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Dream On

Jeff Rosen

    “There it is,” Johnny said as the Meadowlands appeared in front of them, like a giant bathtub plopped down in the middle of a swamp, surrounded by gray weeds waving over murky water, and factories with tubes snaking around them spitting out chemicals.
    “Take this exit,” Leo said, following the directions with the underlined exit number. They rolled from one highway to the next in a big circle, Johnny not really knowing how to merge, so Leo looked over his left shoulder to make sure it was clear, as they pulled off onto the Meadowlands access road and drove straight into a traffic jam at 6:30 in the morning.
    The cars were standing at a complete stop on the access road, and people were starting to get out of them. The empty parking lot loomed ahead, gated. It started to rain.
    “What’s going on?” Leo asked. “Think they might’ve canceled the show?” They were always suspicious that some officious person, like the governor, would step in at the last minute, trying to stem some tide he knew threatened him in a way he did not understand.
    A huge bald guy, wearing a leather vest over his bare, hairy chest, got out of a station wagon in front of them. “These assholes don’t have anyone to open the parking lot,” he said. “The same thing for the Beach Boys. Traffic backed up to Hackensack.” He came over and leaned on the hood of the Polara, pulling out his pipe and firing up with them, then giving them advice on where to park and which gate to line up at to get in quickest. “Don’t park in the front,” he said. “You’ll never get out of here after the show.”
    “Looks like we aren’t even going to get close,” Leo said, gesturing at the line of cars that stretched between them and the parking lot.
    “This? This ain’t nothing. You’ll get right up front.”
    “Yeah,” Karl said, “At a Dead show people get there days early.”
    “This ain’t no Dead show, sonny,” the guy said, as they heard cars start and saw brake lights flash ahead. He moved quickly to his car, opened the door, shouted, “Wake up, babe!” and got in.
    They began to move forward and eventually entered the parking lot unattended. They parked. Leo grabbed his boom box. Karl wrapped the blanket around his shoulders. “You bringing that in?” Leo asked him.
    “Yeah, to sit on. You wearing your Nugent jacket?” he asked, surprising Leo. Ever since Tim had finished airbrushing it and handed it to him, he’d imagined wearing it to a show. “It’s just that it’s going to be hot.” It had stopped raining, and things felt warm but okay.
    They went over to Gate D, where the guy had said to go because it would let them in closest to the stage. By the time they found it, the high chain-link fence in front of it was about ten or twenty people deep. They packed in. People streamed in behind them. Karl packed a bowl and they fired up, passing it around. Leo took a hit off it, but it tasted strange and ashy, as if it was already spent.
    “Nice jacket,” a guy behind Leo said.
    “People here are huge,” Melanie said, looking up.
    As promised, around 8 a.m. the gate opened. But they only opened one small door, rather than sliding the gate, probably so the security and the ticket takers didn’t get overrun. The whole wide swath of people began pressing toward the opening. Somewhere behind them people started pushing, pressing them into the people in front of them.
    “Hey,” Melanie shouted. “Stop being dicks!”
    The crowd pressed and lifted Leo off his feet, squeezed between people. He turned sideways, struggling to free himself from the compaction, as people shoved into spaces that didn’t exist between them. The handle of the tape player snapped, and the Marantz slid down a few inches. He grabbed it and tucked it under his arm. The fence started swaying as people pushed against it. Leo expected someone with a bullhorn to step in and urge them back, but there was no one with a bullhorn. He got pressed forward again, shoved hard enough that he would have fallen if there’d been room to do so. The whole crowd swayed in one direction then another, like a school of fish. People were trickling in through the entrance, as people kept on pushing in from behind.
    “Leo!” Melanie shouted from a few tight people away. He reached through them, grabbed her hand, and pulled the two of them together.
    “Stop fucking shoving!” she shouted, pushing feebly against some large Harley-looking dude, who stared at Leo. “I can’t breathe!”
    “They broke my tape player.” Just ahead of him people had started to climb the swaying chain-link fence. “This way,” he said to Melanie, as if they could choose to follow. People were making their way up and over, but then he heard a snapping sound and the fence and all the people on it disappeared.
    He could hear people yelling, “Let them up! Hold on!” and then suddenly the pressure pushed them towards the fallen fence, and they were holding on to each other’s hands, moving forward through the area where the fence had been, stepping over the downed links, seeing a few people sitting off to the side, one guy holding a bloody t-shirt to his head.
    They moved to the gate where the ticket takers stood. In front, people were opening their backpacks for inspection. Johnny and Karl were standing there, waiting for them, Karl still wrapped in the blanket. “What happened to you guys?” Karl asked.
    “You fucking left me!” Melanie said.
    “We went through the gate and you were gone,” Johnny answered. “What happened back there?”
    “It was fucked up,” Leo said, realizing that this intense thing that had been for a moment his whole life was already slipping away, no more memorable or communicable than a moment spent sharing a bowl of cereal with his dog.
    “Well, glad you’re alright, babe,” Karl said, pulling a reluctant Melanie inside of the blanket with him.
    In front of them, the security guy was inspecting a huge bulging backpack from a kid who looked like he was in junior high. Leo could see a full bottle of Southern Comfort, and something else clear, maybe vodka. The security guy zipped it back up and handed it back. “What are they even searching for?” Leo wondered aloud as they passed through.
    “There are people hurt back there,” Melanie told the security guy.
    He said in a bored voice, “Medical tent is in the back, field level.”
    “Let’s go.,” Johnny, who had not been through what Melanie and Leo had been through, said. Even though it had seemed outside like there were tens of thousands of people, now that the same crowd was arranged in a semicircle in front of the stage, they were able to grab space no more than ten or twenty yards away from where the bands would be playing. Karl spread out the blanket and they all sat on their claimed space.
    “It’s a fucking Peanuts blanket,” Johnny said, noticing for the first time.
    “Dude,” Leo said, “That’s your blanket from when you were a kid.”
    “You had a Peanuts blanket?” Melanie asked.
    “Still do.”
    The crowd filled in around them. A bunch of guys from a Rutgers fraternity surrounded them and quickly assembled a mini bar, mixing drinks into Dixie riddle cups they passed around. Leo read his cup’s riddle out loud to the group. “When is a door not a door? When it’s a jar.”
    One of the Rutgers group, a small guy with a little fro wearing an Aerosmith tank top, pointed to the stage. “In just four hours,” he said, “Frank Marino is going to be right there. Know him?”
    “Totally,” Leo said. “His live album wails. I’ve seen him before. At the Capitol Theatre.”
    “I love the Capitol Theatre,” the guy said, passing Leo a small purple bong. “I’ve seen the Dead there six times.”
    “Have you really?” Melanie asked.
    “I was supposed to be studying for finals, freshman and sophomore year. They always play in April. But I didn’t give a shit.”
    “Yeah, we don’t give a shit either,” Leo said, firing up the bong and drawing the smoke deep into his lungs.
    “About what?” The guy asked. “What don’t you give a shit about?”
    Leo exhaled out the side of his mouth and watched the smoke drift up, mingling with the smoke from thousands of other joints, pipes and bongs, all disappearing up into the grey New Jersey morning. “We don’t give a shit about anything.”
    “Our motto is ‘Who Gives a Shit,’” Johnny explained.
    “Same with us,” the guy said. “We’re the drugs house.”
    “Let’s check out the crowd,” Johnny said to Leo.
    “Where should we go?” Leo asked, looking out at the clusters of people, so densely packed together he couldn’t see past them unless he looked up to the empty stands, where people with reserved tickets hadn’t started to show up yet.
    “Pick a direction. I’m too high.”
    “This way,” Leo said, walking towards what he assumed would be the back concessions.
    People of various sizes and shapes stood around their blankets. Big hairy biker guys stood with a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other. One tall girl was wearing shorts and a tube top that said, “I love you Steven Tyler!” One big group of girls, all junior-high aged, sat with two middle-aged dads who were in lawn chairs, reading newspapers. All the girls had on Journey t-shirts.
    “I might trip with Karl and Melanie,” Johnny said.
    “Really?” Leo said. He thought of tripping as something you did in the woods, or at a Dead show. The Meadowlands, situated in a chemical swamp, didn’t make him think of tripping. They kept picking their way back, going around blankets where people slept with cowboy hats covering their eyes, or where guys laid their heads in the laps of their girlfriends who picked absently at their hair, or where groups huddled over bongs like cavemen huddling over the first fire. Leo once again thought about the stupid, suburban houses their parents all owned, whose lawns they never stopped mowing. He puzzled over his original plan to use his Nugent jacket to meet girls, realizing that no one saw it until he was past them and they were looking at his back. “I wish Nadine was here,” Leo said, wishing he didn’t feel that way.
    “Duh,” Johnny said.
    A weirdly scattered cheer went up. “The sun,” Johnny said, pointing up to a little yellow spot trying to squeeze its way through the clouds. Rather than burst free, the clouds swallowed it back up and the band of lightened sky turned dark again. Scattered boos rose here and there. Then, as if someone had turned on a sprinkler, it started to rain hard. “Let’s head for cover,” Johnny said, able now to break out into a trot as they were well past midfield.
    The went into a tunnel and stood in front of the closed snack bar. Leo’s jacket felt as if a wet heating pad had been wrapped around his body. “Feels like I’ve lived a month today,” he said to Johnny.
    “Dude, are you complaining? We’re gonna see Ted Fucking Nugent!” Someone near them heard Johnny and yelled, “Nugent!” and then someone else did and then soon everyone was chanting Nugent! Nugent! Nugent! “See?” Johnny asked, and Leo did see, he was standing, packed into the Meadowlands concession area, with thousands of soaking wet, maniacal Nugent fans. This was the coolest place he had ever been.
    The walk back was harder, as they carefully picked their way over sodden blankets and wet people shaking off ponchos. Water pools of various shapes gleamed on the new artificial turf. The two dads still sat in their lawn chairs, but their newspapers were grey paper mâché in heaps around them.
    When they finally found Karl and Melanie again, they were laying on the soggy Peanuts blanket, playing Journey’s “Wheel in the Sky” on the Marantz. “Where did you get the Journey tape?” Leo asked them.
    “Those guys lent it to us,” Melanie said, pointing to a group of people playing cards.
    She looked at Karl, who was still digging around in the backpack. “Did you forget them?”
    Karl pulled out a baggie. It looked about the same as a half-ounce baggie, except these white and tan mushroom stalks filled it. He handed some to Melanie, took some for himself and offered the bag up to Johnny and Leo. Johnny took some. “Chew them slowly,” Karl warned. Leo held up his hand, not interested.
    Just then, Pink Floyd’s Animals started playing over the stacks, and as if on cue the sun came back out and the crowd roared. Twice as he lay there basking in the sun, explosions on the stage startled him. “M-80s,” Johnny said.
    “Look at this place,” Karl said, standing up. Leo looked around, as people stripped off most of their clothes and steam from the evaporating puddles drifted up. “It’s like we’re in a swamp.” He stood up and Melanie and Johnny joined him, staring up at the steamy air around them.
    “I might be tripping,” Johnny said when a beach ball hit him on the head.
    “Dude, am I going to have to drive home?” Leo asked.
    “Only if you want to get home alive.” The three of them burst out laughing.
    People kept on jamming up in front of them, finding small cracks in the spaces claimed by blankets. Leo fired up another joint as the clouds drifted apart and the sun burned down on them. The hits off the joint tasted like ash still, his lungs felt roasted, and he had a case of first-degree cottonmouth. The weed crawled into his brain like a fog, not at all serpentine and plummeting, the way a good high felt. Johnny and Karl and Melanie and two of the card-playing guys were laughing and laughing, and Leo kept thinking he had just missed the joke. “I have a dog named Mel,” one of the guys said to Leo. “Melvin Rasta Hardy. I named him after my Uncle Mel, Bob Marley and one of the Hardy Boys. I can’t remember which.”
    Rivers of sweat ran down his back. He didn’t want to take his jacket off, but he was feeling miserable, so he wrapped it around his arm so he couldn’t lose it.
    “You are so burnt,” Melanie said to him.
    “Really? I’m still not feeling it.”
    “No, I mean your face is really sunburnt.”
    Then, finally, blessedly, Frank Marino came onstage. Lanky as a snapped guitar string, he waved a hand at the shouting crowd. He twirled his black moustache and sporadic shouts turned into little roaring bursts as the damp, overheated crowd stirred to attention. People rushed by. Some huge dude stepped in front of Leo and hoisted his girlfriend up onto his shoulders. Leo watched from behind as she took off her shirt and waved it at Marino.
    Sound exploded out of the stacks and stacks of amps, and Leo—Leo who loved loud music, Leo who had been to Yes at Madison Square Garden, Rainbow at The Capitol Theatre, and AC/DC at The Strand—had never felt or heard anything more powerful. He felt the music pound all his scattered thoughts into one acorn-sized spot in his head.
    Marino went from “Purple Haze,” which he arguably played as well as Hendrix, to “Dragonfly” to “Who Do You Love” to “Johnny B. Goode,” pulling the crowd closer and closer to him, like some sort of hypnotist with each song, before he finally took a break, mopped his head and unstrapped his guitar. Then the band walked off stage and didn’t return.
    “What the fuck?” Leo asked.
    “They don’t want him to show anyone up,” said one of the card players, who was wearing a Frank Marino shirt. “I bet they let Journey play a full set.”
    A few Marino fans moved back from the stage, looking incomplete. Journey fans started pushing up. The junior high girls moved past them, trailed by the two fathers. The Journey fans had feathered hair, and the guys were all wearing tight sleeveless shirts, all looking a bit like Steve Perry.
    “I don’t feel so good,” Johnny said.
    “Get a drink?” Leo asked. Johnny nodded and stood up. They made their way upstream, against the flow of Journey fans heading to the stage. The sun was still out, and the act of pressing tightly through so many people was squeezing heat onto them. A roar came up from the crowd and Leo guessed that Journey had taken the stage but didn’t care enough to turn around and confirm. Suddenly Johnny hunched over a big puddle and puked into it. He stood back up and gave Leo a thumbs up.
    Leo laughed. “Journey literally made you puke!” he shouted to Johnny, making him laugh too. As Journey wrapped up “Wheel in the Sky,” the two went back through the tunnel and joined the huge crush in front of the concession stand.
    “Here you go,” Leo said to Karl and Melanie when they got back, handing them the food.
    “You’re the best,” Karl said. “How much do we owe you?”
    “Nothing.”
    “You missed Journey,” Melanie said, as she tore a piece from the pretzel.
    “How were they?” Leo asked respectfully.
    “You didn’t miss anything,” Karl answered.
    Melanie punched him in the arm. “They were fabulous.”
    But then, suddenly, Cliff Davies climbed up onto a riser and sat behind his drum kit. He pounded it a few times and the roaring crowd surged forward. Rob Grange came out and thumbed a few thumpy little riffs on the bass, and the crowd pressed forward again. Leo hopped up and down, shouting, “Nugent! Nugent!” His single shouts were drowned out as the crowd pressed and pressed forward, screaming as one.
    Just as the pressure of the shoving and the shouting crushed together, Nugent came flying off the top of the stack of amps, shirtless in suspenders, guitar chords pulling the steamy air apart and then just ripping it to shreds, as he landed in a sea of terrifying, tearing, colliding noises. Then the sound exploding off stage ceased and noise rebounded off the crowd, who roared back into the quick silence, and that sound collided with the first atmospherically tearing notes of “Cat Scratch Fever!”
    Nugent raced over to the mike. Music exploded out, thick strands pouring out of the stacks in lightning-like bursts. It entered Leo through the pores of his skin, replacing the oxygen he usually breathed. Something in the unbounded leaping and shouting made Leo think again of that time when he was a kid, crying at the end of Brian’s Song, and how the sadness had poured out of him then, the exact opposite of whatever was pouring into him now. Just like the first time he had played “Cat Scratch Fever,” he became nothing but the moment. This was why he was here. This was why he had left camp.
    Songs started and songs ended, and the crowd surged up and forward. Cliff Davies pounded his way through a drum solo, like bones clubbing other bones to dust. They switched to the sizzling, tragic “Great White Buffalo.” And then they walked off the stage.
    “No encore?” Leo asked, falling quickly back to Earth, like a skydiver whose parachute had failed to open.
    “Whadaya mean?” one of the Rutgers guys asked. “They played two encores.”
    The crowd started straggling back, as new people, Aerosmith fans, pushed their way up.
    “I gotta whiz,” Johnny said, looking back over the crowd and then immediately giving up.
    Leo stared around, unclear what was happening. The Nugent fans were moving away from the stage, spent. It started to rain. “What now?” Leo asked.
    “What now?” Johnny said. “Now we get to see fucking Aerosmith! Dude, where’s the Marantz?”
    “Huh?”
    “Your tape deck. It’s gone.”
    Leo looked under his arm, where he had tucked it before Nugent started. “Shit,” he said, but he didn’t care, as he only vaguely recalled how much he loved that tape deck. The most anticipated moment of his life had so exceeded expectations, he felt as if he would never need anything again.
    “How was that?” Melanie asked him. “Better than Journey?”
    “I can still feel Nugent in my bones,” he said by way of a response.
    Waiting had no meaning as people filed by in both directions. Time flowed backwards with the Nugent fans and forward with the Aerosmith fans, who would soon have their own moment.
    Aerosmith eventually came on stage, and the band was tighter than Nugent, more precise in the notes they struck, not quite as loud. Leo had to admit that the crowd pressed in more tightly than the Nugent fans had, and the girls atop their boyfriends’ shoulders shrieked more hysterically. The band members even looked different from Nugent’s band. They weren’t as tall, more boxy and rectangular like cereal boxes, hair wild in all directions but clearly managed. Tyler was strange, wearing eye shadow and pulling the entire microphone stand around with him like a dancing partner. Then when he put it down to sing, his huge lips went right up to it. But every time he paused and held a moment’s silence, the crowd exploded into it. After a while, the band pulled him in. He loved Aerosmith, but his love was distant, like heavy metal cousins.
    The band finished, then came back out for an encore. The crowd called in one voice for “Dream On,” but instead they played the manic, brain-bellowing “Toys in the Attic,” and it was like the drums were beating on the inside of Leo’s skull, where the toys in his own attic lived. As the song wound down, Leo imagined the peace “Dream On” would bring, as darkness fell on the Meadowlands. But instead, they walked off stage. Everyone stood around screaming, hopping up and down and holding lighters in the air. But nothing happened. And then the roadies came on stage and started to coil the cords back up. They stood there as people started walking past them, heading home. A girl came up to Leo, tears streaming down her face, and Leo expected her to say something about “Dream On,” but instead she said, “That was the greatest moment of my life.”
    They waited a bit then went back to their spot to gather the Peanuts blanket, but it was lumpy and wet like a used paper towel. “Fuck it,” Karl said.
    “You are going to leave your Peanuts blanket?”
    “Have to leave it someday. Seems like as good a place as any.”
    “Hey, look,” Johnny said, pointing to the Marantz that lied on the ground like a corpse. Leo went over and picked it up. The battery cover was gone, and one of the dual tape deck faces was broken off. “If it works, it’ll be epic.”
    They picked their way over beer bottles and many other abandoned blankets, heaps of trash, coolers, and shattered beach chairs, exiting the way they had come in.
    “Can you drive?” Leo asked Johnny.
    “I can try.”
    “Hand me the keys.” Leo put the Marantz in the back and got behind the wheel of the Polara. He backed out of the spot and drove about twenty yards into a maze of unmoving cars. “Should’ve parked by the entrance,” he said. They rolled down the windows and sat there. After a while, he said, “That was something, huh?”
    “Yes, it was,” Johnny agreed. None of them seemed able to talk about the experience they had shared.
    “Check this out,” Melanie said. Leo turned around and she was holding up the cassette of Journey’s Infinity. “It was still in the tape deck.” She put it back in, pressed play, and “Wheel on the Sky” started coming out perfectly.
    “Turn it off before it makes me puke,” Johnny muttered.
    On the way home, Leo drove carefully, windows down. They traveled North on Route 17 until they found an all-night diner in Ramsey. Kids from the show packed the diner, all of them red-faced and quiet. They sat down at a table, with the massive menus in front of them, downing large glasses of water, staring out at the lights of the cars streaming by on Route 17. The neon lights of a nearby Midas muffler shop beamed down onto the parking lot in front of them.
    “I can’t bear the thought of eating,” Leo said, though he would.

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