The Jew in the Phish

“Wake up.” Huh. “It’s 11:30.” Consciousness hits. Eyes open. “I gotta kick you guys out.” Roll over. Out-of-focus dark-brown millimeters from my nose. “Got an appointment really soon. Come on guys.” Roll over. Rough carpet on my back. “Get up. It’s 11:40.” Keep rolling. Out-of-focus metal millimeters from my face. “Let’s go! Get up.” Shit. Sit up, shake, focus.

In front of me: one built-in desk with oversized computer monitor. To my immediate right: one posh leather chair, one table, many odds and many ends, strewn. To my immediate left: one pullout couch, pulled out. Beyond that: one new friend, sitting up, yawning. All around: the sounds of premature waking.

Starting with this long strip of carpeted floor, details from the previous night take their time returning to my memory. I slept here because it was the only space in the room in which I could not only fit but also unfurl myself entirely. Before the floor became my bed, Harper made his out of the front passenger seat in the Buick, where he sat waiting for our host to return from the club.

In the driver’s seat, I shuffle through the iPod, which is loaded with several Phish shows and a smattering of psychedelic folk, jazz and hip-hop. I avoid the Phish because I’m superstitious and because I need some balance. Harper wakes up every few songs to proclaim his love/disbelief/curiosity. I pick up the iPod, which is tethered to the main console by a chord that hangs from the mouth of the cassette deck like black, unslurped spaghetti, and tell him the name of the song, but he’s snoring before I can get the words out. I put the iPod down. I flip a switch on the console that reads “Map Light.” The song changes. Harper wakes up. I tell him the song name. Harper sleeps. I flip off the switch on the console that reads “Map Light.” A glint above me. In the rearview mirror, headlights growing big and blinding. Cahlin is back with Sarah and Ryan. Harper wakes up and falls asleep one last time before waking up again to get out of the car.

On the way in to the house, we pass through a living room that has a couch and some chairs on top of a shaggy rug. The couch is so bold, so red, so shiny that I’m afraid sitting might cause it to shatter. The couch is a tease, like a bowl of candy on the counter that, when you get close enough to grab, reveals itself to be a bowl of colorful glass blown to resemble plastic-wrapped confections. We pass by the faux candy comfort, go through the kitchen and enter Cahlin’s room. I locate a blanket, a bit of floor. Next thing I know, it’s nearly noon and we have to get the F up and out.

But such a plan-less person as I can’t complain. So I stand, grab fresh clothes from my pack, change, pack everything up and am following the others out the door not too long after. We decide to leave Harper’s Civic parked at Cahlin’s and pile into the Buick to go find some breakfast. It’s a quick trip ending in bagels and cream cheese, eggs, coffee. The meal is perfect, but all is still not right. With two set’s worth of sweat all over and a floor’s worth of sleep underneath, we really need a shower to set ourselves straight. Back to the Buick, back to the Miami streets. I start driving south on a main-seeming vein while the native South Floridians phone (ten) friends in search of an open home.

In the meantime, Ben calls me. He knows I probably have no place to sleep tonight and invites me to stay with him at a Marriot near the venue. “How much?” I ask him. “Don’t worry about it,” he tells me. “You sure?” I ask him. “Yea, bud. You want to stay or not?” he responds. “Ok, ok. Sure. Thanks, man.” “And if Carl or whoever needs a place to stay, that’s fine.” “Awesome. Thanks man.”

I look for a dollar store as we stop and go, stop and go. I want glow sticks and neon goggles and alien antennae. Anything. I’m in the mood. Tonight is Night Two. December 29^th. Exactly six years from this day I saw my second-ever Phish show in this same city at the very same arena. Ben’s mom scored tickets for us while chatting with a stranger on a ski lift in Colorado a couple weeks before the show. It worked out that I was on a family vacation in the Florida Keys at the end of December and my parents were able to drop me off at a hotel in Miami to stay with Ben and his mother on the day of the show. It worked out in the other ways, too. Ben had contacted our old camp friend, Sherman, the one who claimed to be Mike Gordon’s cousin. I doubted the validity of that claim until the moment a teller at the American Airlines Arena will-call window handed Ben an envelope filled with complimentary tickets to that and the following night’s show. Shock and awe. Sherman had pulled through big time. We walked from will call to the lot, got rid of some extras, saw the sights and entered the arena all by ourselves.

We’d come a long way. I was 15 the preceding summer and had listened to and researched the music of live jam bands on the Internet for a couple years by that point. But Jacksonville didn’t have the liveliest music scene then, and the shows I desired to see invariably happened way out at Jacksonville Beach late at night. Starting with a Widespread Panic show in Tallahassee in April 2003, I entered a crash course in the world of live music. The Panic show was my first large-scale exposure to the Jam in its natural element. I couldn’t go to camp that summer for various reasons, but a parental compromise was reached soon after Neil Young & Crazy Horse were announced as headliners of the second-annual Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival. My dad was convinced, we bought the tickets and soon enough it was a Thursday evening in early June and we were on the highway heading toward Tennessee. Bonnaroo or bust. We arrived in Manchester early the following morning. It took us six hours to drive the final mile into Mecca, but, traffic clusterfuck or not, the long wait was worth it. That Father’s Day weekend, Dad and I saw so many people make so much music. We were introduced to new sounds, to innovative songwriters, to the forefathers. Yonder Mountain String Band. Kaki King. The Slip. Béla Fleck and the Flecktones. The Allman Brothers Band. Nickle Creek. Medeski, Martin & Wood. Ben Harper & the Innocent Criminals. moe. Galactic. Mike Gordon and Leo Kottke. The Dead. And on and ever on. In a matter of days, the world had transformed into an endlessly expansive playground of original music. I saw old legends perform and new legends made. It was eye opening. It was mind opening. It was life opening.

One month later—because of another clause in the great No Camp Compromise—I got to experience live Phish for the first time. Phish had returned from a two-year hiatus the previous New Year’s and seeing that summer show in Atlanta was the actualization of a dream. Still, Ben and I were only able to go with a babysitter, Ben’s older cousin. Phish wasn’t ours yet. “Yea, that ‘Wilson’ was special, man, I haven’t seen them open with that in all my 120 shows,” I overheard a guy comment during set break. The band, its phans and its history still seemed Other. This feeling was not uncommon. Even in the late 80s, folks who stumbled into Phish shows were confronted with precisely executed music involving ongoing storytelling and improvisation played on a tiny stage in front of wildly enthusiastic fans. John Paulska, who would go on to work as Phish’s manager for the better part of two decades, described his first impressions of the band in Phish: The Biography, written by journalist Parke Puterbaugh:

“There was nothing casual about what was going on there,” Paluska said. “People were really into it, and I felt like probably a lot of people felt over the years when they went to their first Phish show, which was that there was a lot of already established understanding that I didn’t know anything about.”

To us, that ‘03 Atlanta show was a revolutionary milestone. I jumped higher off that lawn than I had ever jumped before when Trey signaled the opening riff of “You Enjoy Myself.” We’d arrived, but to the majority of the other phans in attendance that night I’m willing to guess the show—and maybe even that “YEM”—felt like just another Phishy moment in time. No revolution about it.

Then, Miami NYE ’03 was announced. Ben and I failed to get tickets initially but ended with twice as many as necessary at the last moment. In the highest balcony of the arena, the first set of that show was joyous. But it still felt removed—too far away, too Other. At set break, we managed to sneak into a lower level on Page’s side of the stage. Seating was out of the question here. The aisles were overrun with every imaginable breed of Phishhead. I remember a lone security guard treading in this sea with a smile on her face. Or maybe I smiled for her. And then a “Divided Sky” late in the second set sent me leaping to the rafters, almost as high as that Atlantan “YEM.” A song that is short on words but long on love, “Divided Sky” has some of the deepest roots of any Phish song. Off of Phish’s first real album, Junta, this song is 10-plus minutes of praiseful, compositional bliss. “Divided sky and the wind blows high!/Divided sky and the wind blows high!” Trey and Mike call and respond early in the tune. The chant is a ritual from Gamehendge, Trey’s senior thesis/mythical wonderland. In better times, before an evil man named Wilson arrived, the Lizards—those hapless people who inhabit Gamehendge—sung this song to the heavens from atop a giant black rhombus in the middle of a field in the middle of a forest. Fairytale nonsense, to be sure. In any case, “Divided Sky” is a grand piece of music that showcases the compositional and technical mastery of its composer and its players. Its peaks mirrored my soul that night. The set finished up with a Zeppelin cover. Two encores later, all I could think about was how and when I would see this band—my band—again.

But all was not right in the world of Phish. Just months after the four-night run in Miami, a message was posted on the official Phish website. It was from Trey. Phish was through, he said. They wanted to go out on a high note and it was time for everyone else to get on with their lives. I wrote a little poem that day:

It’s all over folks
There’s nothing left to see
Pack up all your adventures
And go back to your family
It was great while it lasted
But now that time is passed
We were all in this together
Now it’s time take a bath

Simple, sad and on another level, down and bitter. Maybe most Phishheads had grown up. Maybe they’d formed families and maybe they had responsibilities that were more important than this. But for me, for Ben, for our other friends currently stepping through the door, the adventure had just begun. “If we’re all in this together,” I thought, “y’all are gonna have to speed through to the punch line of this shitty joke and start the grooves back up again because I’ve got some youthful energy to expend and years of missed magnificence to make up.”

Simple, sad, dark, bitter. And muddy. Coventry, the name and location of the group’s final performance and festival, was a disaster. People traveled thousands of miles to see the show. But biblical rains inundated Vermont in the days leading up to the finale. The festival site was more soup than solid. Cars couldn’t drive in anymore. Amid a traffic jam that backed up dozens of miles, Mike Gordon announced over the festival’s radio station that everyone should turn around. It’s over. There’s nothing we can do. Just pack up and get out of here. We’ll refund you. We’re really sorry. Go home where it’s dry, where it’s warm, where you won’t have to witness what’s about to happen.

But many people just pulled to the side of the rode and walked the five, 10, 20 miles into the grounds. Despite such dedication, every fan who made it was left to shudder in the puddles and the muck as Phish delivered one of the worst, sloppiest performances of a 20-year career. This is how it ends? The unimpeded bliss of a Phish festival has devolved into this muddy mess? Had Trey really become Wilson?

That was a sad, dark, bitter time to be a wide-eyed fan of this band. But here I am, in 2009, bleary-eyed, grateful. Sadness can sit in the waiting room, darkness can banish itself to a dungeon somewhere. This is the year of Light. This is six years later, and we’ve all stepped back through the door.

Miami blurs by. The light turns red. We stop. I look around for a dollar store. The light turns green. Miami blurs by. Sarah gets a call. A friend, whose house is down the road, has some good news. Her mom is home and wouldn’t mind it at all if we rolled through to shower.

Living in Florida—where everybody and their Jewish mother goes to retire, where communal cross-pollination is the rule, not the exception— can take the fun and excitement out of finding unexpected connections. Usually. Soon as we get to talking at Sarah’s friend’s house, one such connection is found. The friend’s mother has been a United Synagogue Youth director for years. I’m excited to meet this women, excited to be welcomed into her home so warmly, so unconditionally, so unquestioningly.  I’ve probably met her before—at a Southeast regional convention, perhaps, or possibly at International Convention, “IC,” the Bonnaroo of all Jewish youth-group gatherings. I went to that convention in the winter of 2005, in my senior year of high school. It was a weeklong event in Philadelphia, PA. We did more that week than I care (or can remember) to list. But one day I remember because they put us on a bus to the city of King of Prussia to do volunteer work at Somesuch Non-Profit. I can’t remember what we did or why or how because all I could think about that day was the Rhombus. If I had my own car and no schedule and no adult supervision, I would be out combing the streets and hills of this city looking for it. It would be down a road, past Wilson’s Leather Shop, up a hill, when you think you’ve made it, keep going. “You’ll know when you’re there,” Trey directed an audience in December 1995. No doubt, a handful of heads have heeded the call over the years and made the pilgrimage to King of Prussia. But could the origin of so many names and circumstances in The Man Who Stepped Into Yesterday really be that simple? How seriously did the creator consider his creation? Maybe I felt a pit in my stomach that day because I subconsciously knew we’d been misled. The Rhombus wasn’t, isn’t, in King of Prussia. It couldn’t be that simple. The search could go on. The convention could go on. Whatever good deed we were doing could continue. The journey to that mysterious field in that hidden forest would have to wait for another day. I’m struck that there are people, places and things that will come into your life when you least expect and most need them and that often they will have been standing around nearby all along. The Rhombus isn’t in King of Prussia. According to Puterbaugh’s biographical account, it’s in Princeton, New Jersey, where Trey grew up. But when I was there, in Princeton, a year and a half after feeling a sinking-stomach feeling in Philly, I didn’t know this. Micah and Jason were there. We’d driven all through the previous night and day from Gainesville, Fla in Micah’s Prius. Freshman year’d just ended. I’d just finished reading Dharma Bums. I was primed and ready for the road. Our final destination was Providence, Rohde Island—we’d talked to Nat, a friend living and learning there, a few weeks prior but couldn’t get in touch with him from the highway and weren’t sure where, how or if he was—but we made a stop at Princeton’s campus to visit brilliant little Hallie and to watch the enchanted trees there turn wondrous colors. Princeton was beautiful, but the road beckoned and the Rhombus would have to wait another day.

This day, in Miami, Nat calls. He’s nearly here. I tell him he can stay with Ben and me and he asks which hotel and I tell him and that’s that. I’m struck that every turn off of every road, no matter if you’re out there a thousand miles from home, holds something or someone special. There’s always a lesson to learn, a heart-filled favor to receive or give. Or just more trees. You can ride down a road a thousand times before you notice that spectacular oak tree or this side street’s hilarious and irrelevant name. And you will pass and meet and re-meet the people you don’t know but need somewhere down the line. Try. Don’t try. Just be open to the possibility and the road will wind around for the thousandth time and out there, before you, below you and above you, will be the same old world bathed in a holy new light. Or maybe there will just be a hot shower and dry towels when you need them most. Also, a lot of laughter and conversation. And speaking of cars, a couple hours of have passed and we need to get back on the road. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

We pull out of the fenced and gated front, and turn back the way we came. We follow the lines going north. We find pizza. We eat pizza. We get beer. We locate Cahlin’s house. We grab stuff. We find that it’s high time to get to where we’re going. Nat’s already at the hotel. Ben’s on the phone and ready ready ready, so we go go go. Drive, drive, drive. Stop. Drive, stop, drive. Stop, drive, stop. Drive. Stop, stop, stop. We’re here. Stop. Let us out here. The light is green. Here. Stop. Screeeeuh. See you. Later. Bye. Thwak.

Go, turn, go. The Marriot’s ahead. One way, this way, that way. The Marriot’s behind. This way, this way, this way. I see the on ramp to the parking garage, spiral round and round and round, find a spot, swing in. Stop. Door opens screeeeeuh. Door shuts thwak. Cacheengpop goes the trunk. Stuff, so much stuff. Clunk goes the trunk. Where do I go? Turn. Third floor. No elevator, no entrance, just stairs, no up. Where do I go? Down down down. Around around around. See the sliding glass. See the lobby, the lounge, the mirrored halls. See the elevator. Go up up up up up—20s—up up. Out, turn, walk. Stop. Knock, knock, knock. Kachunk, woosh opens the door. And there, Sir White and Saint Nat, and behind them the bay and the lights and Miami from so high, and welcome, dear friend, welcome, to the new, raging night. Let us go.