The Jew in the Phish

It is the summer of ’69, and I am homeless in Jerusalem. For 19 shekels, less than 5 dollars, I can take a bus to Tel Aviv. I can hitchhike south to the communes in the desert for free, or I can get in a car with scarved mystics and travel north to the mountains of Tzfat.

Instead of doing these things, I sit in the Y Coffee Bar on Nisim Bachar in Nachlaot. It is cramped and overpriced, but the people here speak Hebrew. For four and a half months, I lived in a basement apartment on HaYarkon, which is one block from this place. Sager, my roommate, left at the end of May to go back to the states and work at Camp Ramah. Back in January when we signed the lease, leaving the month of June open had seemed a great way to force myself to get out and travel. But here I am, sitting a block away from my former apartment. To one side of this coffee shop, a couple doors down, is a hole in the wall where I can do laundry. On the other side of the shop, a few doors up, is a thrift store called Trumpledore. I bought some bellbottoms there once. There’s a typewriter in the window that has Hebrew-lettered keys. It costs 35 sheks, less than 10 dollars. I don’t know how I’ll carry the thing around, so I just stare every time I walk by, which is often because I have nothing to do, being homeless and all.

I sit in the Y Coffee Bar and drink a café hafooch, which can be translated to mean “upside-down coffee.” A man with a big, curly mass of hair on his head walks in the door and sits down. I sit and drink my upside-down coffee, which is really just a latte, and periodically look up at this guy. He orders a hafooch and periodically looks up at me. I look at him and assume he’s Israeli. He sees me look at him. He stares back and says, “You listen to Phish, don’t you?” I freeze. I look down at my shirt. Nope, I’m not wearing any Phish regalia. How did he know that? “Yea. How did you know that?” I ask. “I can just tell,” he says.

A lot of Jews are familiar with the term “Jewish Geography.” You are at a party and a friend introduces you to someone named Rachel Wasser who is visiting from Maryland. “Oh! Maryland! Do you know Jonathan Zeigler?” you ask excitedly. Rachel stares back into the recesses of her mind for a moment. “Oh, yea! Jon Zeigler! He was in my Chemistry lab. He’s in AEPi, right?” “No, I don’t think so.” “Oh, right. That was Jon Seagel. No, no, I don’t know any Jon Zeiglers.” “Oh. OK. Let’s try again. What about Michelle Waldman?” you ask, a bit less expectantly. “Ah! Michelle! I love Michelle.” A dozen OMGs later, and though you only barely know this Michelle Waldman, you’re now practically BFFLs with Rachel Wasser.

Jewish geography is a game that developed out of the smallness and insularity of the American Jewish community. But in the epicenter of the Jewish state, 6,000 miles from the nearest Phish show, I’m not playing Jewish geography. This is something similar. This is Phish geography. A guy walks into a coffee shop, sees me, and something—an aura, maybe—tips him off. He knows I listen to Phish and that I’m heavily invested. There is no hesitation. He asks, but the asking is more of a formality than anything else. We talk for a little while, trade favorite songs and shows. I tell my new phriend about a street party happening that night, finish my hafooch and say goodbye. It’s a quick exchange, but it makes an impression on me.

Walking around town that day, I wonder what tipped him off. It is the summer of ’69. I’m homeless in Jerusalem. Is it because I carry a big backpack? Is it because I have a beard and shaggy hair? Is it because I wear Naots? No. These are all superficial signs. Every third Israeli on the street looks like this. It must be a feeling. Rachel Wasser might never have been formally introduced to me, but I still would have felt that she was Jewish. This guy in the coffee shop might never have called me out, but he knew we had something in common. Jews sometimes call themselves members of the tribe. Well, phans are a tribe within that tribe.

The night before this encounter, I go out to a bar with some other members of the tribe. I plan on sleeping at a friend’s tiny apartment off a tiny back alley, Hatsor Street, in Nachlaot. My friend works a few different jobs. Sometimes she tends bar, sometimes she waits tables at a fancy pasta restaurant. The night gets away from me. I walk back to her apartment at 3 a.m. I knock on the door. No answer. I look around for a key. Not there. I don’t want to call because it’s 3 in the morning and my friend will need to wake up soon and she is Israeli and Israeli women can be terrifying.

I walk back up the tiny alley of Hatsor and out onto a more main road, Bezalel. What are my options? Few. There is a limited number of people I wouldn’t mind bothering at this hour. Most them have left Israel already. I get a brilliant idea. Why not sleep in the park? I mean, I’ve been telling everyone that I’m spending this month homeless, why not live up to my word?

Ever tried to sleep on a metal park bench? Or on a patch of grass with the sprinklers spraying and a murder of crows creeping all around? Or on the side of a prickly-bush hill? It didn’t matter where I lay. It was damn cold and awkward and painful and they don’t turn the lights off in parks at night.

Delirious, I walked through the park, back into Nachalot and, in a quiet square across the street from Shuk Machne Yehuda, an open-air market, I waited and waited and waited.

It takes a long time for the sun to rise. I assume the market will open early. I’d had some early classes that semester at Hebrew University, but no matter how early I got up to run to through the market to the bus stop, Machane Yehuda was always ready and raging. Now, it takes a long time for the sun to rise. And once the sun rises, it takes a really long time for the market to yawn awake. So I wait some more. Finally, a newsstand opens. I grab the Haaretz English edition, and I wait some more. Shops begin to open. Falafel begins to fry. People begin to yell. The place is transforming. I’m 6,000 miles from the nearest Phish show, but Shakedown Street is coming alive before my eyes.

In the Shuk in Jerusalem you can get anything. And if someone tells you they can’t find this appliance or that fruit or some such person, tell them they haven’t looked hard enough. There are nuts, vegetables, fruits, coffees, teas, tonics, pastries, cheeses, eggs, fish, meats, beers, wines and sweets. You can buy plates and bowls and pots and pans. You can find rugs and shower curtains and linen pants. You can give money to a dozen beggars in 10 square feet. You can hear people speaking in Hebrew, Arabic, English, Yiddish, Russian, Amharic, French, German, Yeshivish.

The Shuk is the chaos before creation. Or maybe it’s the chaos of creation. You have to push people aside if you want to get anywhere. You have to hold your head up, or you’ll get ripped off. Yet, everything and everyone flows, and you can find anything your heart desires.

Six months later, I’m extracting myself from a car in the parking garage of the American Airlines Arena. The first thing my new friends and old friends and I want to do is get to Phish’s Shuk, to Shakedown Street, to the Lot.

There’s a parking lot scene at every Phish show. For this run of shows, the parking lot is opposite the arena on the other side of Biscayne Boulevard, a major road in downtown Miami. The lot is where the party begins and ends. Phisheads and gawkers alike congregate before the doors open and the lights go down. You can get anything in the lot: Tickets, bootleg Phish shirts, show posters, stickers, hand-made skirts and hats, pieces and papers, vegan burritos and heady quesadillas, garlic grilled cheese and French-bread pizza, chai tea, beers and smoothies, ganja goo balls, brownies, cookies, rice crispy treats, NO2, L, E and the rest of the alphabet pharmacy.

The place to go is Shakedown Street. This is the main drag where the vendors set up. Vendors are seasoned veterans. Their vans and RVs are often plastered with stickers from tours of lore. It always seemed to me that these people started following the Grateful Dead, and in 1995, when Jerry Garcia died and the Dead disbanded, they just up and moved their business to Phish tour because it was the easiest possible transition. They seem to have 20 or 30 years on the average Phish concertgoer. Hence, every parking lot outside of every arena-sized jamband show is named after a Grateful Dead song.

Vendors arrive at the lot early. They set up their various tables and grills behind their cars and across from another row of vans and vendors. These people sell the shirts and the skirts and the garlic grilled cheese. They’ve got signs and lights and everything is boiled down to a science. Then there are the people selling beer and burritos out of coolers. They sort of fill in the gaps between vans and yell things like, “Heady brews! Three dollars! Heady brews! Two for five!” Stand near one of these dudes for long enough and, with the show approaching, he’ll start to rhyme: “What the fuck? It’s only a buck!”

There’s a writhing mass of people in between all these vendors. It’s a mixture of young beaming fans enamored with the scene, casual concert goers called custies, curious onlookers, people who just got swept up in the tide and drug dealers. You don’t even have to ask for the drugs. It’s impossible to walk more than three steps without hearing someone whisper in your ear, “Molly,” “doses,” “chocolates” or any number of drug nicknames. Keep walking and the whispering stops for another few steps. But if he’s piqued your interest, all you have to do is stop, look the guy in the eye and your wish is his command. The river of people just flows on around you.

People spill out of every orifice of Shakedown Street. The outskirts are where you can buy more beer or posters or buy and sell tickets. All of this happens, while a horde of police look on. It’s quite flagrant, but the police can’t realistically arrest every offender in the lot. Outside of a handful of undercover cops, they just do their best to contain the masses.

This is the scene that we’re all eager to experience before the show starts.  Ryan and Eric, the guy we picked up in Boynton, head to the lot as soon as we get out of the car. Harper and Cahlin take a bit longer to get their acts together. Another friend parks his car near us. His name is Matt Doenges, but most people call him some variation of Doogan. He’s from Wellington, too. Harper introduced me to him freshman year, but I really met Doogans before I met Harper. Actually, he was the first person I ever met in college. We were in the same freshman orientation. One of us was wearing a Phish shirt. We started talking Phish geography and then got to Jewish geography. He’d missed the boat and never had a chance to see Phish during the post-hiatus years. So this is Doogans’ first Phish show, and he’s stoked, to say the least.

Eventually, everyone’s articles are in order, and we exit the parking garage. As we walk alongside the venue, a verse from “Roses Are Free,” a song by Ween that Phish covers, rings out. We look up toward the source of the music. There’s a big screen on the front of the arena with a clip from the Phish DVD called “IT” that chronicles the band’s 2003 summer festival of the same name. The clip is being played on a loop like the “Roses Are Free” verse, but the two don’t match. In fact, nothing matches. Here we are in downtown Miami outside of an arena that normally hosts NBA games, and Phish is blaring over the speakers and flashing on the screen. But the mismatch fits. This whole endeavor is about expecting the unexpected, after all.

I ask Doogans what song he most wants to hear Phish play. “Weekapaug,” he replies. I assure him that we’ll get to share in that groove. We walk on, past the venue, and cross Biscayne Boulevard toward the parking lot. Group cohesion is more of an ideal than a possibility at this point. People stream by in every direction and everything catches my eyes. Everyone is smiling. Everyone is happy.

We get to the edge of the lot and I can actually feel the energy of the place all around me. I want to dive in, but we don’t have a lot of time. Showtime approaches. I’m hungry. I want a burrito. Harper, Doogan and I work our way onto Shakedown Street. Doesn’t take long to get distracted. There’s some carrot cake that looks extra special. And then some girls walk by. They look familiar. Before I can place their faces, Harper and Doogan are screaming salutations and introducing me. Shira and Sarah, friends from Camp Coleman.

But I’ve already figured it out. I’ve met these girls before. Three months ago, the Mike Gordon Band came to Jacksonville Beach. It was September 18^th, a Friday.

When Mike made the announcement, the show’s date made me do a double take. September 18th. September 18th. What else was happening on September 18th? The answer soon came to me: Rosh Hashanah. The Jewish New Year.

Rosh Hashanah is one of those holidays that even the most secular, disconnected American Jews celebrate. Or acknowledge. My background is more traditional than that, so I couldn’t just ignore this reality. In a way, it seemed perfect. I would be coming home to Jacksonville anyway for some quality family time. It seemed I could have my cake and eat it, too (Thank God Mike wasn’t playing Jax on Yom Kippur. There would be no cake and no eating then.) So I found out the family dinner plans for Friday night, I found another Jewish friend from Jacksonville who wanted to hit the show and we bought our tickets.

The night of the show, after dinner, I decided I had to make a sign to bring to the show. It was the New Year and, though his touring schedule implied otherwise, I knew Mike had an innate connection to the holiday. I used some Sharpies and some cardboard to make a sign that read “Shanah Tovah” in Hebrew and included an apple and a shofar. Only the semi-learned Jews in the crowd, Mike included, would be able to read and understand that the sign said, “Happy New Year.”

Sign in hand, I drove to my friend’s house to pick him up. His family had just finished their own Rosh Hashanah dinner. They were interested in the sign I’d made. Before we left, my friend’s mother had an idea. Apples and honey. The traditional pairing for a sweet new year. She wanted us to bring some to Mike. She filled a Ziploc with apples, and then poured in the honey and that was that.

We drove 30 minutes to the Freebird Live at the beach, picked up our tickets at will call and made it through the security, sweets and sign in tow. We found some space close to the stage, and as soon as Mike appeared, I held up my sign to him. He peered out, read the Hebrew words and grabbed the sign from my hands. Mike then held the sign up and out for all to see and the place went nuts. There was a large Jewish contingent at the Freebird, it seemed.

Then Mike and his band played a song or two. I still had this offering of apples and honey, so during the next song break, I held up the Ziploc and made it clear that I wanted Mike to take it. He leaned in, strained his eyes and eventually grabbed the bag. Looking closely, he saw exactly what was inside. He understood.

“Apples and honey, for sweet new year!” Mike said into the microphone while holding up the bag. Now, the place really went crazy.

A glowing faerie of a girl, about my age, danced up to me and said, “Did you tell your parents that you were coming to Jacksonville for Rosh Hashanah services, too?!”

That girl was this girl in the lot, Sarah. She had been with someone at the Mike Gordon show. It was the other girl, Shira. I reintroduce myself, and the circles just keep intertwining.

The girls get pulled away in the tide. They’re selling some baked goods of their own. We float around the lot, get caught up, broken apart and thrown back together a few times over. We find some goo balls bobbing around in there somewhere. The clock is ticking. We start drifting toward the edges of the lot. As it gets closer to show time, the masses become more and more alive. Every so often, some primordial war cry will ring out and the lot will erupt in collective excitement. There is only one official crosswalk between the lot and the venue, so even though Biscayne Boulevard is busy, people keep tempting fate and making a run for it.

Harper remembers this vividly: “We’re tryin’ to walk from across from the lot to the American Airlines Arena and there’s like this six-lane highway and nobody knew when to go, when not to go. And you can see 150 people trying to decide what to do, and this is within the span of three seconds. And all of the sudden some little kid just runs and goes, ‘Power in numbers!’ and everyone starts yelling ‘Power in numbers!’ and running across the street.”

The river is raging, spilling over its banks. Power in numbers. Waves are crashing everywhere. This is it. Power in numbers. We surrender to the flow and careen toward the source.

Even in the depths of December, 60 miles of sunshine lie between the village of Wellington and the metropolis of Miami. It can take any time from one hour to 12 to cover that distance, depending on the route, traffic, lines at tollbooths, carpool-lane eligibility, construction, lane closures, detours, missed exits and the position of the constellations.

I’m back in the Buick, behind the wheel, trying to keep track of a silver Civic that’s a few cars away. There are six lanes on this highway, the Florida Turnpike, and the Civic darts from this lane to that. Every few minutes it speeds ahead until it’s caught in the web of cars, and then the process repeats.

Harper is driving the Civic. His sister, Sarah, is in the car, and so is his friend, Ryan. He knows I’m trying to follow, that I have no idea where we’re going.

The Civic disappears from my sight again, just as a sign for the tollbooth blurs green overhead. This is the Florida Turnpike. This is the edge.

Six lanes somehow expand to twenty. Each lane has a booth. Each booth has a sign over it: Ticket. Change Provided. Exact Change. SunPass.

The Civic must have followed this last sign. With the SunPass—a sticker or plastic box stuck in the windshield—drivers can just roll through the tollbooths. No lines. No loose change. No wait. The pass turns the car into a credit card on wheels. Money’s deducted without a beep or a thought, and the road rolls on.

I don’t have a SunPass. The Turnpike connects Miami to Orlando. It runs parallel to I-95, which extends beyond Orlando, through Jacksonville, my hometown, and all the way up to Maine. Florida’s Turnpike doesn’t make it to Jacksonville, which means I don’t have a SunPass, which means I am like a foreigner in my own state.

I’m stuck in line. I call Harper. No answer. At the booth, I pay $1.25 for my two axels. I merge back onto the highway, call Harper. His sister answers. I tell her that I don’t have a SunPass and that I’ll try to catch up even though I’m far behind. She tells me to get off at a certain exit. They need gas and they need to pick up someone else and we might as well cut over to I-95 for the rest of the trip so that no one has to deal with tolls. Reasonable enough.

Sarah is quite the opposite of her brother. Not difficult to reach, not loud, not erratic, not off-the-fucking-walls crazy. Driving down to see Phish, for her, is as much an opportunity to let loose as it is to do something productive. She’s working on a story for JVibe about the Miami Phish concerts.

Her brother, on the other hand, came exclusively to party down. And I’m not surprised that communication and group cohesion has already begun to break down. Harper is notorious for these sorts of thing, has been since we met in the earliest days of freshman year at the University of Florida.

That year, late one night just a couple of weeks into the fall semester, I walk into my dorm room. Ben, an old friend and my roommate, is standing there drunk and laughing. Some guy is sitting on Ben’s bed, and the

instant that I enter the room this guy starts yelling, screaming at me. There’s excitement in his voice, not anger. I don’t know him but he seems to know me. He’s yelling about Phish and about being Jewish and he’s giving me a huge hug of excitement.

“I remember being super shit faced,” Harper said about that night.

Turns out Harper had been in the communal bathroom of our hallway in the dorm. Ben was in there, too. They were both drunk and started talking. Mutual love of Phish was discovered and then a shared heritage and Ben knew he had to introduce this guy to me. Harper’s been my most abrasive music-loving friend ever since.

It was a new thing to meet other Jewish kids that really liked Phish, Harper said. “Because in high school, man, I looked all over for anyone who liked Phish and nobody liked Phish and I was so sad about it.”

My experience had been similar. I’d discovered Phish, along with the Grateful Dead, at Jewish summer camp just before my last year of middle school. It seemed that a unique, creative culture surrounded these Phish, and I wanted to dive into the ocean to swim around. But this newfound enthusiasm was greeted with blank stares back in the non-camp world. Like Harper, I found that nobody liked Phish and I was so sad about it, too.

The band was on hiatus in 2001. None of my camp friends were hopeful that they would return. Our most legitimate source for Phishformation was a guy who claimed to be a cousin of Mike Gordon, the bass player. He said Mike had been at his Bar Mitzvah. He said that Mike said that Phish would never play again. None of us believed him. All of us believed him. We just assumed that the train had passed, that maybe we should find our own band from our own time.

I imagined that high school would be a garden of musical enlightenment. That didn’t happen. Kids at my school were either stuck deep in the mud of popular country music or listening at the whim of the Top 40.

Thank God for the Internet. I was able to form a virtual community. I could talk with my camp friends about the group online. I found nugs.net and began downloading audience recordings of Phish shows. I discovered the thriving world of American bands that jam.I downloaded more shows from Furthur.net. It took a lot of time and patience. We had a 27-kbps modem at home. I waited. I lamented the fact that no one around me seemed interested.

During the year, I was able to see many of those friends from summer camp at Jewish youth group conventions. Every American Jewish movement has a youth group. Young Reform Jews have NFTY. Conservative Jews have USY. The Modern Orthodox have NCSY. The pluralists have BBYO. I was in USY, and my youth group region covered the Southeast. There always seemed to be a disproportionate number of heads at those weekend gatherings. Some of them I recognized as older kids from camp. They were from exotic locales like Atlanta and Raleigh and Memphis. Some just fit a 15 year old’s notion of the 21^st century hippie: Long and tangly hair, fat hemp necklaces, Chaco sandals and an ever-present Nalgene water bottle plastered with stickers of unknown acronyms and nicknames: SCI, WSP, moe., STS9, pgroove. The oldest, coolest kids wore shirts and hoodies emblazoned with Phish’s iconic logo. The letters inside the fish were in Hebrew. These kids had found Phishy T-shirts on the touristy streets of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv while traveling on Jewish summer programs. It was common to see other permutations of the Phish logo on shirts created by individual youth group chapters to reflect the initials of their hometown synagogues.

While I spent my summers at Camp Ramah Darom, Harper spent his at Kutz Camp, the national leadership camp for NFTY. There he learned to be a song leader, he met some Phishheads and he was increasingly inspired by Phish. One summer, guitar in hand, Harper had the bright idea to take the melody from a ballad-ish Phish tune and applied it to a traditional Jewish prayer. He then taught the arrangement to other Kutz Campers.

Some summers later, Sarah, Harper’s sister, went on an Israel program. There were kids on the trip from Los Angeles who organized a Shabbat service. When they got to the Mi Chamocha prayer in the service, the leaders began to play and sing it to the tune of “Wading in the Velvet Sea.” Hearing this Phish tune in a Jewish service, Sarah was shocked. She approached one of her left-coast peers to ask the origin of the tune and was told that someone from LA had come home from Kutz Camp one summer with this song on his mind. A NFTY song leader, he taught it to the region. And like that, Harper’s bit of Jewish Phish lore was out there in the world.

The Phish world is like the Jewish world in that way. Word travels fast, and trends become traditions. Benjy Eisen wrote a story for Jambands.com in 2003 about how he changed a certain Phish song forever. Stopped in traffic one day in 1996, the song, “Harry Hood,” came on his stereo. As the band got to the segment in which they shout “Harry!,” Eisen found himself responding, “HUH!”

“Not the scratch-your-head, shrug-your shoulders ‘huh,’” Eisen wrote. “But the James Brown HUH, the Funk Amen, the sound of a man getting on the good foot.”

This “HUH!” soon morphed into “Hood!” A few weeks later, someone named Darius posted a message on the nascent Phish Internet community, rec.music.phish, looking for audience participation ideas. Eisen threw out the Hood chant idea. Darius must have liked it because he printed thousands of fliers for Phish’s August ’96 shows at Red Rocks with, among other audience participation ideas, chanting instructions for “Harry Hood.” Darius and his friends passed the fliers out to as many phans as they could. Many of the fliers’ suggestions to the audience were unsuccessful. But then, “during an electrifying thunderstorm on the third night of the run,” according to the Phish.net, Phish played “Harry Hood.” When the band arrived at the “Harry!” section, the amphitheatre responded, “Hood!” Phish was caught “completely off-guard by the successful crowd chant,” but “was noticeably pleased, especially Trey, who responded to the situation with a mile-wide grin.” Phish audiences have shouted “Hood!” ever since.

Eisen continued on Jambands.com:

I go back and listen to pre-1996 Harry Hoods, before the crowd picked up my chant, before anyone knew to sing it. I can still hear it! It’s still there! It is in there years before I discovered it. It’s just silent, that’s all, waiting to be sung. It’s as if I didn’t come up with it after all I was just the first person to stumble across it. I pulled a note out of the air and this one time it happened to be THE RIGHT NOTE.

As Harper made the rounds in NFTY, playing his Phishy reworkings of Hebrew prayers, pulling the right notes out of the air, and as I began to believe I had found my garden of musical enlightenment in USY, Phish announced that they would play shows again. And it seemed that maybe the train hadn’t passed after all, that it was just a bit late getting to the station.

Harper and I got on the same train at about the same time. We saw the same sites, formed similar social networks in our identical train cars and, at some point along the way, discovered we’d been traveling concentric circles.

And now I’m traveling down the highway looking for his nondescript silver sedan so that I can make it safely to a Phish show tonight. The phone buzzes. Harper tells me which exit to take—Boynton Beach—and where to meet—the 7-Eleven. I pull off when I see the exit, and I’m back on a street that looks just like the streets in Wellington. Same strip malls, same traffic, same luxury cars and SUVs. Nothing stands out. Everything repeats. The 7-Eleven doesn’t stand out. I miss it. Five minutes pass, and I find a place to make a U-turn. Another five go by trying to make it back to the convenience store. I pull in, park. Harper backs out of the parking lot and into the traffic of downtown Boynton. I back out, try to follow, get caught in another net of cars.

Harper pulls away fast. Somehow, the Buick and I lunge free, catch up and survey the scene. We’re in the least affluent area of South Florida that I’ve seen so far on this trip. Small houses, packed side by side, extend into the distance on every side street. These people aren’t poor, or doing poorly, but they seem to be living within their means.

Harper turns in somewhere, and we stop at a gate. The gated community—a hallowed South Florida tradition. But, like an unfunny bastardization of the securitized American Dream, this is a gated community of cramped apartment complexes. We follow the curves and corners and eventually stop to pick someone up.  He’s got a brown-bagged bottle in one hand and a duffle in the other. He hops in Harper’s car, and we’re off, back around the curves, through the gate and into Boynton.

Harper finds a main road, which we follow until it reaches an I-95 on-ramp. No tolls here but still an inordinate number of cars. An hour passes before we approach greater Miami. Time is ticking. It’s nearing 5 p.m. Doors open at 6:30. The show starts at 7. We still need to drop our stuff at a friend’s house. We keep driving. Cars converge and concentrate into a metropolitan mass. Every exit is backed up. We keep driving. We find a suitable exit and begin our descent from the highway heavens into Miami. Thirty minutes of stop lights and rush hour and one ways pass before we make it to the house, in all its upper-middle class glory.

Our friend, Cahlin, lives here with his parents when he’s on break from school. Now is such a break. I never took Cahlin for a Phish fan. But the potential exists in everyone, and, though he’s only tangentially familiar with the band’s music, Cahlin’s decided to come to the show tonight. We drop our bags in his room. Even in an upscale, Art-Deco’ed house such as this, things are cramped. Cahlin’s got a bed and some slivers of space on the floor in his room. The couches in the living room are more for show than sleep. I’ll take my sliver any day. How can I complain? I left Jacksonville days earlier without the slightest plan for accommodations. A bit of carpet in a posh house in Miami is better than sleeping on the streets, you know? Tomorrow night’s a different story, but I’ll worry about that then, I think. HUH!, I think, let’s get on to the show.

Everyone hits the bathroom, changes clothes, grabs vitals—all I need is my notebook—and we bust out of there. To save on parking, we decide to take one car to the show. Four of us pile into the back seat and I begin to realize what’s about to happen.

The lot. The lights. The love. Huh! We find the freest expression in the most crowded of cramped spaces. All squeezed together, we get back onto the roads of Miami. In the parlance of our times, shit’s about to get mad intimate.