I suspect that I’m under no legal obligation to show him, but I dump the contents on the garage floor anyway. With the shiny tip of his black trooper shoe, he nudges the dirty underwear and socks, a crumpled jacket. Meanwhile, I squat and finish fitting the patched inner tube inside the BSA’s rear tire. My hands are nearly black with road grit and chain grease. Stomach growling hungrily, I’m dirty, sweaty, and profoundly tired.

Without another word, the trooper leaves. A jagged-edged sense of reprieve spreads through me, along with a reminder that, the festival over, I’ve returned to the real world, where drugs are illegal, I’m a member of a despised minority, and no one over thirty can be trusted. I need to get home and see if there’s news from San Francisco about my physical.

And, maybe, a reply from Robin to my last letter.

But I know that, after what Barry laid on me last night, I won’t ever be able to look at my tiny sliver of the universe in quite the same way again.

“Where’s Tinsley?” Arno asks. It’s late afternoon and he, Milton, and I are in the GTO. The BSA’s rear tire went flat again on the Cross Bronx Expressway near the old school for the deaf that looms up from the marshes like something out of The Addams Family. There were no gas stations around there, only a diner. I called Arno and then settled down to enjoy the most delicious cheeseburger and fries I think I ever ate.

When Arno and Milton got to the diner, they looked at me like I’d just returned from the moon. Turns out that the festival dominated the national news over the weekend. Did I know that New York State had declared the festival a disaster area, and several newspapers suggested it be quarantined as a public health hazard? Or that by the end, a local police chief was quoted as saying the attendees were the most courteous, considerate, and well-behaved group of kids he’d ever encountered? Or that the commander of the state troopers said he was shocked that a crowd that size could go three days with insufficient food and water, and yet not a single act of violence or theft was reported?

Maybe if I weren’t quite so wiped out, I’d find that interesting. I tell them that Dylan never showed and Tinsley went off with Bernard, but that she was pretty decent about how she did it, and maybe it was just as well, because I managed to find Barry. Then I ask Arno what happened to his acid.

“Two thousand hits down the drain. The sewer system’s full of tripping turds.”

“They punish you?”

“You don’t think that’s punishment enough? I had a chance to get rich, man.”