“And if I never come back, tell my mother I’m sorry.” --Tame Impala

The year following my first Bonnaroo experience found me in a much different place than where I was when I first passed through those gates. I had started school at and then subsequently dropped out of what I thought was my dream college before even finishing a semester, moved back home to Connecticut to live with my parents, and held two very unfulfilling retail jobs. It was the opposite of what I had hoped to achieve and I felt like a complete failure. I was in a rut, and I needed to get out.

Ever since returning from Bonnaroo the year prior I had told of my experiences there to basically anyone who would listen. My tall tales were pleasing to relate, and made me feel like I had some sort of untouchable experience that gave me the edge I had so desired for most of my young life. In the time following my withdrawal from Fordham, it was the only constant source of appreciation the past year had afforded me.

When the lineup for the festival’s 2006 edition was released in the spring, I immediately received a call from Ben asking me if I was planning to attend the festival that time around. I was hesitant at first, just like in 2005, but for different reasons. What if I couldn’t handle myself this time around? What if the weather was the same—or worse—than it had been the previous year? What if my first experience wasn’t really as great as I had made it out to be in my head, and I was just setting myself up for another disappointment?

Frankly, at that point in my life, I don’t think I had the potential of disappointing myself more than I already had in the previous months. When I started at Fordham I thought I was going to excel, like I had in high school. I was pursuing my dream of becoming an actor, and I was convinced that Fordham was the place to do it. When things went sour, I turned to vices that were detrimental to my physical and mental wellbeing, and when I finally surrendered to the suggestion that I was in the wrong place at the wrong time, I felt a sense of relief. This relief was swiftly coupled with a subsequent sense of despair.

I had lost myself in those few months at Fordham, and I was frantic in my attempts to get it back. And since Bonnaroo was the first place I really felt comfortable with a transitional version of myself, it seemed like it was the best place to find what I was looking for. It was the best place for me to regain my confidence, to connect with the world outside of the small, suffocating environment that I found myself in once more. It was the best way to get me on the right track again.

Around the time the Bonnaroo 2006 lineup was released was when I found out that I had been accepted to The New School’s undergraduate liberal arts school, Eugene Lang College. I would be returning to New York that fall for a fresh start, trying once again to get my acting career off the ground. I had to be careful yet confident. I started to question everything pertaining to my older self.

During my downward spiral at Fordham, I often thought that perhaps my first Bonnaroo experience was the cause of me bottoming out, but I realized later that Bonnaroo might have in fact been my saving grace. Even when I felt my worst, when I was isolating myself and drowning my anxieties in booze and drugs, I knew that there was a community out there that would accept me for who I was, despite my shortcomings. I separated my drug use at Fordham from the sort of substance-based behavior I allowed myself at Bonnaroo as two opposing forces: one was coming from a place of darkness, the other from a place of light and joy. The activities I indulged in at Bonnaroo were not rooted in insecurity and self-loathing, and so I was comforted by the fact that I could still have fun without losing my head. My time at Fordham was rooted in desperate lunacy; at Bonnaroo it was the complete opposite.

The lineup for the 2006 edition of Bonnaroo featured many more familiar names than it had the previous year: Radiohead, Beck, Sonic Youth, Ben Folds, Tom Petty, Damian Marley, Grace Potter, Matisyahu...these were all acts that I recognized (still not too much on the diversity front, but that would change in the coming years). The opportunity to finally see Radiohead alone was almost enough to get me down to the farm again, and so I decided to return after all. Through my crafty storytelling, I had convinced my best friend Pookie, my hometown friend Kurt, an older high school friend named Beth, and a friend from Fordham (who also had dropped out that year, for different reasons) named Mary to come with me.⁹

I decided this was going to be my year. I was ready to share the experience with new friends and make new and lasting memories with them. Having gone the year before, I felt like I was king of the castle, like I could navigate the festival with ease and that I would be able to impart my wisdom to my eager and excited friends. It was something I felt like I was still good at, despite my academic failures. This was the year that I was going to make Bonnaroo truly mine.

⁹ Ben ultimately decided against going back in 2006; he would only return to Bonnaroo one other time, in 2007.

***

We left Connecticut in two cars the night before the festival: my trusty van and Beth’s little blue Mitsubishi Lancer. This time around we had no plans to stop at any hotel on the way; we were just going to drive through the night, a mission made possible by our strategy of switching drivers every so often and napping at rest areas.

Night had already fallen by the time we pulled out, meaning it was rather late (this being a week or two before the summer solstice, during which the sun sets at around eight PM).  Unlike the previous year, we hit virtually no traffic along the way, most likely due to the later hour. We were cautious in taking our carefully timed key bumps of blow until we were in western New Jersey, where the streetlights became more and more sparse, as did the bulbs illuminating the curtains of headlights and taillights that surrounded us. We would stop for gas and snacks, during which time some people would move between cars to keep the company we held somewhat varietal. This strategy lasted us through Maryland, and soon after crossing the Mason Dixon we began searching for respite.  We finally found a rest stop in Virginia to nap at, surrounded by other cars packed to the brim with camping supplies and the like that were evidently headed for the same destination as us – it was sort of like a dry run for Bonnaroo.

Just as the sun started to peek over the horizon, we started getting our stuff together – feeling a little woozy, of course, but our youthful constitutions allowed us to shake it off and press on.  As we drove further and further south, the temperature began to rise. At first it didn’t seem like it was too out of the ordinary; this was June in Tennessee after all. I didn’t notice anything strange until the heat became too bearable to keep the windows rolled down. It was right around the time we hit Knoxville and stopped for a quick bite at a Huddle House (like Waffle House but much greasier) that I realized something strange was happening with my van.

As Pookie and I got back on I-40, we quickly discovered that the air being blown out of the vents was no longer the cool A/C that we had enjoyed earlier in the day. It was hot and sticky, much like the outside air that surrounded us. I toyed with the knobs and levers that controlled the temperature, furiously pounding the A/C toggle button to try to get it working again, cursing louder and louder with each failed attempt. Finally I gave up, and since we needed gas, I elected to pull off the highway and deal with it later.

We stopped at a Shell station between Knoxville and Chattanooga, and as I pumped the gas I waited for everyone to finish using the bathroom and gathering last minute supplies. We got back in the car and I plunged my keys into the ignition and turned. The Odyssey came to life, but only after a few tries and some notable hiccupping. Once the engine was finally engaged, I saw that a new decoration had popped up on my dashboard: a red light in the shape of a rectangle, wearing a + on one end and a – on the other. It was the battery light, and when I saw it pop on, I thought to myself: Aw, shit...Well this can’t be good.

I pulled the van into one of the spaces along the wall away from the pumps and put the van in park. I glanced over at Pookie, and she looked back with a slightly worried look on her face.

“What do you think is the matter?” she asked after a few moments of tense, sweaty silence.

“I have no idea” I admitted. Car maintenance was hardly my forte. The only things I knew how to do when it came to my vehicle were pumping gas and adding oil or windshield fluid. I think I had just learned how to change a tire, but I was pretty bad at that too.¹⁰

I decided to call my dad, considering he was the one who taught me my limited knowledge of car maintenance as it stood. I asked him if he knew what was possibly plaguing my car, and he put me on with a guy who worked for him at his engine distributor named Mike, who happened to be a mechanic. Mike did his best to guide me as I pored over the jungle of parts that lived underneath my hood. After a few minutes of exploring the inner workings of my van like I had never done before, he came to the conclusion that my A/C compressor was busted.

“If you can live without it, just turn the A/C off until you can have someone look at it in person,” he told me. I agreed and did as he told me, and when I turned the car back on, the battery light went off. I breathed a sigh of relief and we continued down the road, deciding to take US-41 for the majority of our remaining journey, to avoid the festival traffic but also to limit the amount of energy needed to power the car along.

We were about ten miles south of Manchester when the battery light came to life once more. I muttered a string of curse words to myself as I tried again to toggle the A/C on and then off again to get rid of its nagging stoplight red glow. Those attempts failed, but the car was functioning so I tried not to let it bother me. Eventually we found our place in the line and didn’t face any more problems. That is, until we were deep in the line, and the car suddenly shut off completely.

During this whole ordeal, Pookie was on the phone with Beth and/or Kurt in the car behind us, relating our woes and worries until we were approaching the tollbooths. When the car finally died, I could not find a way to get it turned on again. We tried getting it in neutral and pushing it, but that became more of an ordeal than it was worth. Thankfully, I had a pair of jumper cables stashed in the back compartment that housed the spare tire. Kurt hurriedly pulled up Beth’s car next to mine, connected the cables, and voila! The Odyssey came back to life once more. We made it a few more yards in the line and up to the tollbooth when it suddenly died again.

“FUCK!” I screamed, which everyone around us heard, as the windows were all open, letting in the heat and letting out my expletives. I heard a few people snicker to each other, darting their eyes in our direction. I had Kurt jump the car again, although this time we tried a more creative approach, as he turned the Lancer around so our hoods faced each other. We connected the car, got it turned on once again, and kept the cables connected as Kurt slowly reversed and I crept forward. This worked until we were pulling around a bend in the road, Pookie steering while I coaxed Kurt backwards, guiding him so he didn’t accidentally drive into the ditch lining the side of the road or hit one of the festival-goers on foot. When we reached the bend, one of the people walking by tapped me on the shoulder.

Spoiler! The van had to be towed into the grounds.

“Dude, uh,” he stammered. “There’s like, a bunch of green stuff dripping from your car.” He pointed to the spots of dirt directly behind the van, which were now sprinkled with little dots of bright liquid that looked like spilled highlighter ink.

I recognized the fluid immediately, even despite my lack of mechanical know- how. It was antifreeze, and upon spotting this, I instinctually told Pookie to pull to the side of the road and turn off the car. She did, I unhooked the cables, and turned on the hazards.

We’re totally fucked, I thought to myself, just as one of the volunteer workers jogged up to us.

“What seems to be the problem, guys?” he asked cheerily. I know he was just trying to be helpful and to keep things light, despite our misfortune, but I was a little annoyed at his tone. I tried my best to keep myself composed as I told him what had happened, and even though I was quite snappy, he was more than willing to give us a hand.

“Aw, man, that sucks guys! I’ve had similar problems and I know that they can be a real buzzkill.” It was sweet that he was trying to relate, really. “What I can do for you is get a tow truck in here to get you the rest of the way to your campsite,” he continued, “but it’ll probably cost some moolah, and you probably couldn’t get it looked at until after the festival’s over.”

Great, so I’m stuck with a broken car for the rest of the weekend. I was kicking myself at this point for not getting the car fully checked out before I left, like my father had advised me to. I told the volunteer yes, we’d have the car towed in and deal with it later. I was half-expecting to be waiting on the side of the road for a good hour or so, staring back at the gawking faces pointed in our direction from the comfy, fully operational vehicles that carried them, but within five minutes or so, the truck arrived, hoisted Helga up on its steel haunches, and drove further into the grounds, while Beth and Kurt followed in their car and Pookie, Mary and I walked alongside.

Funnily enough, our campsite was not too far from where the car had ultimately died, maybe a hundred yards or so. What was not funny was the bill for the tow company, which was more than two hundred dollars. As the truck driver presented me with the bill, I was already numbed by anger, and so I shoved a credit card in his hands and told him to call it in. As soon as the bill was signed and marked PAID, I wandered away to find a cocktail that I could sink into for a while, displeased with how my second Bonnaroo was starting.

I was beginning to think that this festival was trying to tell me to stay away, that I didn’t belong there and that I should never come back. Why else would I have to endure this brand of bullshit each time I came? First, it was the endless rain of the previous year (not to mention the almost chronic separation from my friend throughout the entire weekend), and now this? It got even worse the next day when Mary accidentally locked Beth’s keys in her trunk. This year was supposed to be my retribution, my reward for making it through the deluge of 2005. It was going to be the year that I would be able to share Bonnaroo with new friends and make new memories, but it was already turning out to be shit.

¹⁰ This is a skill I am now proficient at, thanks to years of living in New Orleans and falling prey to its many potholes.

It wasn’t long however before things started to turn around. We made due with our limited shelter from the heat, sharing cocktails in the back of the van, the five of us strewn about the twin mattress in back and hanging out the tailgate, laughing and tripping and drinking away the few times between sets when we all found ourselves back at camp at the same time. Then, that Saturday morning, we had a visitor.

He was a mechanic, a local one. He had heard from his buddy at the tow company that there was a car facing some mechanical difficulties. Our vehicle, luckily, was easy to spot, as we had secured a spot right off one of the main paths that stemmed from the road that traverses the grounds between the tollbooths on either side. Also, we were a big blue van with Connecticut plates, covered in bumper stickers that boasted only hints of the vehicle’s actual exterior in the few empty spaces in between. The mechanic approached us, wearing blue, oil-stained coveralls and a stitched-on nametag that simply read Bud.

“I heard you folks were havin’ some trouble with your car, here,” he said matter- of-factly, his deep voice laden with the heavy twang of a born-and-bred country guy. We all looked up from our warm beers with astonishment, exchanging puzzled glances. Beth immediately started giggling uncontrollably, and everyone else held a perplexed gaze upon the man. He paused as we took in his presence, and then continued:

The year the BRAND NEW tent was broken, and my shirt didn't fit either! [NOT PREPARED] (2008)

“Yes! Yes!” I exclaimed, still unsure how this man had heard of our fate. “The beast won’t start up on its own, and the battery light keeps going on. We tried jumping it, which worked, but only for a minute or two before dying again.”

Bud nodded knowingly. “I reckon I know exactly what your problem is. Pop the hood for me, will ya boss?”

I complied, and he disappeared beneath the hood into Helga’s guts. After about thirty seconds, he reappeared, dropped the hood closed with a clanging THUD, and brandished what looked like a raggedy, rubber headband.

“You’re alternator belt’s snapped,” he said, waving the mangled part in the air for all to see. “By the looks of it, it’s been on its last leg for a while. That drive down you just took was probably the last nail in the coffin.” He examined it once more. “Frankly I’m surprised y’all made it this far.”

“So, how easy will it be to fix?” Kurt piped in.

“Oh, it’ll be a breeze,” Bud replied with a smile. “Should take just a couple of minutes. Not sure if I have the part on hand, but I’ll bring a couple down and see if they fit.”

We all heaved a sigh of relief. He agreed to check back in a few hours, and to bring a long a locksmith’s kit to get Beth’s car opened. Upon his return, as promised, he popped Beth’s car door open so she could open the trunk and retrieve her keys. He tried a few belts for the alternator, none of which fit, unfortunately, but he gave us the name of a shop in town that his buddy owned that could fix the car that coming Monday. Luckily, my AAA membership allowed for the car to be towed out of the grounds on and to the aforementioned shop (why it couldn’t cover the towing that got us to our spot is beyond me), and so after it was safely shipped away on Sunday night, we drove down to Chattanooga to drop Mary off at the airport and camped out at a nearby Best Western. The following day, we drove Beth’s car back up to Manchester to collect the Odyssey, and as promised, she was ready when we got there. Pookie and I climbed in, and we were on our way back home.

***
I would soon learn that no trip to Bonnaroo is perfect. I’ve made peace with the fact that something will always go wrong, one way or another, no matter what you try to do to avoid it. There was one year when I bought two brand new tents at Wal-Mart on the way down, only to find upon our arrival when we finally took them out of the bag that one of the tents’ poles were completely broken. Another year we completely forgot to check the canopy before we left, and discovered that we had left the nylon covering back in Connecticut, forcing us to instead use a beat up tarp as our source of shade, haphazardly latched onto the frame with bungee cords. There was even one year where we had to battle a funnel-spawning supercell thunderstorm, which was one of the scariest moments of my entire life.

All of these mishaps seemed frustrating—even catastrophic—at the time, but in the long run, have become some of my favorite stories to tell. You know when people say, “Just think of how funny this’ll be in a few years”? Well, I can’t speak for everybody, but in regards to myself and my Bonnaroo “hiccups” as I like to call them, I can definitely speak to that. Honestly, the atmosphere of the festival and the positivity it radiates is so pertinent that it envelops you; it’s like a big blanket that morphs into this visceral sensation that everything is going to work out. And more often than not, it does.

The year the tent was broken? I slept in the back of my car. The year we forgot the canopy cover? The tarp worked well enough, and made our campsite easy to spot (I even heard some of our neighbors say to their friends, “Look for the janky-ass canopy near Pod 9...we’re right next to that!”). The year of the tornado? Well, we survived, didn’t we?

Nowadays, a true Bonnaroovian is prepared for everything. [Note the specially made Coozie] (2016)

As it turns out, Bonnaroo was on my side that year. I got a better glimpse of how the community works there, and since I was with my friends (who didn’t run off every morning, mind you) I was able to enjoy myself with the people I had basically hand- picked to join me. Our troubles were daunting at first, but soon fell by the wayside as we surrendered to the comforting glow of Bonnaroo, our sweat glistening as it fell to the ground from the creases in our faces, created by the gleeful trembles of our laughter.

As Pookie and I drove home from Tennessee, recounting the tales of our bad luck, we were already smiling. It was then that I knew I was in for the long haul. Bonnaroo was part of me, come Hell or high water.

Luckily, I had already experienced both, and lived to tell the tale.

The Journey Continues Tomorrow ... Stay Tuned.