High and Dry

It’s dusk on the first night of Bonnaroo, and the lotus-eaters are all around us. There are candy flippers in white Moon Boots with impressively lacquered eyelashes, and a portly man with a Gandalf beard who’s magnanimously handing out shot glasses. There are hemp-studded undergraduates whose eyes are pinwheeling from whippets, and a cluster of pixie-winged teenagers who are piggishly snorting Percocet. In the bathroom, dealers do brisk business in various illicit substances, and they bark out their wares the way stadium vendors call out “Hot dogs!” or “Peanuts!” Twice I’ve been offered Molly and tabs of LSD, and a throuple I meet in the bathroom is shilling for the upcoming orgy. Over at the Sparkle City Disco show, a coven of drunken zoomers—many of whom, mind you, were born after 9/11—are all shimmying jubilantly to songs by Donna Summer, pointing stoically to the ground and then triumphantly up at the ceiling, looking rather a lot like latter-day John Travoltas.