in between that of a hospital and a hotel – clean linens with a hint of death. We walk into his apartment without knocking, where he’s sitting in his pink recliner, looking too much like our father, receding hairline and all.

“Greetings, gentlemen,” he says in mock formality. “Did you get it?”

“Yep,” I say, taking the can out of my backpack and the Adderall out of the can (he had asked for it to help with his job as a logistician for a company that makes security systems). I throw the bag of orange capsules onto his coffee table, where it lands next to a copy of Atlas Shrugged that he’s using as a coaster for his Magic Hat, a beautiful marriage of his undying love for capitalism and craft breweries (which could only thrive in a free market). I can remember him advocating the sterilization of people who have been on welfare for more than three generations, but I’m fairly certain he got over his flirtation with eugenics sometime during high school. He offers us our choice of any of the random beers in his refrigerator. Isaiah asks if he has any Natty. He doesn’t.

So we drink and talk and listen to music and switch to rum when we finish all the fancy beer. Isaiah decides to cut a little hole in the padding on the inside of his shoe to slip blunts into, so we won’t have to worry about any particularly strict security guards on our way into the venues. He’s always been resourceful. We used to play in the woods behind his house, swinging from vines, jumping over creeks, climbing up rock faces we probably shouldn’t have been climbing. Any time we came across an obstacle that looked unconquerable, he never failed to find a way over, under, or around it. But I usually stayed back, afraid to scrape my knees. I’m not so worried about scratches anymore, but the fear is still there, the rocks and creeks replaced by the specter of corporate life and all of its dullness.

Once we’re good and drunk Tom starts telling us about one of his roommates, a girl from Texas who’s fluent in Arabic that he’d love to sleep with but can’t because her boyfriend has become his best friend in greater D.C.

“Yea, that’s the only thing stopping you,” I say.

There’s a brief silence before Tom asks Isaiah and me about college life, a wistful sadness in his eyes when he asks the question, like he’s remembering some lost lover stolen from his bed. “Same as it ever was,” I tell him. He misses college – the shitty apartments, the football games, always having a friend to get high with, even the exams. A few times this semester he has come to visit me, and every time seems like a slightly more desperate attempt than the last to latch on to the life he had only a year ago, fueled by nostalgia for the recent past. I’m scared to fight that battle, one that’s made only more terrifying by its seeming inevitability. I try to picture a future where I don’t become like him, but all I can see are monthly reports and Casual Fridays.

Eventually, the conversation devolves into an incoherent political discussion, as it tends to do when people who think they’re smarter than they really are get drunk. It consists mostly of me calling Ayn Rand names and Isaiah saying that “people just don’t think these days, man.” It ends with Mitch pointing out my “off-putting need to always be the smartest person in the room.” I don’t argue with him, and soon, we all pass out.

***

The bus arrives at noon exactly. When we get on, our grade-school instincts instantly resurface, propelling us to the back. Everyone knows that’s where the cool kids sit. Tom and Mitch take up the entire bench seat that’s next to the bathroom. Isaiah and I take the row in front of them, sitting down and putting our headphones in. They all fall asleep before we reach the highway, but I stay awake, staring out the window – something I’ve gotten pretty good at lately. As we pass Baltimore on I-95, I realize I’m listening to a death metal song called “A Moment of Clarity.” The lyrics are about convincing yourself that everything will turn out fine, constructing lies to repeat over and over in your head, so you can avoid whatever it is that’s staring you in the face. Another thing I’ve gotten pretty good at.

I feel a tap on my shoulder. It’s Mitch and he has that look in his eyes that he gets when there’s something weighing heavily on his mind. “If you ever wrote a book, what would it be called?”

“I don’t know, Mitch. I’ve never really thought about it.”

“God, you’re no fun.”

“Well, what would your book be called?” I ask.

“Our Endless Numbered Days,” he says with a touch of dramatic flair, like he’s in a small time Shakespeare production.

“Sounds heavy. What’s it gonna be about?”

“How the hell should I know?”

“Um, because it’s your book. How can you come up with a title before you even know what it’s about, anyway?”

“I don’t know, man. All I know is that if I don’t write it by the time I’m 50, I’m gonna off myself,” he says, putting his headphones back in and casually leaning back in his seat before I can respond. Though he nearly always makes bad decisions, Mitch possesses a firm finality about life that I feel obligated to respect. He lives by his rules – “footloose and fancy-free.”

***

It’s 4:30 when the bus is navigating through a circular turn right before the Lincoln Tunnel, where I have been told that you can see Frank Sinatra’s childhood home on the hillside to the left of the road. I have no idea if this is true, but thinking it is somehow makes entering the city even more exciting for a guy who is still amazed that there are places where people have things to do besides getting drunk in the woods and going to the midnight buffet at Eat’n’Park. So I choose to believe it.

We pass under the Hudson River and come up in Manhattan where the bus lets us off at Penn Station, on the same block as Madison Square Garden. We stand on the sidewalk for a moment, ogling the surrounding commotion, and don’t start moving until we realize that all of the people walking by are motherfucking us under their breath. So we wander around aimlessly for a few minutes, not wanting to stray far from the venue, worried we won’t be able to find our way back. Isaiah points out that the doors won’t open for two hours and that we have nothing to do. Mitch is disappointed we haven’t run into any Blackwater guards, but he cheers up when Tom suggests we locate a liquor store. We find one around the corner, and while Tom is inside, Mitch, Isaiah, and I go into a 7-11 and buy six 20 ounce bottles of pop to dump out and replace with liquor.

Which is why I am now in a Penn Station restroom being threatened by a crazy man wearing a suit. “You know I really like you kid, so you better not bad mouth me or I’ll punch you right in the teeth!” He keeps repeating this or some variation of it over and over, with one hand firmly gripped onto my elbow and the other cradling a brown leather bag that’s hanging from his shoulder.

“Uh, I wouldn’t do that…I mean…I like you, too…” Mitch is standing next to me wearing his standard confused expression, Tom is in one of the stalls mixing drinks, and Isaiah disappeared when a cop with a dog came in to take a leak. The man stops threatening me and pulls out a notebook from his bag that is full of what look like technical drawings of toilets, all of which I complement him on. When Tom comes out of the stall to share bewildered looks with Mitch, the man suddenly hands me a piece of paper that he says is his résumé, tells me he likes me once more, and storms out of the restroom. This is when I finally realize what he was up to – he was networking, and every good business student knows networking is the key to success. With any luck, one day I’ll be ambitious enough to sell myself to strangers in train station restrooms, too.

Once we’re back out on the street, I realize I threw the man’s résumé away without even looking at it. I feel like I owe the guy an apology.

We loiter on the steps outside of MSG, taking bigger and bigger swigs of rum and root beer to numb our skin as the sun disappears behind the skyscrapers. Fans begin to trickle into the plaza outside of the arena, using it like they would a parking lot at a summer show. By 7:00 the sidewalks are filled with dreadlocks and hemp sweaters, the pungent odor of tobacco and patchouli creeping in to mask all of the other city smells. We leave the steps to mingle with the crowd and check out what the wooks are hocking for gas money. They’re the professional concertgoers who I secretly envy and admire for their ability to shun the world. I love to fantasize about dropping out and joining them, travelling from city to city, selling grilled cheese and pipes in parking lots. Then, my only worries would be about the amount gas in our van and how I was getting into the show. Of course, it will never be more than a fantasy. I have a limited capacity for uncertainty – constantly fearing the consequences of following the road less traveled. I need to know where I’m going and how I’m going to get there. Plus, I like showers and soft toilet paper too much to live in a van.

Most of the crowd is young, but I spot some older guys who have probably been with the band since they were playing clubs in the 80s and a few that look old enough to have attended the Acid Tests. Small groups of preppy New Englanders dressed like they’ve been plucked out of a Land’s End catalog pockmark the bustling herd of neo-hippies; skeletal figures in baggy jeans and hoodies slither through the mass of bodies, dangling cigarette boxes from their wastes and announcing their wares barely loud enough to be heard by those listening for it. Everyone just floats along, greeting whoever they happen to bump into like old friends. A Land’s End model asks me how old I was in 1994 – the first year Phish played MSG. When I tell him I was four he smiles, gives me a high five, and says that I missed a hell of a tour while I was busy learning my ABCs. As we were slapping hands, Tom sold an extra ticket to a tie-dyed girl from Colorado. They are now best friends.

Everyone here is exactly where they want to be. Life in the lot makes sense.

The doors are open, so we enter, giddy as Japanese schoolgirls, and follow the flock of people ahead of us up the escalators to the arena. Our seats are in the first level up from the floor and perfectly centered with the stage. At a quarter after eight the house lights go down and the band walks out. The audience’s thrilled shouts are drowned out by the first chords of the set erupting from the stage and reverberating off the rounded arena ceiling, generating a thunderous echo. The rainbow colors of the stage lights spiral around and around, following the music wherever it goes, everyone is moving, lost inside themselves, feeling the torrent of sound resonate in their guts, and we’re no different. Isaiah and I bob our heads back and forth, Tom pounds on phantom drums, and Mitch bounces around like a newborn elf. I imagine what it must feel like to be on stage, lost in the performance, no longer thinking about what notes to play, just letting them flow through me like water through a hose. To direct the movement of 20,000 people with the slightest shift of my fingers. To have such control over anything. I hear people throw around the phrase “surrender to the music” to describe what happens to both audience and performer, but it’s not “surrendering to the music.” It’s more like surrendering to the air – taking in everything about the show, the scents, the people, and forgetting about the world outside the doors, because for these three hours, it simply doesn’t matter.

During the set break, Isaiah lights one of his shoe blunts and hands it to me, but I don’t hit it, passing it on to Mitch instead. Mixed with the liquor, it would only make me tired. I sit and let the perfect combination of beer, cigarettes, piss, weed, and sweat clog my nose. I love that smell. I know I won’t find it in an office.

Fifteen minutes later the lights go down for a second time, and the music blasts off into cosmic territory, twisting and turning like a DayGlo snake, as though it’s coming from one instrument, not four separate musicians with four separate minds. Isaiah taps me on the shoulder and points to his left. The Land’s End model is running shirtless up and down the steps yelling something. I watch his lips for awhile to figure out what he’s shouting – “The funk is too deep! I can’t stop!”

The funk is just right. I could probably stop if I wanted to, but I don’t think I will.

***

We’re back on I-95, this time heading south to Charlottesville from Bethesda. A record breaking blizzard is battering the entire Mid-Atlantic and has turned the road solid white. The swirling snowflakes outside make the car feel like a cozy country cabin with wheels. Tom is driving, Isaiah is riding shotgun, and I’m squeezed in the backseat with Mitch, our knees against the front seats. He’s got a zinger waiting for me.

“Hey, what did the Phish fans say when they ran out of drugs?”

“’Man, this music sucks.’”

“Aw, how’d you know that?”

“It’s an old joke, Mitch – you can use it with any band. And I find it mildly offensive.”

“Gimme a break. You’re the one with an army of controlled substances in your backpack, Mr. Crabbypants.”

“Yea, well you’re the one who commissioned the army.”

“Don’t sass me.”

Tom looks at us in the rearview mirror, “You two better behave, or else I’ll turn this car around.”

We play nice for the next two hours and make it to Charlottesville safely, despite the weather. The city is home to the University of Virginia, and all of its buildings look old, except for our motel, the Cavalier Inn, which looks like a three-story strip mall. It’s perfect for anyone following the band with money to pay for a room, because the arena is only a few hundred yards away, resting atop a hill like a fortress. We pull into the parking lot where there are dozens of other concertgoers pouring out of cars, including a guy that looks like a slightly chubbier Jerry Garcia, who I swear I’ve seen at every concert I’ve been to since my freshman year of high school. We check in, giving a few knowing nods and smiles to fellow travelers in the lobby. On the way to our room, we see a man playing a three-foot didgeridoo and walking around the motel’s perimeter, past every door, ignoring everyone around him. His bearded face is tranquil, almost corpse-like in its lack of expression. “Some life,” Tom says when the man passes us.

We hang out in the room for awhile, and at 7:00 Mitch takes the acid from my stash can. He unwraps the foil from the sheet of stiff red paper, tears off two hits, and hands the rest to me. I know from previous experiences that acid is everything my 6th grade health teacher warned me about. It makes the absurd seem normal and the normal seem absurd. It makes life feel like a dream and nightmares reality. Basically, it’s exactly the thing to bring to a 15,000 person dance party.

Nevertheless, I hesitate. “I don’t know about that. The last time I tripped I pissed my pants.”

“I would hate to piss my pants while I was tripping,” Isaiah says, stuffing blunts into his shoe, “I’d probably drown.”

“You can’t be the only one not tripping. C’mon, man, do one,” Mitch pleads.

I do one.

Tom divides the molly into four separate piles, so the powder looks like miniature versions of the mounds of plowed snow out in the parking lot. He and Mitch brush their piles off the desk and into their hands, then toss them down their throats. Before Isaiah goes for his, he asks Mitch to describe its effects.

“Like a panda pooped rainbows in your brain. Pure happiness. And the comedown feels like gently descending onto a cloud.” This is good enough for Isaiah.

“I think I’ve got all the enhancement I need,” I say.

“God, you’re no fun!”

It has a bitter tang like soap or medicine. This can’t be the taste of happiness.

We grab out tickets and walk the short distance to the venue. It’s late, so only a few stragglers and the people who are still walking around with one finger in the air, desperate to find someone with an extra ticket, are left in the parking lot. Once inside, we take our seats and the set starts shortly thereafter. I find it hard to immerse myself in the music while I’m waiting for the drugs to kick in, anticipating the coming attack on my sanity. They finally take hold at intermission, and I watch the hairs on my arm twist and turn and climb up my wrist like vines. Every muscle in my body tightens and aches as if I have the flu while we sit, silently watching the rest of the crowd mill around, their faces red and damp from dancing. The air is thick with the stench of sweaty bodies and sticks to me like hot glue. A cloud of smoke hangs from the rafters at the top of the arena, growing larger with every suffocating puff of tobacco and marijuana.

The band comes back out and I begin to notice waves of heat rolling through me. When the music begins, I notice Isaiah glaring at the nearly empty water bottle in his hand, watching its vibrating contents with intense fascination. His eyes are open wider than I’d like them to be, and his nostrils are flaring up into fleshy domes. I decide to leave him alone for now and watch the concert. My brother and Mitch seem to be enjoying themselves, although it looks like Mitch is imitating Tom, sitting when he sits and standing when he stands.

A few songs pass, and Isaiah sits down, stone-faced, watching the ass of the guy in front of him. I ask if he’s alright, but he just tells me to watch the concert. The music has gone, though. It’s been reduced to atonal beeping and clicking, like they’re playing in Morse code – dot dot dash dash. All around me people are writhing around like the possessed horde of some ancient death cult.

My spine is burning.

“Isaiah, we should go get some water,” I yell over the din, trying to appear calm. He nods and starts up the steps. I follow him, clinging to the railing the whole way up. The girl working at the concession stand tells us that there’s no more water, making a face that’s supposed to express sympathy, but actually makes her look like a troll, her features contorted into a shapeless blob. We decide to go to the restroom and just drink from the sinks. As we’re catching water in our hands, Isaiah stops, watching himself in the mirror, like he doesn’t recognize the face looking back at him. “I’m sorry,” he says.

“For what?”

“For freaking out.”

“I’m kinda freaking out, too, so don’t worry about it,” I say, painfully aware of my own tongue. We leave and stand at the top of steps for the rest of the show, scared to reenter the dark heat of the arena. After the encore, Tom and Mitch find us. “What happened to you guys?” Mitch asks, sounding mildly concerned.

“I was getting like…brain-damage hot in there,” I say, struggling through the throng of people pushing towards the exit. Outside, the cold and the icy pavement make it hard for my wobbly legs to support the rest of my body. We pass the nitrous vendors and their balloon-sucking customers who roam around like the living dead, barely conscious. Isaiah won’t stop apologizing, but no one knows what he’s talking about.

When we get back to the room we fall onto the beds, Mitch and Tom on one, Isaiah and I on the other. Mitch turns the TV on, and Isaiah rolls over on his side, curling up into a ball. Tom manages to fall asleep. I can hear him snoring. I close my eyes, exhausted, wishing someone would sing me to sleep. The last four hours feel like a reflection of my entire life – recognizing the smart choice but choosing the opposite, because it’s what I think is expected. I knew the drugs would only be an obstruction, something to overcome, not enjoy. Just as I know that if I continue refusing to take control, sabotaging myself at every opportunity, I’ll have to overcome my own livelihood to enjoy anything.

As I watch the backs of my eyelids, a bizarre, yet comforting, droning enters the room, slowly getting louder. When it sounds like it’s on top of me, shaking the bed, I open my eyes to see the silhouette of the man with his didgeridoo walking by the window. He’s playing the same note that he was before the show and traveling the same path. It occurs to me that we’re the same, following a rigid course, never wavering from the plan, no matter how ill-conceived it is. The sound fades away faster than it arrived, disappearing behind the clamor of drunken after-parties that seem to be taking place in every room but ours. I lay there and wait for him to return.

***

I’m surprised to wake up on my stomach with my face between my hands, because it means I must have fallen asleep. Everyone else is already up and throwing things into duffle bags.

“It’s too early,” I groan.

“No,” Mitch says, standing at the window and looking through two blinds that he’s parting with his fingers, “I think the clocks are just running late.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“I don’t know, man. I think I heard it in a song. Just get up, we’re leaving.”

No one talks during the drive back to Bethesda. The left lane is unusable, the plows having had nowhere else to push the snow, and the closer we get to Tom’s place, the worse the road gets. When we reach his building I don’t go back into the hallways that smell like death, instead saying goodbye on the frozen roof of the parking garage. Tomorrow he will wake up at 7 a.m. to go to work, and I will wake up at 8 a.m. to return to the classes that every day bring me one step closer to a life too much like his. We will both wonder why.

I drive back to Morgantown. Isaiah stares out the window with hollow Syd Barrett eyes. Mitch is abnormally quiet in the back. Three days ago I expected to be driving back to school invigorated and overflowing with excitement for Phish’s summer tour even though it’s six months away. Yet here I am, fighting a horrifying emptiness that makes the snow bank on the side of the road seem like a good place to park the car. If you get confused, listen to the music play, says a gentle voice from the car’s speakers, though I’m not sure that’s enough anymore. Even so, I listen. The road clears up, but the sky remains dark and faded.

***

Eric Cipriani

Eric Cipriani is an undergraduate at West Virginia University where he no longer studies management information systems. When he’s not eating bagels or downloading music, he occasionally writes, which he hopes to one day get paid for.