The stage goes dark, and the crowd begins to roar with excitement. Milton helps me to my feet. “Train Kept A-Rollin’” explodes out of the PA, and the crowd goes berserk. I stick my fingertips into my ears. It’s the loudest music I’ve ever heard. The spotlights burst on and there’s the band.

“There’s something wrong with their heads!” I shout at Milton.

“They’re wearing cowboy hats!” he shouts back.

The cheering audience is almost as loud as the music. The sound is so gargantuan, so concussive, that the Windowpane has to build a protective glass fallout shelter around my head. From the calm inside, I observe the raging audio typhoon. When preening, prancing Plant and plodding Page launch into “I Can’t Quit You Baby,” you can feel the air rattle. The music batters us like sheets of rain in a storm. A beach ball blows past.

Halfway through “Dazed and Confused,” weird, haunting dinosaur moans fill the night. A spotlight narrows on Page, who is sawing his Les Paul in half. The crowd roars.

“He’s playing with a violin bow!” Milton shouts as excitedly as if the Yankees have won the seventh game of the World Series with a Joe Pepitone walk-off home run.

But the unbearably loud din, and all these pressing bodies, is too much for my double-dosed, hyperaware senses. The glass fallout shelter shatters. Pelted by hailing music crystals, I’m forced to retreat deeper inside my skull until I’m floundering at the edge of a dark precipice. On one side, a bottomless black chasm. On the other, an onslaught of marauding horrors stampeding toward me. Time to sit, clap my hands over my ears, and try to hold it together.

Focus narrows. In the hurricane inside my head, flying mental debris, painful memories, and dark thoughts carom and ricochet. Musclini calling me a goddamn goofball. Robin freaking about the undercover-narc toll collector. Chris using a cigarette to burn black leeches off his legs. Mom pulling me toward train tracks. Tinsley pulling my hand into her blouse.

Jimmy Page’s sawing guitar is grating iron against stone, then the screech of locked train wheels. John Bonham’s bashing drums are pounding earthquakes to the ears. Though seated, I try to bend lower to get out of the sonic maelstrom.

But there is no shelter in Wollman Rink tonight. Nowhere to hide inside my head. A black-winged beast with the paterfamilias’s head flaps its scaly wings. In one claw, it grasps tennis rackets. In the other, a yellow Wiffle bat.

“Goddamn goofball!” it caws. “Underachiever!”