Ecstasy (3 page)

“Couldn’t you just pat me on the head and say, ‘Poor baby’?”

“Poor baby.”

“What about the head-patting part?”

“Don’t want to mess with my macho image. They giving you hazardous-duty pay for this one?”

“Since I’m kind of working night and day, they’re giving me a four-day weekend for the next two weeks, which is nice. Just
about the only nice thing, if you ask me.”

“Poor baby.”

“Keep it up,” I said, “and you might get lucky on Sunday night, after all.”

As it turned out, Cody got lucky roughly fifteen minutes later, when he used his lunch break to squire me over to his apartment
to pick up his camping gear. It wasn’t until around two that I finally got into my trusty red next-gen Beetle and drove the
ten miles out to Jaspersburg, the one-horse town that has hosted Melting Rock lo these thirteen years. Even a festival basher
like myself knows that it’s the quintessential love-hate relationship: The town fathers love the bags of money that Melting
Rock drops on their doorstep and hate just about everything else about it.

I drove down the main drag in search of the so-called VIP parking lot, which proved to be hell and gone from the campground.
I, therefore, hauled my tent, sleeping bag, laptop, and backpack full of clothes half a mile through scraggly grass, already
starting to sweat and realizing that the only way I was going to get clean was to open my heart to the concept of the communal
outdoor shower.

I stomped around like that for a while before I realized I had no idea where I was going. Eventually, a wiry young man walked
by toting a load twice as big as mine, and I yelled for him to stop. He did, and when he turned around, I noticed he had a
ring in his nose—not a wee one through the side of one nostril but a honking doughnut of a thing right through the middle,
like a prize bull.

“Uh, excuse me,” I said. “Could you tell me how to get to the campground?”

“Sure, sister. Which one?”

“Er… The main one, I guess.”

“Main? You sure?”

I dug a piece of paper out of my pocket. “Yeah,” I said. “I’m supposed to go to the main campground.”

He whistled at me, and probably not because I was a vision of loveliness. “Hey, you’re
lucky,
” he said. “Slots in Main almost never open up.” He gave me an assessing look. “Hey…are you, you know, here by yourself?”

“Unfortunately.”

“Cool,” he said. “How about I crash with you?”

“Excuse me?”

“You know, can I crash in your tent? We’d have a
blast.
I got a ton of buds coming, and they’re bringing some really sweet—”

“Er…I’m afraid not. I’m kind of, um, here on business.”

“Yeah? Whatcha sellin’? You got E? ’Shrooms? What?” His eyes narrowed. “Listen, I don’t do Oxy—”

“Oh, er… nothing like that.” He looked rather crestfallen. “So could you maybe tell me how to get to the main campground?”

“Yeah, okay.” He walked ahead for a few paces and stopped. “Like …you really don’t want me to crash with you? You sure?”

“As sure,” I said, “as I’ve ever been of anything in my life.”

M
Y NEW FRIEND
was nothing if not tenacious; he repeated the question at least half a dozen times before we finally got to the campground.
At one point I tried telling him that I couldn’t bunk with him because I had a boyfriend, but this did no good whatsoever;
he just mumbled, “But, come on, this is Melting Rock…” and proceeded to tell me I was one freaky chick.

I didn’t contradict him.

His name, as it turned out, was Doug—a rather conventional moniker for a guy with a pacifier through his proboscis, if you
ask me. And though I tried to shake him once I figured out where I was supposed to be headed, in the end I was just as glad
he stuck around;
somebody
had to get the tent to stand up on its own, you see, and that somebody wasn’t going to be me.

By four o’clock I was settled in my nylon rathole and beginning to contemplate the awful truth, which was that I was going
to be calling this place home for the next hundred or so hours. In a vain attempt to cheer myself up, I went in search of
sustenance. You’d think that a place as hippie-dippy as this would be all about macrobiotic tabouli, but a lot of the vendors
who come to Melting Rock are the same ones who hit the county fair circuit. And to add insult to atherosclerosis, the stuff
is more overpriced than movie theater popcorn. I settled on a pizza slice dotted with a few pathetic mushrooms and a small
diet Coke. Although I was plenty thirsty, I was determined to keep my Porta-John trips to a minimum. It cost me five bucks.

Eventually, I couldn’t avoid work anymore; I had to file something pretty soon or Marilyn was going to give me a cellular
shellacking. Sondra and I had worked out a tentative story budget that had me doing mainbars that would jump off page one
on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Monday (there’s no Sunday paper), plus a couple of daily sidebars on whatever I happened
to dig up.

That didn’t sound so bad… but neither was it the whole story. Chester, who had recently discovered that there’s this nifty
gizmo called “the Internet,” had decided that nothing would be cooler than having dispatches from the festival posted on the
Monitor
’s spanking-new Web site six times a day. This meant that I had to come up with six story ideas a day (mercifully, only three
that first night)—which, in turn, meant that I was what we professional journalists call
desperate.

I decided the first Web piece might as well be on something I was already acquainted with, so I did a little eight-hundred-word
story on the vendors. This turned out to be a damn good idea, since it got me a complimentary funnel cake as well as a bag
of curly fries and a caramel apple, the latter of which I stashed away for a future moment of emotional desperation.

Once I finished the piece, I figured I might as well file it. I, therefore, went in search of the so-called “media tent,”
which I assumed was going to be a pole with a phone line stapled to it. It proved to be an actual army-style green canvas
tent containing a cable modem on a folding table and two strapping young fellows checking press passes to make sure nobody
else tried to sneak in.

One down. A feature and a sidebar to go before I sleep. But what to cover?

I decided a little aimless wandering was in order. So I strolled from the media tent, past one of the minor concert stages,
and toward the much-ballyhooed main campsite; then I looped around to where the Jaspersburg Fairgrounds ended in an abrupt
(if climbable) two-story drop to a decent-size creek. I peered down the slope and was greeted by the sight of several dozen
human beings engaged in some very enthusiastic skinny-dipping. Then I headed toward the epicenter of the revelry, a pancake-flat
space known as the Infield. It was barely a few hours into the first day of the festival and already the place was packed
with undulating youth. The Infield stage was set off to one side of the oval of trampled grass; on the other was the geological
freak-out that gave the festival its name.

The Melting Rock is maybe fifteen feet tall and looks like a blackish-grayish wedding cake that’s been left out in the sun
too long. It has four tiers, which (in kind of a Mesozoic version of
American Bandstand
) a few of the aforementioned undulators were using as a perch to boogie and watch the musicians howling from the other side
of the field.

One of the fans—a guy of about thirty with a bushy beard and an equally bushy ponytail—was wearing a homemade T-shirt that
said
ASK ME ABOUT THE ROCK
. I did. He turned out to be a Benson University geology professor, and once he filled me in on the origins and composition
of the thing, I figured I had a sidebar on my hands.

That was all well and good—but I still had the next day’s mainbar hanging over my head. I decided my next mission was to track
down someone in charge, if such a person existed. I managed to grab a girl in a tie-dyed T-shirt with the Melting Rock logo
on the front and STAFF on the back, and she told me I had to talk to some guy named Joe. As it turned out, I had to talk to
some
woman
named
Jo
—a person so womanly, in fact, that she had one fat baby in a sling on her hip and another one threatening to pop right out
of her midsection.

Jo—short for Joelle—had been in charge of Melting Rock since I’d been in junior high. I interviewed her about how the festival
had changed over the years, yadda-yadda, and at one point she let it slip that she was in a “committed relationship” with
the drummer for Stumpy the Salamander, the roots-rock band that was the festival’s headliner.

Jo proved to be a veritable gold mine of story ideas; after sitting on a tree stump with her for half an hour, I found my
budget was filled to bursting. There was one about a couple who’d met at the festival two years before and were getting hitched
that weekend; the guy who’d had the festival’s ever-changing logo tattooed somewhere on his corpus every year since it started;
the bunch of friends from Jaspersburg High who’d been coming to Melting Rock together practically since they were old enough
to walk—et cetera, et cetera.

I didn’t have a strong feeling about which story to hit first, so when Jo told me that the high-school kids always had a picnic
by the rock on the first night of the festival, I figured I’d check it out. And there they were, eight teenagers decked out
in the Melting Rock uniform of grubby T-shirts and baggy shorts (for the boys) and flowery tank tops and foofy skirts (for
the girls).

They seemed to be having a hell of a good time, kicking back on blankets, smoking cigarettes, and munching on a combination
of homemade snacks and vendor food. Normally, I would just have walked up to them brandishing a notebook, but something made
me hang back and watch them for a minute. Maybe these kids were a breed apart from the mainstream, I decided after a while,
but adolescent group dynamics were universal; this crowd definitely had a caste system.

Maybe because (like most of my friends) I’m a refugee from the high-school unpopularity wars, I’m often acutely aware of who
sits where on the food chain. At the top of this one was a pretty, round-faced brunette with glitter on her cheeks and a clove
cigarette between two fingers. She wore her hair loose, with a tiny blue flower stuck over one ear; the hand that wasn’t holding
the butt had a ring on each digit, including the thumb. She sat in the center of the ragged circle like she was holding court,
barely paying attention to the guy who had an arm draped loosely around her shoulders.

Like half the menfolk at the festival, her prince consort had his hair pulled back in a droopy ponytail; when he let it down,
it must be even longer than hers. He kept peeking at her out of the corner of his eye as the conversation ebbed and flowed,
but there was something unpossessive about the way he was touching her, and I got the feeling they were just friends.

Sitting around them in uneven clusters were three girls and three boys who kept their mouths fully occupied at all times—with
food, tobacco, chitchat, or a combination thereof. At least half of them had visible tattoos, which kind of astounded me;
if I’d been fool enough to get myself branded before I was old enough to vote, my dad would’ve made me get it removed and
cheerfully tithed the doctor bill out of my allowance.

When I got tired of watching, I sidled up to the group and gave my standard journalist’s mating call.

“Hi, my name is Alex Bernier, and I’m a reporter for the
Gabriel Monitor.
Would you mind if I asked you guys a couple of questions?”

Unsurprisingly, it was the girl in the center who fielded the query. “Um…You mean you’re, like, from the newspaper?”

“That’s right.”

“And you want to talk to
us?
”

“Yep.”

She raised a dainty eyebrow at me, though not obnoxiously. “How come?”

“Jo Mingle said you guys might make an interesting story for the paper—about how you’ve been coming here together for a while
and all.”

“And you want to put us in the paper? Like, with our picture and everything?”

“Yep.”

A smile overtook the lower half of her face, revealing the results of a relative fortune in orthodontia.
“Cool.”

“You mind if I sit down?”

She scooted over and made room for me in the midst of the gaggle of adolescents, then stuck out a ring-covered mitt. “What’s
your name again?”

“Alex Bernier.”

“I’m Lauren Potter.” She turned to the guy next to her. “This is Tom Giamotti.” I shook his economy-size hand, and he favored
me with wide eyes and a goofy grin; the overall effect was of an adolescent Saint Bernard. Then Lauren proceeded to go around
the circle introducing the six others, who waved at me with varying degrees of understated coolness. I wrote all their names
down, with descriptions so I could match them up with their quotes when I put the story together. At first glance, they’d
all seemed to be cut from the same batik cloth, but once I got a closer look, I realized they were sort of a Rainbow Coalition
of high-school hippies, drawn from all the stereotypical social subgroups.

Since I spent over an hour with them, I had time to take a lot of notes. Here’s a rundown of the eight kids, translated from
my bad handwriting:

• Lauren Potter—long legs, pretty, confident, “the queen bee”
  
• Tom Giamotti—bushy hair, sweet, STONED
  
• Alan Bauer—Gap T, clean-cut, major muscles, “the jock”
  
• Cindy Bauer—Alan’s younger sister, purple hair, nice, kinda sad
  
• Trish Stilwell—super thin, rose ankle tattoo, gawky, quiet
  
• Billy Halpern—big stupid sideburns, bigger ego, “the hunk”
  
• Dorrie Benson—crew cut, many piercings, “the freak”
  
• Shaun Kirtz—glasses, goatee, acne, pot-leaf T-shirt, “the nerd”
  

The kids may have been vaguely freakish, but they were plenty gracious. Over the next half hour, I was offered home-brewed
beer, chocolate-chip cookies baked by Tom’s mother, umpteen cigarettes, Kool-Aid, dried apricots, limp sweet-potato fries,
and a pan of very inviting double-chocolate brownies. I was just about to go for the latter when I realized they weren’t
hot brownies
(as in warm from the oven) but
pot brownies,
as in laced with marijuana. I took a pass.