Ecstasy Read Free Page B

nice guy I’ve ever even considered
     dating. He married his college sweetheart, then got summarily dumped when she decided she’d rather sleep her way up the chain
     of command of the Boston P.D. Ours is one of those patented opposites-attract kind of romances; witness the fact that he carries
     a gun to work
and
actually enjoys spending the night in the woods sans both TV and air conditioner.
    “You know,” he was saying, “camping out can be really fun. I’ve been trying to get you to—”
    “Come on, Cody. If I never wanted to sleep in a tent with
you,
what’re the odds I’m gonna like sleeping in a field full of dancing hippies?”
    “Can’t argue with you there. I guess you just gotta try and make the best of it.”
    “Couldn’t you just pat me on the head and say, ‘Poor baby’?”
    “Poor baby.”
    “What about the head-patting part?”
    “Don’t want to mess with my macho image. They giving you hazardous-duty pay for this one?”
    “Since I’m kind of working night and day, they’re giving me a four-day weekend for the next two weeks, which is nice. Just
     about the only nice thing, if you ask me.”
    “Poor baby.”
    “Keep it up,” I said, “and you might get lucky on Sunday night, after all.”
    As it turned out, Cody got lucky roughly fifteen minutes later, when he used his lunch break to squire me over to his apartment
     to pick up his camping gear. It wasn’t until around two that I finally got into my trusty red next-gen Beetle and drove the
     ten miles out to Jaspersburg, the one-horse town that has hosted Melting Rock lo these thirteen years. Even a festival basher
     like myself knows that it’s the quintessential love-hate relationship: The town fathers love the bags of money that Melting
     Rock drops on their doorstep and hate just about everything else about it.
    I drove down the main drag in search of the so-called VIP parking lot, which proved to be hell and gone from the campground.
     I, therefore, hauled my tent, sleeping bag, laptop, and backpack full of clothes half a mile through scraggly grass, already
     starting to sweat and realizing that the only way I was going to get clean was to open my heart to the concept of the communal
     outdoor shower.
    I stomped around like that for a while before I realized I had no idea where I was going. Eventually, a wiry young man walked
     by toting a load twice as big as mine, and I yelled for him to stop. He did, and when he turned around, I noticed he had a
     ring in his nose—not a wee one through the side of one nostril but a honking doughnut of a thing right through the middle,
     like a prize bull.
    “Uh, excuse me,” I said. “Could you tell me how to get to the campground?”
    “Sure, sister. Which one?”
    “Er… The main one, I guess.”
    “Main? You sure?”
    I dug a piece of paper out of my pocket. “Yeah,” I said. “I’m supposed to go to the main campground.”
    He whistled at me, and probably not because I was a vision of loveliness. “Hey, you’re
lucky,
” he said. “Slots in Main almost never open up.” He gave me an assessing look. “Hey…are you, you know, here by yourself?”
    “Unfortunately.”
    “Cool,” he said. “How about I crash with you?”
    “Excuse me?”
    “You know, can I crash in your tent? We’d have a
blast.
I got a ton of buds coming, and they’re bringing some really sweet—”
    “Er…I’m afraid not. I’m kind of, um, here on business.”
    “Yeah? Whatcha sellin’? You got E? ’Shrooms? What?” His eyes narrowed. “Listen, I don’t do Oxy—”
    “Oh, er… nothing like that.” He looked rather crestfallen. “So could you maybe tell me how to get to the main campground?”
    “Yeah, okay.” He walked ahead for a few paces and stopped. “Like …you really don’t want me to crash with you? You sure?”
    “As sure,” I said, “as I’ve ever been of anything in my life.”
    M Y NEW FRIEND was nothing if not tenacious; he repeated the question at least