Acidhead

         We arrived at Wannadooloo the next day in the afternoon. We stopped only once more before getting there to buy two bottles of whisky with almost the last of our money.

          We had to check in with the work exchange people at a tent. In the brief they said the most important thing was to have fun and not to show up to your shift wasted. They gave us t-shirts. We were putting in twelve hours the next day, and had to be at the tent the next morning at seven.

          After that we went to the campsite and set up our tent. I won’t be able to chronicle much of the festie experience, because I was a lot of the time drunk and tripping. That first night it was cold so we got into the whisky. We walked around the work exchange campsite with a bottle, offering swigs to hippies. I was in my black Marine Corps fleece. I had it zipped all the way with the collar up to my ears. I felt like a turtle. I felt at ease like those times in the field, after a day of training toward another tour with the deploymentheads, the grunts. I felt like I did then after turning-to for the day, when everyone relaxed in a tent city like this one, only more uniform; when someone produced a flask, and everyone made a circle there too, and passed the flask around, and warmed up, and no one addressed anyone by rank.

          The hippies offered us weed for whisky. We wandered up a dirt road and into a bazaar of vendors working under big tents of canvas, most of them selling something tie-dye. Hippies zoomed past us, and some whispered “shrooms” or “doses” or “headies” as the zoomed, and I remember thinking the rest of our minority was here.

          We wandered back into our site and couldn’t find our tent. We’d bought a smiley-face balloon and tied it to the tent for a landmark. We stumbled around looking at the sky for it. At nine thirty at night the sky was still blue and a little bright. There were Jolly Roger flags and balloons and rainbow flags and American flags with the peace sign where the stars would be, all against the sky, all of them like beacons for homeward bound hippies.

          What I can remember most from that first night is swapping whisky for weed with cold hippies, and feeling the numb and careless cold you feel outside when you’re drunk and happy, and the lingering blueness of the sky, and the flags and balloons against it, and the sound of djembes overlapping each other from different campsites, and us being homeward bound, and finding home, and me somehow lying in the tent with Annie next to me.