
Illustration by Micha Huigen
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chapter 1
good clean fun
It’s dusk on the first night of Bonnaroo, and the lotus-eaters are all around us. There are candy flippers in white Moon Boots with impressively lacquered eyelashes, and a portly man with a Gandalf beard who’s magnanimously handing out shot glasses. There are hemp-studded undergraduates whose eyes are pinwheeling from whippets, and a cluster of pixie-winged teenagers who are piggishly snorting Percocet. In the bathroom, dealers do brisk business in various illicit substances, and they bark out their wares the way stadium vendors call out “Hot dogs!” or “Peanuts!” Twice I’ve been offered Molly and tabs of LSD, and a throuple I meet in the bathroom is shilling for the upcoming orgy. Over at the Sparkle City Disco show, a coven of drunken zoomers—many of whom, mind you, were born after 9/11—are all shimmying jubilantly to songs by Donna Summer, pointing stoically to the ground and then triumphantly up at the ceiling, looking rather a lot like latter-day John Travoltas.
In the midst of all this bedlam, somewhere past the Sanctuary of Self Love and the Planet Roo pavilion, I and about two dozen other festivalgoers sit beneath a vinyl tent and talk about how to stay sober. At the moment, we are congregated in an oval of elderly metal folding chairs and are all sitting congruently in pensive, supplicant postures—with hunched shoulders and elbows on knees, our fingers steepled contemplatively and pressed against our lips. Even though the sartorial efforts in this tent are either Phish Fan or Rave Siren (think space buns for the women, think tie-dye for the men), our expressions nevertheless betray a mortal kind of seriousness, particularly as we train our gazes upon the speaker who recounts their addiction.
“I feel so good right now I could probably cry,” one addict says. “And I don’t like crying, because that’s pretty much all I did my first whole year of sobriety.” This is Hillary, a young therapist with corn-silk hair who hails from rural Tennessee. Earlier this morning, Hillary told me that her marathon of sobbing only ever relented when a friend sketched for her a cartoon of a Mohawked angelfish, which for unclear reasons made her lose her shit, and whatever unbudging darkness that had taken residence inside her was swiftly and summarily lifted. This is why, on her leg, she’s got the friend’s doodle as a diminutive tattoo, a constant bodily reminder of the depth of her addiction.
“You know, right around that point at, like, one-thirty today, when we were setting up camp,” another addict, named Brian, says, “I was coming to the end of my rope, and I just needed to sit back and take a breath and remember that I’m not supposed to be here today—because I’m actually supposed to be dead. So every day that I wake up clean and sober and doing what my higher power has in store for me is a grateful day. I joined this festival community back in 2013, and the saving grace of my life has been going to these festivals and working these sober tables. And back in 2020, when it wasn’t there because of the pandemic, I would try streaming live concerts just to get that connection. But it didn’t work, because for me it’s not just the music. It’s being with all of you. It’s giving back to something that gave me so much when I came in and when I desperately needed a fellowship. And so even though it’s rough some days—and goddamnit, it is rough some days—I’m here, and I’m still alive, and I’m living my best life.”
However heart-tugging I find this soliloquy, I must confess that it’s difficult to square Brian’s earnestness with the debauchery occurring all around him. After all, in the distance I glimpse a troika of young women, who are all wearing neon-pink halters and who have teased their hair to Wynonna Juddish proportions, brandishing a handle of vodka and fieldstripping a water bong with seriously impressive adroitness. But perhaps Brian’s serenity in the face of these theatrics is owing to the fact that, earlier this morning, he and I joined the Soberoo encampment, the bone-dry haven at the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival, the four-day concert in Manchester, Tennessee, an event otherwise known for its anything-goes spirit and Dionysian revelry.
Apart from camping together in a labyrinth of tents, Soberoovians—as the local argot has it—hold a quartet of daily twelve-step-style meetings, although they claim no official affiliation with Al-Anon, NA, or AA. Since 2002, this assortment of music lovers has vowed to remain sober for the duration of the festival, and while they cater mostly to veterans of the recovery community, the group also functions as a makeshift relief effort, an asylum for those regular Bonnaroovians whom the week of hallucinogenic indulgence will bring to a genuine rock bottom.
At tonight’s meeting, after the last addict gives their “share,” we stand and clasp hands to deliver the Serenity Prayer, which is a fairly common practice for concluding a twelve-step session. The intimate physical proximity of this causes everyone to issue apologies—for clammy hands and lackluster deodorant, the unavoidable byproducts of this merciless Tennessee summer. After the meeting, a few of the Soberoovians hold a frazzled caucus for the rest of the evening’s agenda. After all, it’s only 9 pm, and the night still teems with weird neon traceries and the eerie Dopplering roar of crowds at nearby concerts.
“Sean, what you doing, bro?” an addict named Dylan asks. (Though we’ve only just met, Dylan will end up being my Virgil throughout the weekend.)
“I’m going to pass out. I just feel fried after setting up camp. I just feel, like, dangerously stupid,” Sean says.
“I’m trying to decide between the Dirty Circus and a shower,” Dylan says.
“Come on,” says one Soberoovian named Cayleigh, a sixteen-year-old who’s attending Bonnaroo with her mother. “Be real: Sexy cowboys or a hot shower?” (Later, I’m told the Dirty Circus has western themes, apparently.)
“It’s gonna be a cold shower, bro,” Dylan says. “If anything, I’m gonna take a cold-ass shower.”
“Okay, but I mean come on,” Cayleigh says. “Think about it … sexy cowboys. They show their butt cheeks and everything. It’s in the House of Yes.”
“I’ll admit that the House of Yes does sound pretty cool,” Dylan says.
“It sounds consensual, I guess,” Sean says.
I’ll be the first to acknowledge that this picture of addicts and alcoholics—who are right now swaddled in loads of garish tie-dye and who have abruptly started grooving to the song “Pony” by the artist Ginuwine—runs counter to the joyless caricatures of this demographic that have become dominant at this time: the catacombic meeting spaces in dank church basements, the drooling hagiography of Mr. Bill Wilson, to say nothing of the pain and self-abnegation involved in relentlessly declaring your powerlessness. And yet these joyfully teetotaling people are the vanguard of a newly popular movement, an avant-garde of abstinent revelers who have eschewed the shroud of embarrassed anonymity and who insist it’s possible, even without intoxicants, to have the kind of cut-loose, notional fun that can be both ecstatic and life-altering. Soberoo turns out to be one of many recovery communities that have popped up at recent festivals—there’s Soberchella at Coachella and Anonymous Village at Burning Man—but it has its earliest precursor with something called the Wharf Rats, a squadron of Grateful Dead fans who started assembling at shows in the early 1980s, abstaining from various substances while jamming to the music they loved. (I don’t mean to seem cruel, but I rather innocently assumed that intoxication was pretty much a prerequisite to actually liking this music.) Kindred associations have sprouted up among other fandoms—Phish followers have the Phellowship, for instance—but good old Camp Soberoo was the first official organization, the first group of teetotalers to garner festival endorsement.
And yet for all their lucid assurances of gaiety and merriment, I myself remain not so easily convinced. As someone who’s been sober for the past eleven years, I’ve largely jettisoned any hope for experiences that are Dionysian. What this looks like in practice—I am embarrassed to admit—is a life that I’ve described to friends as lamentably geriatric. When I stopped drinking at the age of twenty-six, I was somehow teleported into the regimens of my own eventual senescence, watching as friends gloried in their youthfulness and experimented with psychedelics while I’d kill weekends at the library with the dusty tomes of the Romantics. On weekends I’d fall asleep sometime before 10 pm—usually in front of Seinfeld reruns or episodes of 60 Minutes—only to wake in the morning to a bombardment of drunken texts. Invariably these would be accompanied with froggy-lidded selfies—pictures of sozzled friends—clearly taken amid the glitz of a nightclub or the murk of some faddish establishment.
Gradually, my life became sumptuary and monastic, but this was more or less a survival tactic, since my own bouts of addiction had, throughout my twenties, left me with a contrail of two suicide attempts. Better for me to stick to a wholesome life program, maintaining a safe perimeter around bars and hazardous revelers. Part of the reason I have come to Tennessee, then, is to understand how former addicts and alcoholics could live their lives this way, rolling the dice with their sobriety in a Boschian festival environment. After twelve hours here, I’m worried this will be a doomed spiritual adventure, as if I were some overconfident NoFapper who heads to the Playboy Mansion, promising himself nothing more than a chaste, innocent weekend. Could I possibly make it to Sunday night while maintaining my sobriety? And what did these Soberoovians actually wish to gain here?
“Well, do you think you’ll have fun this weekend?” Dylan asks me. He’s loitering outside my tent while I change into a new T-shirt (every night this week will feature Dantean levels of humidity, and by Sunday my tent will house a moraine of deeply fragrant laundry).
“Jury’s still out. You guys are gonna have to show me a good time.”
“Oh, you’re definitely gonna have a good time,” another Soberoovian, named Jonathan, says. On his head is a bucket hat rife with mushrooms and aliens, psychedelic motifs that on a sober person are more or less the sartorial equivalent of a priest dressed as a dominatrix.
“I would venture to say,” says Lexa, who’s rummaging through her luggage in search of butterfly pasties.* “No, I would wager a million dollars that in the end you’re going to have the experience of a lifetime.”
chapter 2
raising spirits
Beyond my principal inducement for attending Bonnaroo—i.e., determining whether such an experience could be meaningfully endured while sober—I was also interested in the broader appeal of these festivals, namely as kilns for political utopianism and catwalks for self-expression. Overnight camps like Bonnaroo—and with it, places like Coachella, Burning Man, Electric Forest, etc.—turn out to promise more than just a safe, welcoming sanctuary for unbridled libertine carousing. Instead, what they offer is much more fundamental, a cleansing of perception, a wholesale spiritual rejuvenation. The obvious precursors here are the tent-meeting revivals of the Second Great Awakening, where scores of flagging believers tramped to God-haunted countrysides to take part in massive outdoor spectacles, ones meant not only to enlist newly ensorcelled congregants but also to perform CPR upon those scores of toilworn Christians who’d grown disenchanted after the Enlightenment.
If the comparison between a music festival and a tent-meeting revival strikes you as harebrained or overextended, then consider the following statements of these various Bonnaroo artists, who themselves have noticed a similar spiritual resemblance. During a concert in 2018, Childish Gambino told the members of his audience that “this is not a concert. This is fucking church.” Or consider the press conference where Phil Lesh, the late member of the Grateful Dead, when asked about the emergence of music festivals, said this: “In the nineteenth century, they had town camp meetings. Whole towns would go to camp out, play music, and pray . . . that’s kind of what this has become. . . .”
Of course, sites of “collective effervescence,” as the sociologist Émile Durkheim calls them, don’t always make good on their glittering, resuscitative offers. Since at least the 1990s, scholars of festival culture have tended to fall within two interpretative camps: those who view places like Bonnaroo as theaters for civic engagement and those who see them as nothing more than vacuous, neoliberal escape hatches, chances for overworked Americans to don pasties or banana hammocks in a limply misguided gesture of pseudorevolutionary catharsis.
The 2022 festival was happening at a moment when the country’s spiritual energies (wellness, life hacking) had been concentrated increasingly in the precincts of “New Sobriety.” Bar menus in every major American city were annotated with craft mocktails spiked with adaptogens, and YouTube swamis like Andrew Huberman were proclaiming that alcohol was a poison that hampered cognitive performance. While a casual onlooker could be forgiven for rolling the Soberoovians into this lifestyle fad, it quickly became clear to me that there was a marked difference between their commitment to temperance and the whims of New Sobriety. Many of these latter trend hoppers were what’s known, in twelve-step parlance, as “California sober,” a dig at those who attempt a more “nuanced” approach to abstinence, one that does not prohibit, say, the nibbling of THC gummies or the occasional cerebral cleansing of an ayahuasca ceremony. They were responsible for corny observances like Dry January (and its chastened rebrand, Damp January), as well as a spate of books about “mindful” drinking, as though the national substance-abuse crisis could be cured with rounds of belly breathing. They were everywhere at Bonnaroo, happily slurping cans of Liquid Death, their faces dewy with the glow of self-actualization. Unlike the Soberoovians, few of these fashionably abstinent revelers would deign to identify themselves as addicts or alcoholics. Indeed, the altars at which they worshipped were not the sedulous moral inventories found in twelve-step recovery, but the mosh pits of “conscious clubbing” and the ecstasies of morning raves.
Sobriety, much like the festival itself, had become a hotbed for catharsis—or a misguided crack at transcendence. The cultural historian Barbara Ehrenreich contended that the existence of mass festivals can be a tonic for grievous states of melancholia and widespread disenchantment. The “black gall” and depression that overtook Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, she suggested, could be attributable not only to the desolation of the modern economy but also to the disappearance of yearly folk celebrations. Throughout history, these mass gatherings were suppressed by the Catholic Church and insecure democratic governments, which worried that sprees of ecstatic reverie would foment social revolution. She referred to the despondent French historian Jules Michelet, who lamented an adolescence without the thrill of the annual festival:
My childhood never blossomed in the open air, in the warm atmosphere of an amiable crowd, where the emotion of each individual is increased a hundredfold by the emotion felt by all.
Over the preceding few years, it’s become glaringly apparent to me that our own moment suffers from a comparable disenchantment. It wasn’t that everyone around me was some psychological case study for the meaninglessness of existence, but in my day-to-day interactions with colleagues and friends, I noticed an unmistakable uptick in nihilism and depression. By way of evidence, consider the revolving door of students who appeared in my office, looking slovenly in sweatpants and panda-eyed with exhaustion, occasionally given to weeping at their feelings of disappointment. “I guess I wanted to ask you,” one girl said, “whether you think my life will ever turn out to be something more than this.” (For all the vapid chatter about this era’s impending vibe shift, with writers penning squibs about the nature of Gen Z optimism, clearly those authors hadn’t actually spent time with the members of this generation. Hadn’t the surgeon general just characterized sadness among young Americans as a national “epidemic”?)
In milder cases, the disenchantment would manifest in casual conversations, when it seemed like every topic degenerated into Netflix recommendations. Meanwhile, my inbox was surfeited with “Weekend Watch Lists,” with endless suggestions about “what to binge next,” as if the only viable kind of leisure in this country was pixelated spectation. This was precisely the prediction that the French theorist Guy Debord offered in 1967, when he warned that we’d become a society of the spectacle, passive observers of mindless enchantments, drowning out the routine humiliations that we passed off as our existence. Interestingly, Debord believed such a society would emerge only in “an epoch without festivals,” which lent credence to Erhrenreich’s idea that the festivals might save us.
Except, as far as I can tell, our era suffers no dearth of saturnalias or impoverishment of celebrations. In fact, it’s entirely possible that, decades from now, historians will regard the present moment as the Age of the Festival. And so it may well be that our endless sacraments of self-care and communal transformation are nothing more than the symptoms of a deeply noxious culture, one that is desperately trying to heal itself through the ablutions of mass catharsis. Of course, I did not have much hope that Bonnaroo would offer spiritual nourishment in the Ehrenreichian sense, but I was curious about the Soberoovians, who seemed to occupy a curious place at the festival and appeared to commit their lives to a different set of values. Their sobriety felt less like escapism than it did a perceptual advantage, and in the end, it turned out that they alone could properly diagnose us.
chapter 3
peer pressure
To arrive at the Farm—the seven hundred acres that comprise both the dozen or so music stages and the sprawling Bedouin campgrounds—is to go down the utopian rabbit hole and enter a Seussian portal. Past the entrance gates, where grim, gloved security guards search your car and belongings, there is an expansive capillary system of dusty gravel roadways on which hordes of Bonnaroovians are already starting to migrate. (As a sober person, I have to say that I take an unreasonable amount of pleasure in leaning James Deanishly on the edge of my front bumper and watching as the security guards fruitlessly search my car. I even make a little show of whistling insouciantly while the drug dogs paw my luggage, a melody that annoys the frat boys next to me, who are watching the search of their minivan with barely concealed trepidation.)
The sheer immensity of the tent city is jaw-dropping, a hinterland oblivion of yurts and RVs, all stretching into the distance as far as the eye can see. Here and there are thickets of flush summer trees, but rare is the spot of shade to be found in the natural landscape. Instead, sun shelter must be taken under various home-brought conveniences, be they rain tarps or conical structures, or, more commonly, the sunblocking tapestries of a psychedelic fashion. The ones I see mostly valorize Phish and the Grateful Dead, but I do see some for Lizzo and (um, why?) Guy Fieri. The latter says flavortown in bold black letters and features a shot of Fieri himself, who is for some reason pointing Uncle Samishly at the camera.
So far the standard festival raiment among the roadway’s itinerants are “dong sarongs” for the men (basically, a cotton penile fig leaf) and G-strings for the women (the breadth of which resembles the width of off-brand dental floss). By tomorrow evening, nudity will become so ubiquitous that it will have lost all erotic novelty, and I will gaze upon the shapeliness of Peloton-whittled bodies with what can only be described as a prelapsarian sort of innocence.
Even though there are more than a hundred people staying in Camp Soberoo, I end up getting placed alongside the organization’s core crew, those who will be manning the vendor tents and staffing the recovery sessions. Most have camped together at Bonnaroo before and have thus attained a kind of familial rapport. Serving as Camp Soberoo’s de facto patriarch is Patrick, a fiftysomething jam-band fan who is fetchingly bald and is one of the most genial people I’ve ever met. Patrick has been at the helm of Soberoo since the festival started in 2002, although back then the meetings were more or less impromptu and took place in the doilies of tree shade not far from the Who Stage. Among the Soberoovians who are also based in Louisville, I hear several enthusiastic testimonials for Patrick’s weekly step class, a kind of graduate-level seminar on the canon of recovery texts, which he apparently leads with an air of Talmudic seriousness. One Soberoovian sponsored by Patrick describes it by saying, “It’s like: be at the church every Sunday at six, and have your fucking step work done or you’re gonna get behind. And, man, you don’t wanna get behind. And dude, it fucking saved me. That guy saved my life.”
The other parental figure is Grace, a big-eyed, large-hearted woman in her late thirties who monitors everyone’s hydration levels with a stern but loving vigilance. Back home, Grace has two kids, Hazel and Dexter, the latter of whom is still breastfeeding, which is why during interstitial moments throughout the week, between concerts or recovery meetings, you might traipse out into the common area to find Grace sitting topless in a flimsy nylon chair and speaking over the percussive suction of an especially loud breast pump. (When Grace’s kids arrive for a visit on Friday—her family lives only an hour or so away—her three-year-old, Hazel, will start disobeying her mother, hightailing it to other campsites and cutely greeting other campers, at which point Grace will become so exhausted and discombobulated that, when Hazel runs off for the third time that night, she will warn, with a mortal seriousness, “Hazel! If you don’t start listening, then Bonnaroo is over!”)
Also from Louisville are Jonathan and Sean, two dudes in their late twenties who are charismatic dancers. Apart from their essential, lovable bro-ey-ness, Jonathan and Sean also offer compelling evidence that one’s verbal quirks and stonerish rhythms tend to endure beyond one’s cessation of substances, since their elocutionary habits are, more often than not, downright Cheech and Chongish. Of course, both guys are now committed pink-lunged teetotalers, but that doesn’t stop them, while setting up camp, from having the following two-hander:
“Bro, I had to make tent stakes out of sticks. ’Cause, you know, like, I forgot the metal ones.”
“Shit, you’re like Bear Grylls and shit. Did you drink your own pee afterward?”
“Nah, I’m special and everything, but nah, I didn’t do that.”
For recovery-community old-timers like Grace and Patrick, attendance at the festival has less to do with personal transformation or spiritual enchantment than it does with being of service to their community of fellow addicts. And yet some of the younger folks in camp—or those who are at least very new to sobriety—tend to have more or less the same motivations as me and are attending this year’s Bonnaroo as a thanatotic gambit, in which a cornucopia of drugs can be on offer, and yet somehow, despite everything, they can still be present. It is almost as if finding a way to stay alive inside the turnstiles were a dress rehearsal for the burdens of everyday existence. Grace puts it to me this way: “So, Barrett, this is how you can make a bunch of lifelong friends. You go camping together in fucking Hades.” It is an apothegm that reminds me of another AA truism: religion is for people who are scared of hell, while spirituality is for those who have actually already lived it.
Among those Soberoovians with whom I share similar motives are Lexa and Dylan. Lexa is five foot ten and thirty-nine, a mother of one son and an addict of marijuana. To everyone she meets this week, she will recite what she describes as her “ongoing weight-loss journey,” an Iliad in which she used to weigh over three hundred pounds but lost over half that through myriad natural remedies, which include epic stretches of walking and mindful systems of eating. Now she’s a personal trainer at a wellness depot and trains as a bikini contestant in the Organization of Competitive Bodybuilders (think pumpkin-hued spray tans and grinning, tendon-flexed positions). I’m fairly confident that in a pinch Lexa could heft my flabby corpus directly over her head. She got sober in March 2021, so this is, she says, “all pretty new to me,” which is why I worry that, like me, she might be susceptible to temptation and why monitoring the status of her sobriety will become one of the great personal intrigues throughout the coming week.
Dylan, meanwhile, is twenty-two and has been sober since he was nineteen, soon after he got arrested for drug possession and was suspended from his university. Now he lives in the wilds of Tennessee, on a queer-utopian compound that his neighbors call Hippieland, where most of the other residents are members of the faerie religion. They’ve given up their Christian names and now go by odd connotative monikers like “Snacks” and “Pure Wet.” “Then there’s this other dude who calls himself ‘The Nameless Man,’” Dylan says.
“Why does he call himself that?” I ask.
“He says it’s like a humility thing, like getting rid of your ego or whatever. But I’m always like, man, if you wanted to do that, then you should’ve called yourself Richard. Because if you go around town calling yourself The Nameless Man, then you can sure as hell bet that you’re gonna get some attention.”
The breadth of Dylan’s brilliance proves difficult to capture. A few points of evidence: When I tell him my sobriety birthday is March 16, he says, without even pausing, “Oh, so the same day that Cassius and Brutus got amnesty for murdering Caesar?” Whenever I totter back from the restroom, he invariably greets me with queries like “Hey, how was the bathroom? Do you wanna know the molecular difference between margarine and butter?” It seems important to remind you that he is only twenty-two, and yet the nature of his allusions is bafflingly astute. His Instagram handle is @isobelgowdiescuck, as in Isobel Gowdie’s Cuck, a reference to a seventeenth-century woman who was accused of witchcraft and thereupon prosecuted by the government of Scotland. “So what are your feelings about private property?” Dylan asks me before revealing that his own personal politics are just to the left of Trotsky’s. He tells me that the banner color of his high school was crimson, so in 2018, for the senior photo, when he and his fellow graduates were asked to evince school spirit, Dylan, like the good comrade that he is, wore a red T-shirt emblazoned with the familiar hammer and sickle. Explaining the prank, he says, “Well, I mean, they didn’t specify. They just told us: ‘Wear red.’ Plus, didn’t they know it was the anniversary of the October Revolution?”
As we set up our tents, Dylan regales me with the saga of how he hit his bottom, a nightmare of reversed fortunes that sounds straight out of Flannery O’Connor. As an enterprising first-year student at Tennessee Tech University, he was studying fish and wildlife with ambitions to work as a park ranger, but he was also scheming with a roommate as an up-and-coming drug dealer, selling weed and pills to the packs of affluent white kids who liked to party on campus. Both he and the roommate were flush with cash, and their dorm room was furnished with the appurtenances of small-time traffickers. Next to textbooks on religious studies and notes for a chem final were scales for measuring baggies and felonious amounts of narcotics.
After he was suspended from school, Dylan was left with what he thought were soul-withering life prospects. “I was like, I can never go back. I can’t get a degree or get a good job. So I just thought that life was pretty much over for me.” In the last month he was getting high, he went to the ER three times, where they gave him Zofran and Ativan and urged him to try rehab. In time, he was living on the street and eating meals through the Helping Hands program of Tennessee’s Putnam County. Bear in mind that he was only nineteen at this point. Eventually, things were so precipitously in decline that he found himself dialing up the local suicide hotline. They called the cops on him and had him admitted for ongoing ideation, and once he got out, he went into a halfway house and has been putting his life back together ever since.
It’s hard to say what exactly so compels me to Dylan. But within a few hours of my arrival, I sense between us a high-wattage kinship, a mutual skepticism of the utopian promises of the festival but an equally forceful longing for an enchantment that is meaningful. It’s for this reason that I attach myself to him like a barnacle, particularly as we make our way that night into the neon maw of the festival.
chapter 4
field sobriety test
Because intoxication is pretty much a given at Bonnaroo, all the venues have names that are comical and cruel—the This, That, and the Other Tents; the What, Which, and Who Stages—so that, as you’re walking around campus and eavesdropping on conversations, you end up bearing witness to Abbott and Costello–grade confusions. To wit:
“So that band is playing at which stage again?”
“Exactly.”
“No, I’m asking if it’s that one.”
“No, not That Tent. It’s Which Stage.”
“That’s what I was asking you, bro!”
And so on. Even for a sober person, this makes navigation unreasonably arduous and thus explains why Dylan and I get lost several times during our frequent peregrinations. It also explains why I keep seeing festivalgoers wielding large totems and placards, all of which say stuff like: if you’re lost, fear not, just come dance with us.
Dylan and I meet Lexa in a thumping fluorescent rave tent in a campground called the Beyond. Lexa has promised us that even despite our mutual sobriety, the festival will trigger in us a swift alchemical transformation, where we “will come to realize that the level of humanity that exists here cannot be found in the everyday.” This little koan is more or less a gloss of the Bonnaroovian Code, a set of directives and injunctions that we’re all supposed to follow as denizens of this campus. These include “Prepare Thyself” (i.e., don’t be a mooch), “Respect the Farm” (um, don’t litter?), and most importantly, “Radiate Positivity” (which underscores their assumption that social change is effected through an attitudinal alteration).
When we arrive, cliques of Bonnaroovians are boogying all around us, with gyrating hips and noodly limbs, a jiggling hypnosis. One woman sidles up next to me, wearing a bedazzled fedora and butterfly pasties, and tells me that my chest hair resembles the state of Wisconsin. Even though she doesn’t mean this unkindly—she more or less delivers it as a matter of settled opinion—it’s difficult to see how this qualifies as “radiating positivity.” Then the DJ drops the beat, and the tent becomes a sea of obvious venereal longing. As the lotus-eaters writhe and spin, I am routinely spritzed with centrifugal drops of their ample perspiration, a kind of patchouli-scented mist that doesn’t exactly conduce to ecstatic soul communion. I watch one cannabis lawyer from Maine—whose car broke down on the way here and who thereupon purchased a sedan in rural Virginia—make squares around his face in the same deadpan way that Madonna did back in the early 1990s, the voguing she appropriated from the balls of Harlem drag queens.
Meanwhile, Lexa undulates with vitality, to the point where if I didn’t know she was sober, I’d think she were on ecstasy. Every so often, she veers in my direction only to yell into my ear therapeutic exhortations. “Breathe this in,” she says, wafting the air toward her in a cosmic doggy paddle. “This is the energy you’ll take with you throughout the coming year.” I try to take a huff of this invigorating ozone only to get a lungful of an adjacent raver’s BO. This of course sends me backpedaling out of the fray, where I find Dylan watching the mayhem from the perimeter of the dance floor. He says, “This reminds me of this one time when I drank a half a cup of peyote and then, maybe like an hour later, shit my pants on the dance floor.” I ask him how he can come back from that, from where he musters the courage. “Dude, to be honest with you, emotional-investment-wise, I’m at like seventy-five percent. For whatever reason, I can’t remember how exactly to actually embrace the music. Not like Lexa, anyway.”
Why is it so hard for me to disappear in this moment? It’s not just the tiresome surfeit of Lexa’s woo-woo abstractions, nor is it the fogbank of the dancers’ collective odors. Rather, there’s something deeply misguided to me about living at this moment in history and believing that wearing face paint and twirling rave sticks can be an avenue toward catharsis.
Because he’s twice referenced Camus in the six hours I’ve known him, I ask Dylan whether he still identifies with the philosophy of pessimism. “Not anymore,” he says. “Maybe when I was younger and more disillusioned with reality. Like with Camus, I was like, Oh, wow, this guy really knows what’s he’s talking about. But in sobriety, it’s been important for me to recognize my psychological baseline, because if I start thinking too much about the postmodernists, I can start to feel suicidal again and just focus only on the really negative shit.”
Tramping back from the Beyond, Dylan tells me about his parents, both of whom are still dealing with various kinds of addiction (his dad with heroin and Percocet, his mom with booze and meth). Throughout Bonnaroo, his mom will be suffering from what Dylan suspects is a meth-induced psychosis, which is why he tends to dodge her calls at every chance he gets. “When I was young, whenever I’d hear something at night, I used to wake up freaked out because Mom and Dad were always fucked up, so there’d be a lot of loud noises whenever they got rough.” I picture him there in his rumpled twin bed, his eyes pinched to asterisks, listening to the violent clatter ricocheting across the kitchen—slammed cabinets and shattered dishes. Eventually, their darknesses began to catch up with them. Dylan tells me that, within a few months of each other, both his parents were sent to prison after repeated DUI charges. At the time, Dylan was thirteen and living with his grandparents, kindly folks in their dotage who’d endured his parents’ addictions. And yet Dylan’s own dalliances with substances started soon afterward, beginning with an interest in booze and weed and escalating very quickly to a dependence on Oxy 80s. “I got into narcotics when I started hating myself,” he says, “which is why I loved them so much. But once that happened, I got sick. And then I was like, I don’t care about having a good time. I just don’t wanna be sick. But in rural Cookeville, once you get strung out, access to stuff isn’t exactly rampant, so it’s like every day you’re dope sick as a matter of routine occurrence.”
Given his skepticism of capitalism, I ask him whether he thinks a festival like Bonnaroo can effect a genuine transformation. “There was a book I can’t remember the title of,” he says, “it might have been The Great Divorce by C. S. Lewis or it might have been by this priest out in New Mexico named Richard Rohr. But anyway, it was talking about this woman who once got on a subway, and right before the door closed, this homeless guy walks in, and she was looking right at his face, and as soon as the door shut behind him, everything around her changed. She started really seeing everybody’s faces, starting seeing all the old ladies and imagining their entire lives, playing out every single thing that had led them to this moment, and she burst into tears and was in this spiritual window for like three days, full of nothing but gratitude. And then after the three days, she could remember the experience because it changed her life, but she could never return to that exact perspective. And that was just on her trip home from work, you know what I’m saying? She wasn’t on drugs, no holotropic breathwork or whatever—no, like, engineered experiences for her to have that moment. So I don’t know that she would’ve had that, you know, if she went to something like this. I don’t know if you can orchestrate that. The thing is, like, looking around here, are these people having those types of genuine experiences?”
“Maybe they’re better at just slipping into it,” I say.
“Or maybe it’s just us who are too focused on the negative shit?”
chapter 5
life without substance
I don’t mean to sound like a Debbie Downer, but since I’m trying to describe for you what it feels like to attend a massive outdoor music festival without the aid of hallucinogenic indulgence or the balm of full-proof alcohol, I therefore feel justified in outlining and characterizing some of the more upsetting personal experiences that I’ve endured during this time. Because I’d suggest that when you’re sober, all the festival’s utopian enchantments begin to sort of seem both grotesque and dystopian.
See, for instance, the Farm’s camping accommodations, which do not exactly yield a kumbaya mentality. Instead of offering reasonably appointed housing options uniform to all attendees, the festival offers tiered camping “experiences,” which function as a spitting image of the current U.S. housing crisis. At bottom is GA, or general admission, camping—where one finds the sort of communal interdependence of low-class precincts everywhere—sharing tools, assisting in domicile construction—a Rockwellian sense of samaritanism that only ever emerges in distressing matters of survival. But then there are a bunch of invidious distinctions that start to separate the GA campers. For instance, those Bonnaroovians who’ve opted for various glamping amenities can apparently get a spacious “darkroom tent” (offered in two- or four-person dimensions), replete with cots and a queen bed, and a special “personal cooling unit.” (Regular GA campers lack an available power source, and by Dylan’s estimation, the class-related entendre is definitely intended.)
But this is pretty much the iceberg’s tip when it comes to class distinctions, because festivalgoers can also purchase either VIP or platinum experiences. To be honest, I’m so swampy and disgruntled in my Soberoo tent as I write this that I don’t even want to recount for you these various upper-class experiences. The luxuriousness of the VIP campgrounds becomes apparent upon arrival because these affluent campers are immediately afforded complimentary concierge services. This is to say nothing of the campground’s patio and lounges, which have several big-screen TVs with a livestream of festival happenings, plus a maze of loungers and couches where spirits and beer are available for swift and easy purchase. There is also a VIP spa, where any misalignments or inflammatory jimjams, doubtlessly caused by rampant nocturnal boogying, can get lovingly kneaded into oblivion during courtesy chair massages. This is to say nothing of the VIP campground’s hair-and-cosmetics salon, which offers compris stylings of updos and bohemian braids, plus body and face applications of a winsome biodegradable glitter. Meanwhile, the platinum experience features everything included in the VIP experience except they also have golf-cart transportation and all-inclusive meals, which are fastidiously arranged by a chef named Tim Love and include things like semifreddo with berries, coconut-banana pudding, and really toothsome wedges of a tres leches cake.
At some point, I notice that the relationship between the festival workers and the rest of the Bonnaroo campers goes a long way toward articulating the thinness of their utopia. For instance, as Dylan and I head back to Camp Temperance that evening, we will meet one festival worker who, even though it’s only Friday, has somehow already logged over forty hours this week. As we meander through the campgrounds, she tells us about the star-crossed circumstances of last year’s Bonnaroo festival. From what I understand, the powers that be decided that the Old Testament–type rains, one of the many sopping aftereffects of the baneful Hurricane Ida, had so thoroughly flooded the festival’s campgrounds that they pretty much had no choice but to go ahead and cancel. Things apparently got so bad that, as a truck tried to pump out rainwater and clean up the mud, tractors that were towing cars out kept getting stuck, prompting crews to bring in even more vehicles of extraction (the capsized results of which you can probably already imagine) until the whole thing sounded like some sort of evocative spiritual lesson. On the day the head honchos canceled, this employee was sitting at an intersection and watching as cars kept skidding off the gravel, prompting her and her friends to make a sign on weather-hampered cardboard that read abandon all hope, ye who enter here, and don’t let off the fucking gas.
If this sounds like it resembles the grimness of the World War I trenches, then just wait till you hear what she excitedly tells us next. Because when the organizers canceled the event, it was less than forty-eight hours before the festival’s commencement, which meant that whole schools of the most enthusiastic Bonnaroovians were already lined up outside the entrance and were eager to gain admission. When they heard that the festival had been eighty-sixed, these patrons were so desperate for their spiritual-cathartic fix that they pretty much refused to accept this and, according to the employee, started to bum-rush the entrance. I picture a scene of a mob of disgruntled Bonnaroovians pressing their faces against the latticework of the gate and poking their fingers through the openings like animal claws through a cage. Apparently, they were making avowals that they would kill them all. “Some of the staff got a little bit insane because, well, you know, it was just a very heated situation.” Allegedly, some staff started rioting and burned down a tent, a conflagratory act of protest in the face of dismal conditions. She tells me about one friend who, in the embers of the kerfuffle, proceeded to have a psychotic breakdown, one that reminds me of Martin Sheen’s famous motel-room crack-up scene in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. “My friend locked himself in the staff RV, and he’s high, and normally he doesn’t get high, but the Roo was canceled, so he was like, ‘Whatever.’” And so when the patrons stormed the gate like the rebels at Versailles, this poor man was more or less stratospherically high. “And he’s texting me like, ‘What do I do?! What do I do?!’ And I’m like, ‘Find a fire extinguisher! Find a weapon! ’Cause if they come in and roll this motherfucker, you wanna come out swingin’!’ Again, I can laugh about it now, but I was not laughing then,” she says.
If this isn’t enough to prove that the utopianism at Bonnaroo is notional and without substance, then allow me to point your attention to the bathroom services on campus. The warren of porta-johns at Camp Soberoo’s Plaza 7 is a claustrophobically narrow little grotto of about a dozen loos that within an hour of my being here Dylan and I decide to rechristen the Château de Bonnapoo. (This neologism isn’t—or isn’t entirely—mean-spirited but mostly emerged from our annoyance with the hokey festival organizers, who had an expressed tendency to respell everything with this cutely themed permutation. See, for instance, the hourly meditation services at the “Art of Living” retreat center, which were advertised in their little pamphlets as daily “Roo-juvenations.” Equally annoying, at least to me, was the name of the evening meal, which allegedly included the world’s longest salad (although I saw no rep from the Guinness World Records office there to actually confirm it) and which was known among the festivalgoers as a meal of “BonnaROOTS.” The continual deployment of this punny on-brand spelling eventually became so ubiquitously hackneyed that it soon took on a summer-camp lameness, the same sort of aw-shucks, gee-whiz humor that you tend to expect from oversolicitous stepfathers or ingratiating high school coaches. It thus explains why an ongoing source of amusement among the Soberoovians was to come up with prurient alternatives to these stupidly themed appellations. Hence Dylan’s late-night declaration of wanting to find some gentlemen for “assorted bodily introosions.” I myself get into the linguistic mix when I suggest that Bonnaroo’s treatment of its sanitation workers doesn’t exactly strike me as “posootive” or “altrooistic.”)
The Château de Bonnapoo is maybe a stone’s throw from my tent, which, while convenient for gastrointestinal reasons, nevertheless creates an unpleasant olfactory experience. Not infrequently throughout the weekend, my alarm clock will not be auditory so much as it is odiferous. But remember that this is just a description of Bonnapoo at a distance. Because when nature finally calls and you approach with tentative steps, the indignities begin to compound with the speed of credit-card interest. It starts first with being made to wait in a serpentine line, where other festivalgoers are squirming with abdominal urgency, which, given the depth of hangovers among them, isn’t exactly something that you would soberly care to observe. One kid keeps bouncing exigently and says to the dude next to him, “I’m telling you, man, this is really not good.” The other unpleasantness is that the smell doesn’t relent as you inch closer to the entrance—somehow you’re unable ever to get inured to it—and that the hollow plastic of these makeshift latrines amplifies the digestive noises of their cavernous unlit interiors. (That’s right—no lights in the waste stations, which is why, at night, savvy bathroomgoers will stand in line with little glowing headlamps, as if defecation were tantamount to a bout of late-night spelunking.) Let us pass over in silence the rest of this process, except to say that my trip to the Château de Bonnapoo involved my opening the door to find the walls of this vestibule splattered with what looked like a Jackson Pollock of shit, as if whatever man who’d previously been in here was wrestling with a grizzly bear while completing his colonic exertions. That or maybe he was just on a really gnarly trip.
It’s at the Château de Bonnapoo that I finally recognize the racial dynamics on campus, because while the festivalgoers themselves are emphatically Caucasian, the service workers at the latrine stations are predominantly people of color. Perhaps it’s easy to overlook this if you’re tripping on psychedelics—after all, it’s easy to radiate positivity if you’re hopped up on LSD—but if you, like me, are in your twelfth year of sobriety, it becomes harder and harder to ignore these queasy-making realities.
If I’m at such disquieting pains to enunciate these deprivations of the festival, it’s only in an effort to show that they end up being glittering instantiations of those same injustices and hierarchies that plague us outside the turnstiles. Because even Bonnaroo’s injunction to radiate positivity doesn’t end up striking me as subversive or salutary, since it’s more or less a perfect analogue to our standard approach to inequality, where everything from political correctness to employer-employee relations relies not upon structural action but upon nothing more substantive than an attitudinal alteration.
Transcendence, in the end, is not the festival’s ambition. Instead, it is to profit off a national attitude of paralytic disenchantment, an accretive, widespread feeling that late-capitalist life in this country is vacuous and without meaning, and that for reasons that pass understanding we have all come gradually to believe that our ultimate spiritual undertaking is not the cultivation of personal integrity or a system of other-directed ethics but the attainment of weekend frivolities and a glitzy, remunerative profession. It is a tacit but profound sadness—a national epidemic—one you can see in all the intoxicated faces that are roaming around this campus. It is a humiliation of consciousness in which we see ourselves as nothing more than a herd of citizen-consumers, as the poet Virginia Konchan has called us, instead of taking ourselves to be the possible children of God. And yet the festival itself was supposed to be a cure for this. It would jar us from our self-delusions and return us to our senses. And so it may well be that the festival’s greatest irony is that its greedy capitulation to myriad corporate sponsors has sapped this event of its revolutionary potential and has turned this possible Xanadu into yet another consumerist venue, which ends up creating a disenchantment of the same vein that had brought most of us to the festival in the first place. And so, in the end, the festivalgoer who rather naïvely believes that Bonnaroo may redeem them, who believes it might offer a spiritual resuscitation, can only end up toggling between cynicism and sincerity, between enchantment and disenchantment, a life of vacillation without responsibility or commitment, until the whole convolved thing begins to look like an addiction.
chapter 6
actions taken in this program
“So what happened with that mushroom guy last night?” Patrick asks, sitting under the communal tent of Camp Soberoo the next morning. It’s just past dawn, and a few of us are slurping coffee and swapping last night’s stories.
“He’s good,” Brian says, “His friends came over this morning and said, ‘You guys have no idea how much you helped him last night. We really appreciate it.’”
When I ask what happened, the guys tell me about how, as they were leaving the Soberoo tent last night, these girls from the Planet Roo “Academy”—where there are granola-crunching workshops on tending to the environment—poked their heads into the Soberoo tent and asked Brian and Patrick to come and talk to their friend, who was walleyed on psilocybin and croaking with trepidation.
“We were like, We’d be happy to share our experience, strength, and hope with him,” Brian says.
Allegedly they found him curled on the ground.
“We talked to him for a good twenty minutes, you know, telling him, You’ll be here tomorrow, you’re on a smooth ride, you’ll be all right.”
“I related to it,” Patrick says. “It’s like you can only imagine the worst possible future. It’s like that mushroom spin zone where you believe the world works against you and you’re only destined for failure.”
“And so we were like, Your friends are here. They love ya. Listen to them. You’ll be all right.”
“He was probably just out there working all day, and after his shift was over, he was gonna go see music and figured it was the best time to get high. And so he probably just misdosed is what happened. Went too heavy on it. And the other girl who ate them was fine, which probably only spun him even further, like, Why is she fine on them and I’m not? So I felt bad for him. We used the word ‘love’ a lot and talked about the good things in his life.”
“And we just happened to be there,” Brian says.
“I mean, it helped me, weirdly—that’s all I know,” Patrick says.
“I mean, that was a gift from God for us,” Brian says.
“I walked out of there going, I’m not eating mushrooms today,” Patrick says.
“I walked out of there going, I helped somebody today. It’s music time!”
I find, quite to my surprise, that the Soberoovians are not blind to any of the aforementioned disenchantments—which, I admit, have pushed me right up to the edge of a bourbon-slurping relapse—and yet they are somehow managing to live their lives without cynicism or detachment. One salient example of this comes from one of my favorite tandems in camp—Michelle and Cayleigh, a mother-daughter duo from rural Tennessee. They came here with the Cookeville contingent, which includes Dylan and Grace, and are sleeping in a diminutive tent directly across from me, a proximity that makes me privy to both intrafamilial sentiments and standard domestic squabbling. (“Mom, I locked the keys in the car.” “Cayleigh, quit lying, I’m gonna bop you, I swear to God.”) Michelle is in her late thirties and is kind-eyed and wary. Every day this week, she wears a dark, sweat-encrusted visor (the faded white lines of which resemble the peaks of a mountain range), plus black tortoiseshell glasses whose lenses are always smudgy. Michelle is one of those timid, diffident persons who does little kindnesses that no one else seems to notice—cleaning up a stack of plates after a hurriedly made breakfast or setting out people’s towels to dry after they head into campus—and then absconding from the site of altruism before anyone knows she did it. And to her teenage daughter, she extends a Gandhi-like forbearance, particularly in the face of vulgarities and other behavioral churlishness.
Consider, for instance, later that morning, when a cluster of us are riding in Brian’s pickup as we head into the Centeroo campus. Pretzeled in the truck bed are me and Dylan, Hillary and Lexa, and Michelle and Cayleigh, and after Dylan explains the type of guy he’s attracted to—“Okay, really skinny, covered in tattoos, looks like he has just gotten clean from drugs. It’s like, ‘Ooo, baby, felony with active warrants and child support due? Hey, I got a cabin in the woods, and it’s not on any map’”—Cayleigh interrupts him to ask, “Doesn’t ‘slong’ mean penis? Slong, like, Hey, how big is your slong?” (She pronounces this term as if she were slurring the cheerful valediction, “So long!”) Michelle, her mother, turns to me and says, “I’m sorry if her questions ever bother or offend you.” “Did my slong question offend you?” Cayleigh asks, a bit hostilely. For a while, the truck bed is silent, and we listen to the engine grumble as we putter across the campus. Eventually, we pass a man who is bedazzled in a rainbow-colored blazer with no shirt underneath, and his only bottoms are a pair of snug tie-dyed briefs. He’s holding a wilted shred of cardboard that reads: send dick pics. “Ooo, he sends dick pics,” Cayleigh says. “No, no,” Dylan explains. “He wants you to send him dick pics.” “Oh, get his Snapchat,” Cayleigh says. “Nah, I let it go by,” Dylan says. “I’m pretty sure my digital footprint is gonna ruin my life.” “I send dick pics,” Cayleigh says. “How do you send dick pics?” her mother asks. “With my big slong,” Cayleigh says. “Cayleigh,” her mother says, sighing with exasperation, “It’s pronounced schlong.”
Cayleigh, as I mentioned, is sixteen. She’s forthright and waggish, and her hair has been dyed a mélange of blond and aquamarine. She stays up late most nights making TikToks—one morning I woke at 4 am to see her and her mom’s tent complexly aglow from the light of her flickering smartphone—and for reasons that are unclear to me, she’s under the curious (and obviously misguided) impression that I’m reporting on Bonnaroo for a podcast, and keeps enjoining me to start every episode with the following salutation: “What’s up, my bitches!” Her misapprehension is mostly owing to the fact that sometimes I will whisper voice notes into my phone, but after a certain density of comments regarding my podcast listeners, whom Cayleigh continually refers to as my “bitches,” I decide that I will try to disabuse her of this notion, a conversation that ends up functioning only to reveal the distressing state of media literacy that exists in this country.
“What’s the title of your podcast?” Cayleigh asks.
“I’m not doing a podcast,” I say. “This is for an article.”
“That’s the same thing,” she says.
“Not the same thing,” I say. “A podcast is just people talking.”
“That’s what you were doing. You were talking into that thing.” Here she nods quickly in the direction of my recorder.
“That was just a voice note,” I say.
“So you’re just gonna listen to it and then write that shit down? That’s fucking lame. So, wait, this is for the newspaper?”
While I have no direct knowledge to corroborate or confirm this, I nevertheless suspect that Michelle’s unswerving tolerance of her daughter’s R-rated antics is perhaps because Michelle did not treat Cayleigh so well when she was in active addiction. (At one point, Cayleigh will let slip that, when Michelle was still using, she was grievously abstracted, “not really there,” and “not really present.” It was from this perspective that Michelle’s laissez-faire attitude toward her daughter, which struck me as far more sororal than it did maternal, started to seem terribly poignant and ended up being an enduring source of pathos throughout the entire week.)
chapter 7
my shaman fernando
By midafternoon on Saturday, I’m wandering the festival listlessly, feeling rather a lot like an Ishmael lost at sea. Dylan, who’d been riding sidecar with me all week, had a shift at the Soberoo table this morning, but since then, he hasn’t been responding to any of my texts. If I’m especially worried about this, it’s because, in response to all the consumerist venues, he had said this: “I mean, for me, I have to do certain things in order not to sink. It’s like if I get in too bad of a mood, then I’m gonna be right in the middle of the crowd, and I will be at a show every hour until this thing is over. And I mean, like, for me certain thoughts are dangerous, and if I get completely out of it, then I can get to a point where I’m like, Why, yes, stranger! I would love to snort ketamine off your neighbor’s genitals!”
When I swing by the Soberoo tent to see if I can find him, I watch drowsy-eyed festivalgoers stumble past the Soberoo sign with openly contemptuous expressions. Those Bonnaroovians who actually stop for a chat tend to fall into one of two demographic phyla: either they themselves are sober or have a loved one who is, or they arrive at the tent intoxicated and slurringly express bewilderment. One man, who looks like a recently furloughed roadie for Crosby, Stills, and Nash (Harley-Davidson tank top, gray ponytail, melanomic suntan), swerves up to the table and asks, “Soberoo? What in the heavenly fuck is Soberoo is what I’d like to ask you.” This constant oscillation between addict and skeptic gets interrupted only by a few notable exceptions—a species of people who don’t have a “problem” with substances per se but who have nevertheless chosen to attend the festival sober. This was the case for one Michigan-based couple, Stu and Faith, who approached the Soberoo table in Sixties-era couture. They tell me they have embraced the New Sobriety movement, having mutually decided, fairly recently, to swear off alcohol and drugs. And yet, when I ask them what prompted this, Faith says, “Well, we just did this sacred ceremony of something called 5-MeO-DMT.” Perhaps confusing her listener’s expression for one not of incredulity but of fascination, Faith continues: “This is basically like the psychedelic that comes from a toad. It’s all about healing and connecting back, and so we did that, but it takes three to six months to integrate the experience because it stays in your body, and technically, you can activate it at any time and you’re high off life, so you don’t need substances”—she presumably means more substances, I think.
The paradox of Faith’s avowals seems utterly lost on her, so I ask her how she first learned about this salubrious psychedelic. “So, basically, I found it through this shaman I follow on Instagram. He lives down in Mexico and works with a lot of tribes down in South America, so everything is ethically sourced from the frogs and toads down there, and then he comes up here and does little tours essentially. And he helps people heal through the sacred ceremony. And so you have to go on a super huge cleanse the week before, since you have to be sober.” Finally, she’s registered my hoisted eyebrows and lip-bitten circumspection because she clarifies this by contending, “Yes, okay, technically you’re doing psychedelics, but it is in fact a medicine. . . . At the start of the ceremony, you get blessed with the pipe, and then your shaman goes, ‘Look into the sun,’ and everything just quickly kind of dissipates and you just kind of fall back—like collapse weightless or whatever, and so then I’m just sitting there in my shaman Fernando’s arms, and I’m just like barely holding my head up and looking at the sun, at which point I realize, like, this is what gives us life, this is the ultimate life source, and, you know, it’s not normal to be cooped up in buildings all day, working and slaving away when we could be outside. Like, I’ve been coming to Bonnaroo since my early twenties, and I love that it’s all about radiating positivity, and I love that my shaman could give me another experience to amplify that feeling.”
“Plus, the other thing,” Stu interjects, “is that it’s extremely effective in treating addiction in the first place, like, you can realize that you don’t need to do substances after you take this medicine.”
I ask, with barely concealed derision, “So, do you guys think you’ll end up doing DMT again?”
“Oh, yeah, there’s no doubt,” Faith says.
“Absolutely,” Stu says.
What a shithead I’d been, thinking I could withstand this, interrogating this epicureanism without succumbing to total sadness. I had passed off my sobriety as sturdy and unprecarious, but I am now so dispirited by this interaction that I find myself pushed right to the edge of a full-scale, catastrophic relapse. It’s at this point that I notice that my circumnavigations of the Bonnaroo campus have kept veering closer and closer to the Jack Daniel’s tent, and it’s in this fugue of anticipatory drunkenness that I decide if I ever do hear back from Stevie Nicks’s publicist (Stevie, of course, is a paragon of a rock star in sobriety and is performing at this year’s festival as the must-see Sunday-night headliner), I’m going to saunter backstage and pull an Annie Leibovitz (who famously claimed to have gotten Fleetwood Mac to relapse with a casually proffered baggie of some mind-altering substance). A vision overtakes me of Stevie and me dancing saucily while tussling chiffon hankies, that we will take turns huffing lines from each other’s daintily upturned pinkies, and that she’ll be so piercingly amused by the way I’ve abandoned Camp Soberoo that she’ll ask me to join her onstage to do a heart-stirring version of “Second Hand News.”
But what finally snaps me out of this hypnagogic trance are two drunken kids who are staggering around the vendor tents like just-debarked seamen. They are mumbling nonsense to each other that will elude their memories later. What were we even talking about, man? And, weirdly, it’s my annoyance with these kids that ends up preserving my sobriety, because in a flash of insight, I am struck by a paradox that feels like a revelation—namely, that it is the escapism of the festivalgoers themselves that is causing me to escape them, that their intoxication is making me so sad that what now seems like a spiritual solution to the problem of disenchantment would only end up being a self-defeating intoxication. This is how it was when I was still drinking. Alcohol felt like a trapdoor out of the meaninglessness of existence, but in my drinking the way I did, at the expense of family and friends, I had ensured that my life had lacked any enduring significance. Out of cowardice disguised as contempt, I’d thought I had escaped the disappointments of the world when in reality I had become a part of the world’s disappointments. And it’s this fear, of becoming what I hate, of rehearsing the same behavior that plagued me throughout my twenties, that is enough to propel me toward the campgrounds and go in search of Dylan.
chapter 8
the war on drugs
That evening, after returning to Camp Soberoo, I find Dylan lying under a picnic table, seeming morose and blue. Over the western hills, the sun is setting, and all the other tents around us are hushed and empty, which lends the adjacent campgrounds an evacuated quality. An undulant cloud of flies is haunting a plate of cookies, and I take a seat across from Dylan and ask if he’s all right. He tells me he was listening to a meditation app called Insight Timer “where this old British lady was talking about yoga nidra, and I pretty much fell asleep about ten minutes into that.” And yet I can’t help sensing that something else is bothering him—perhaps a hectoring call from a co-worker or another of his mom’s texts?
“I guess I’ve been thinking about how I’ve gone the past year and a half without thinking too critically and about how maybe my life has been, like, correspondingly easier. Maybe because I’m not spending so much time inside my head, you know?” he says. “I don’t know that I’ve been happier. But by any objective measure, my life has been easier.”
It’s hard not to hear this as a subtle dig at me—that maybe all my talk of consumerist disenchantment has started to affect his sobriety. I now feel sick about trying to enlist him in this, about always reflexively turning to sneeringly un-fun cynicism. In light of my revelation at the beer tents, I can’t help thinking that my distrust and suspicion of the festival has been just as palliative and dissociative as any good drug is. It may well be that my cynical deconstruction of the Bonnaroo campus has been providing me with what is in essence an existential Binky, that all my abstract intellection is no less escapist or ego-drenched than the intoxication of the Bonnaroovians. There are, after all, many different ways of maintaining avoidance.
“It’s like, I don’t know,” he says. “This place—it’s not something I’m spiritually invested in. Like, I make jokes like, ‘Don’t look behind the curtain; this place is actually wondrous,’ which is just me fucking with you,” he says, “because, I mean, for me, it is what it is. I don’t think I have any illusions about what’s really going on here, but I think a lot of people do. They don’t want you to write about the fact that every day when you’re walking to a show you’re excited about, you’re blasted for fifteen minutes with absolute shit smell. Or that it’s pretty much only black people who clean the Bonnaroo toilets. And I don’t know, if they read it, those people will probably be like, ‘Well, he’s disillusioned, and I see it the real way,’ which gives them a safe out from having to reframe their thinking. And then they’ll go back to licking the toad with their shamans or whatever.”
He laughs, a booming, sonorous laugh—not in a judgmental way but perhaps at the human condition and all our ridiculous attempts to feel a little bit better. Behind him, on the trail leading into campus, a clot of Bonnaroovians pass a bottle between them, a glinting container of rum they need two hands to handle.
“Because it’s like I can’t lick the toad,” Dylan says. “Because I know I won’t feel better at the end of it. So it’s like, What is my equivalent of licking the toad? Well, maybe it’s like teetotaling Nietzsche with his ‘Oh, no alcohol for me, I prefer my suffering raw,’ or whatever. I mean, I get why, in your line of work, you have to be a conduit for the fucking suffering, not just to get paid, but that’s what you have to do so you don’t get soul-sickness. And so then you have to be ready to be an outlet, you have to make yourself available to it. But it’s like, Why do I have to do it?”
At this, he laughs again.
“Which is why I’m really scared to relapse,” he says. “Because I wouldn’t wanna stop, you know what I’m saying? I think I would want to die pretty much. Because it’s already hard enough to emotionally handle situations or, like, bounce back, let alone trying to imagine how I would respond if all the years I’ve been learning to build enough of an exoskeleton of self-acceptance to get through the day were just suddenly obliterated. Maybe this is why I go to like five different church services. I mean, what did you do when you first got sober?”
My mind flashes to those early days of sobriety, when I would wake up every morning invariably at 4 am, brain zapped with regret and trembling with self-laceration. I tell him how, wrapped in threadbare blankets, I’d spend hours completing crossword puzzles to divert my ailing head, how eventually I started running twice a day, until my legs had slimmed to a doelike twigginess, until I was too tired to act upon my plans for self-termination.
But before Dylan can respond to this, Grace and her family come trundling back to the Soberoo tent, a raucous little dust cloud of glee and high-pitched merriment. It happens that Grace’s husband, Josh—a computer-programming instructor wearing a mug-shot-ish expression, which belies the fact that he’s trenchant and hilarious—is actually Dylan’s sponsor, which might explain why Dylan clams up and lets his face resolve itself into his classic sardonic deadpan. This performance thickens when Grace approaches and wonders if she’s maybe interrupted something, whereupon Dylan turns to her and says, “No, but you know what’s crazy? It’s like we’re all here together and becoming close friends, but maybe like eighty years ago, all of us would’ve been lobotomized for various troublesome reasons.”
There’s a potent silence as Grace takes this in. “I suppose that’s true,” she says.
“Anyways,” he says. “I gotta pee.” The non sequitur sends Grace into arpeggios of laughter, but once Dylan is out of earshot, Grace discloses to me that she’s begun to regard Dylan as one of her own children.
As we head into the festival, the Bonnaroovians around us engage in a pageant of self-expression. We pass a skinny man who is dressed as a vagina and who is unsurprisingly garnering a stream of jocular attention. “Don’t be such a pussy,” one man yells. “You are what you eat, huh?” says a leather-studded woman. Another Soberoovian yells, “Hey, come here, Vulva.”
Josh says, “It’s interesting to see so many people shorn of their civility.”
“This is nothing,” Dylan says, turning to me. “You should tell him about those Michigan kids who shilled for DMT.”
After I do, Josh pauses and squints inquisitively, gazing into the middle distance with an attention-holding silence. Then he says, “I feel like DMT is just the easier, softer way to a genuine religious experience. You know, something that would otherwise be achieved through a life of diligence and devotion—a lifestyle and an awareness, you know what I’m saying? It’s like buying a gun or something. It’s a glimpse of something tremendously powerful with absolutely zero context—no, like, scaffolding around it. No sacrifice. Like they haven’t had to sacrifice anything in order to actually experience it. But all of us,” he says, panning his hand across this little procession of Soberoovians, “well, I mean, each of you guys knows what all of us have been through.”
Everyone has gathered at the Soberoo table, and the air is now charged with a weird autumnal mood, the desperate, clutching nostalgia of a ten-year high school reunion. Discarded feathers from someone’s boa seesaw toward the ground, and the low sun slants down on us in a glare of molten brown. Patrick saunters over and says, “Dude, you have to see this.” He brandishes his smartphone and cues up a news story about Tre Hargett, Tennessee’s secretary of state, who was booked on drunk-driving charges after leaving Bonnaroo yesterday. “Who knows?” Patrick says. “Maybe next year this guy will come and camp with us.” Meanwhile, Cayleigh comes over to show me the results of her afternoon’s exertions, which have apparently included making a half dozen bracelets with letter-printed beads, all of which she gives to Dylan and all of which are littered with various genital obscenities. thicc ass, one says. schlong, says another.
The last time I see Lexa, she’s crying and gives me a hug, as if she were already seeing the festival through some future retrospection. “I don’t know why I’m crying or why I’m like this. But did you have a good time? Did you end up feeling it?” And even though I didn’t, even though I can’t help interpreting her sadness as some ineffable dawning awareness that the festival is almost over and still it didn’t save her, I tell Lexa that I did, that how can I help but feel it?
But in thinking back to the festival now, I see that I was mistaken, because I keep returning to one moment when it actually begins to happen—when I’m standing with the Soberoovians at the War on Drugs performance. Because when I am swarmed on all sides by sweaty Bonnaroovians who are all bouncing stupidly to the placid riffs of the music, some of them even raising their arms like evangelicals during a praise chorus, I start watching as Hillary and Brian and several other Soberoovians start swaying slit-eyed, too, and I begin to find myself divided between the week’s reigning spiritual moods, trying to somehow fake it till I make it, in the spirit of recovery, but also worrying that this would be giving into an evanescent catharsis. And yet it’s just as the War on Drugs begins playing a song called “Red Eyes,” itself a signifier of either grief or intoxication, that Dylan leans over to me and says, “Remember when you’d run twice a day so that you wouldn’t commit suicide?”
“Yeah,” I say.
“Well, these guys,” he says, pointing to Hillary and Brian, “these guys have to do this.”
(A couple of weeks later, Dylan will send me a text explaining that his stepdad, himself a deeply troubled addict, had been found dead, having killed himself after a protracted two-year relapse. The next day, when he arrives at his stepdad’s trailer, the fire pit out front will be piled with smoldering trash, and empty bottles and crack pipes will decorate the front steps. “There’s shit on both beds and all over the floor,” he says, “Like actual shit—not like drug paraphernalia—which I know is what happens when you drink a gallon of vodka literally every fucking day, but still.” Fearful for his own sobriety, I will call Dylan immediately, and as his voice gets split by a dark shard of grief, he’ll tell me about how his stepdad once taught Dylan the rudiments of carpentry, and at the end of this thumbnail eulogy, Dylan will thank me for calling and will tell me that he is glad to have met me and that he’s taken heart in the fact that he’s found someone who seems relatively happy but who still nevertheless has the same thoughts as him.)
The War on Drugs now plays its final number, and what I can’t yet account for is the little epiphanic realization that this moment has in store, because as the sun blazes down on us in a sacred way and the hills of Tennessee become lush and glinting, everyone keeps dancing, and a new light begins to gradually break upon me, and it’s through this barely opened aperture of nascent spiritual perception that I start to see each jiggling Bonnaroovian not as some drug-induced rube who’s been duped into consumerism, but as the living incarnation of thousands of minute experiences, a roil of choice and consequence, of genes and providence, people who did not choose to be born in this moment, where the work of each day is an existential torment. If nothing else, this week has furnished me with fresh evidence of all the variegated ways in which we are suffering at this moment. And yet while most of us have chosen lives of evasion, it’s the Soberoovians to whom I look for spiritual instruction, because right now, in front of me, they are somehow still here and still defiantly alive, despite having endured what Chekhov once called the long, long days and the long, long nights. They have learned to make a heaven out of Hades, not through positive attitudes or craven intoxication, not through good spirits, but through the daily un-fun spadework of other-directed commitment. I watch now as Dylan puts his arms around Hillary and Brian, with the stage lights hitting their faces with a weirdly ethereal tinge, and if I find myself impelled to join them in this moment, it’s because they have learned to make a place where, despite the chaos all around them, they can remain clearheaded and present, where they can somehow, despite everything, actually want to live.