I catch Mary Ellen up on my case and tell her I’ve got eleven days until my induction physical. What does she think of smoking cigarettes dipped in ink?

“Forget it,” she says. “The army doctors are wise to that one. The last guy who tried it was sent to a military hospital for three days. When they x-rayed him again, the spots had disappeared and he was inducted.”

Shit! “So what’s my best shot for failing the physical?”

She tells me to hold while she consults the other counselors. I wait, my insides in turmoil, my thoughts going back to Karl, the Vietnam vet. How many more are there like him? There is no fucking way I’m going over there. None.

Mary Ellen gets back on the phone and asks how tall I am and what I weigh.

I tell her, then wait while she does the calculations: “Lose forty pounds between now and your physical. You’ll be exempted as severely underweight.”

Four pounds a day.

Okay, Lucas, it’s time to suck it up and start starving.

Thursday, August 21

It’s a hot, breezy August day. Gusts blow small clouds of fine particles off the mound beside the open grave. This is the first funeral Lucas has ever attended. He is not stoned; he is in disbelief. Or what did Charles call it? Dissociation? And like so many other things he’s heard about and thought he could imagine, it’s something that must be experienced to truly comprehend. The stunning sadness. The wretched emptiness and loss. The simultaneous disbelief and inescapable reality. He is here, but he can’t be here.

Several dozen people have gathered around the grave, Tinsley among them. Lucas is surprised when he sees her but guesses that he shouldn’t be. It’s the first time since the music festival, which the press is now calling Woodstock and treating like a momentous history-changing cultural event.

Particles blow into Lucas’s eyes. People sob. Tinsley’s short diaphanous dress flutters around her thighs. The ends of her long blond hair dance in the breeze. She lifts her gaze to meet his and then looks away.

One day about a year ago, when I hadn’t seen him for a long stretch, Barry turned up unannounced at our front door with Zach and a skinny girl who looked oddly familiar. I was shocked by my cousin’s appearance. He’d lost weight, and his skin had a grayish cast. All three of them were disheveled, their clothes looking like they’d been slept in. They were chain-smoking and jittery.

With a grin that looked more like a grimace, Barry said, “Hey, man, spare some bread?”