Posts Tagged The Man
Bonnaroo Part 2: This is Hamsterdam
Posted by Chris Battaglia in Stories on October 19, 2009
For the full story, read Part 1: Border Fuzz first.
Matt kept repeating it on the way to Bonnaroo. “This is Hamsterdam.” He said it when we stopped for gas and greasy food at a truck stop in southern Ohio, he said it while we sat on the balcony of a motel two hours from Manchester, Tenn., and watched rain so heavy it turned the canopy into a waterfall, and he said it while we idled in a 6-mile line of cars on the interstate shoulder, waiting to finally enter the festival grounds.
I put the car in park and took my foot off the brake. The line wasn’t going anywhere. Another state trooper on motorcycle appeared in the side mirror, approaching quickly on the left. Up ahead, an off-ramp was blocked by two cruisers with more troopers beside them, watching our snail-flattering progression.
Matt stared back. “Heavy police presence. You’d think we were being herded off to some prison camp.”
“Hey, Matt, pass the pipe.” Heather’s hand reached out from the back seat.
Matt turned around. “No, you’re not serious. Now of all times?”
“Just one more bowl. Why not?”
The bike trooper rumbled past.
“That guy.” Matt pointed at the bike trooper. “Him. That’s why. We already smoked once here and got away with it. I don’t want to tempt fate.”
“Those guys aren’t looking for drugs. They’re here to make sure nobody cuts out onto the highway trying to get ahead and causes a pile-up.”
“It doesn’t matter what they’re here for, I don’t feel comfortable smoking around all these Tennessee state troopers. We’re not in Toronto. Pot’s a serious thing here. And even if we were in Toronto, this would still be too many cops. Why can’t you just wait until we get inside? It can’t be that much longer.”
And once we were inside Bonnaroo, every recreational drug imaginable would be essentially legal for the next four days.
This wasn’t the first time these troopers had escorted tens of thousands of hippies, hipsters and frat boys into the Bonnaroo grounds. They knew by now what goes on inside and how much contraband they would find if they searched a few cars at random, yet they didn’t seem to care about any of that. They were strictly on traffic duty, tasked with ensuring the stoners enter the designated drug-use area in an orderly fashion.
We didn’t smoke another bowl until we were parked. As we unpacked the van, people were already walking around looking to buy weed. There was no way we were selling what we had. We were nearly extradited to Syria for bringing that pot across the border. You can’t put a price-tag on that.
We dropped MDMA as the sun set, the storm clouds turning its yellow light a bluish grey as they slowly converged overhead.
“How many do you want? Two?” Greg asked.
I shrugged, “one should be fine.” I had never done MDMA before. The myths about it creating pinholes in your brain matter and the association with glow-stick waving, pacifier-sucking ravers kept me far away from it in high school. All I really knew was proper MDMA worked like a filter on your brain that makes everything wonderful for around three to four hours.
“Trust me, you’ll need two,” said Matt, grabbing an extra one from Greg. “You’ll want a re-up.”
The lightning struck with the MDMA. Jagged stabs of white illuminated the sky with a light that echoed off the clouds. Big, thick raindrops fell fast and relentless, drumming on the canopy beside a neighbouring tent while we sat underneath, waiting for the downpour to end. The drumming was so loud it drowned out everything else. Its rhythmic constancy calmed, soothed, made everything okay. It was almost wonderful.
Everyone sounded slightly distant, as though they were talking through tin cans attached with string. I took a deep breath and listened to the sound of the storm, now louder than ever.
“It feels really good to breathe,” I said to no one in particular, discovering that MDMA also removes any ability to think before you speak.
As soon as the rain let up Matt took off, anxious to explore Centeroo, “get a feel for the place,” he said. I tried waiting for everyone else, but after a while I couldn’t resist the inviting smile of the shimmering lights on the other side of the wall.
Centeroo was separated from the campgrounds by a large yellow wall. There were only two known points of entry, both called Shakedown, because Centeroo was a drug-free zone, technically. Shakedown wasn’t air-tight. 
A little weed in a shoe or a tab in a wallet would make it through unharmed — assuming the weed doesn’t reek of foot — but you had to take the effort to conceal it.
I found Shakedown and headed into Centeroo. After driving 1,400 kilometres to get here, I still wasn’t sure what Bonnaroo was. I knew there would be a lot of music, but that was about it. I wasn’t prepared for the incredible nocturnal carnival that surrounded me. A ferris wheel rotated slowly in the distance, bulbs flashing. Lights were everywhere, colours of every hue, backlighting silhouettes of people casting long shadows on well-worn dirt paths as they wandered between one attraction and another.
Matt appeared beside me as I walked.
“So yeah, this is a pretty cool place,” I said.
Matt smiled, “this is Hamsterdam.”
I finally understood.
Bonnaroo Part 1: Border Fuzz
Posted by Chris Battaglia in Stories on July 26, 2009
Matt ran his fingers through his hair, rocking back and forth and shaking his head slowly in his hands.
I looked over. “Calm down man. Nothing’s going to happen. We’ll be fine.”
“Look, there’s nothing you can say that will calm me down right now. I’ll be calm once we cross the border.”
He continued his finger-combing. “How much do we have? No, wait, I don’t want to know.”
All together we were carrying less than an ounce of weed in the minivan, keeping us on the safer side of the line between partially fucked and totally fucked. It was the 25 MDMA pills stashed away in one of Greg’s bags that put us over that line.
I had also packed over a dozen Cake Pops: chocolate-coated balls of cake and cannabis icing (served on a stick for convenience), prepared by a friend back in Toronto. They were well-made; you could barely taste the weed. Perhaps I could offer some to the border guards if they hassled us.
And the guards were going to hassle us a little. I was sure of that. There’s something about a borrowed minivan filled with bags and boxes driven by four people under 25 heading to a music festival that just screams “random search!” and if the border guards found anything, that was it — our trip would be over before it began. All we could do was play it cool and hope we didn’t look like a threat to national security.
We probably should have crossed the border clean. You can get whatever drugs you need at Bonnaroo, but we still took the risk bringing some from home. Sure, our Canadian weed was better (and cheaper) than any of the American schwagg we’d find in Tennessee, but that alone wasn’t enough for me to justify smuggling it. I mostly did it because I was curious; I wanted to see if we could get away with it. So much of what we do is influenced and regulated by threat of punishment if we cross some arbitrary line, be it a law or a border. I wanted to know just how empty the threats really were.
The only one of us with clean bags was Matt, aside from the under-the-counter Adderall he had on him. The border guards might wonder why he was carrying prescription amphetamines in a Tic-Tac container, but that was more inconvenience than illegal. Then again, it didn’t matter whose bags were carrying which drugs; we’d all be equally fucked if the guards found them.
Traffic at the border was surprisingly light. We didn’t have to wait long before we pulled up to the booth and Greg handed the guard our documents.
“Citizenship?” the booth guard asked as he flipped through the passports.
“Canadian.”
“What is this?” he held up my enhanced driver’s license, something I picked up specifically for this trip, since it was now impossible to enter the States with a regular Ontario driver’s license.
U.S. border guards are among the most serious people in the world. No matter what you tell them, you’ll always get the same look: like you’re lying and they know it.
But he asked, so I told him. “It’s an enhanced driver’s license.”
“No it’s not,” he snapped, an odd response considering the words “Enhanced Driver’s License” were printed in bold above my photograph.
The booth guard waved the license in front of the RFID scanner anyway in an attempt to show me that he was right and I was a lying terrorist. The scanner beeped.
“Oh, so it is,” he grumbled, apparently angry at the license for proving him wrong.
He asked us the standard questions: Where were we going? Why? How long? Were we bringing any fruits or vegetables with us? Nothing out of the ordinary. He gave us the border guard look the whole time, but after a while, I thought we were free and clear.
“Pull your car around to the side and park it,” he ordered, pointing around the corner to where other cars were being dissected trunk by trunk. “You’ll get your documents back inside.”
Oh shit. Oh shit. Shit shit shit. They were going to search us. What would they find? Maybe nothing. Probably something. Border guards search vehicles for a living; they know their way around a minivan filled with contraband.
No one said a word as we parked and headed inside. Straight faces all around. None of us looked interested in cracking. That might change once they led us into separate rooms and began the waterboarding, but in the meantime, we were stone-cold pros.
Our interrogator was sitting behind a reception desk, next to the elevators and across from the vending machines. He didn’t seem like much, and it would be easy to confuse his workspace with a DMV waiting area. Still, he made us sit and wait for five minutes, just to let the tension mount. We could no longer see the minivan, so we had no way of knowing what they had found so far. I’m sure he knew that.
When the reception guard eventually called us up, he started running through more of the standard questions. It didn’t make any sense — by now they probably had my stash, the Cake Pops and Greg’s pills. Heather hid her pot with care, but the other stuff gave them enough of a reason to tear everything apart anyway. They had us by the balls, yet this guard was still asking us about our borrowed minivan.
“You mean you all have jobs but none of you owns a car?”
What kind of CIA mind games was this guy playing? Perhaps our lack of car ownership flagged us as terrorists, because only terrorists share things like cars. Genuine freedom-loving patriots own their own cars and they wouldn’t think about letting another person get behind the wheel unless a briefcase full of money was involved. That’s the American way, not our extremist car-sharing fundamentalism.
I began to wonder what would happen to us once they found everything. They would probably lock us up for a long time. And getting caught smuggling drugs isn’t like being convicted of massive fraud or political corruption — we’d be sent to real prison, the type where inmates’ colons get rearranged in the shower on a daily basis.
None of this would be happening if it wasn’t for September 11th. When those planes hit those towers, America lost its collective shit. While the country was still in shock, Americans were told the best way to fight the terrorists was to shop, forfeit civil liberties, and bomb a couple of countries back to the stone age, so they did just that. Once it became apparent no one felt any safer, they turned to their borders. Slowly but surely, it became more and more difficult to enter the U.S. legally without a cavity search, and we were the result — nothing more than collateral damage in the war on terror.
The interrogation ended without any mention of illicit substances or smuggling or terrorism and the guard gave us back our documents, but we still couldn’t leave. Something was up.
As we sat back down to await our fate, an armoured truck pulled up just outside the entrance. Matt nearly shat himself. We were sure it was there to haul us off to Gitmo or whatever eastern European interment camp the Department of Homeland Security set up to extract information from Canadian drug smugglers.
The guard at the entrance motioned towards us. This was it. We were about to spend the rest of our lives being tortured and gang-raped, all because we tried to bring drugs to a music festival. Counter-terrorism at work.
“Ok, you can go,” he said.
We filed out in stunned silence. They were letting us go? Aside from one or two bags on the top of the luggage pile in the back of the minivan, everything was as we left it. We all figured they were going to find something; it never occurred to us that they wouldn’t even bother searching.
We made it through, drugs and all. We fooled the U.S. government. This must be what freedom feels like. Eat that, Uncle Sam!
We didn’t say anything to each other for the first couple of blocks, but once we were absolutely sure we were clear of the border we erupted in a fit of laughing and cheering and clapping in celebration of our perfect crime. Even Matt was ecstatic.
“I think you all owe me an apology,” he said. “You called me paranoid when I said I was worried about crossing the border. ‘It’ll be fine,’ you said, ‘we’ll get across no problem.’”
“And that’s exactly what happened,” I said.
Heather pulled out one of the three joints she was carrying in her pocket. Matt stared at her in disbelief.
“You had those on you the whole time?”
Heather shrugged. “Yeah. It’s not like I can get at the rest of the pot right now. I rolled these for the road.”
“What the fuck? What if there had been dogs? Were you trying to get caught?”
I started laughing again. “Who cares man, we made it! Woo! Next stop: Bonnaroooooooo!”
Matt just shook his head.
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