Amy V. Egbert

Word Count 944

The night of my 16th birthday party Laurie Pile threw up in an orange and white Chinese porcelain bowl in my parents’ front entrance hall. Henry Childs fell through a window. My father glanced up from the garden shortly before the party began and saw a bedraggled, barefoot troupe of scraggly-haired musicians dragging battered guitar cases across the lawn to the white pavilion we called the Summerhouse to set up. One of the females was visibly pregnant under her Indian bedspread of a dress. Jesus Christ! He must have thought. Because of the “drug problem,” he had hired Nick, an off-duty detective who worked security at the Creek Club. Everyone knew he was a nark in his dark suit, Columbo shoes, and military crew cut. I invited friends from boarding school and local friends, but the word PARTY held viral implications. The road leading to our house was a steady stream of foreign convertibles, Corvettes, and ‘53 Buicks.

“It’s just like Woodstock!” my mother cried, clapping her hands. My mother loved a good party. She had diplomatically invited the neighbors and a few sets of parents for cocktails. This was the summer of the Hippy-Hop and short mod lime green and fuschia dresses from Carnaby Street. Under my transparent plastic mini dress, I wore tiger print Pucci lingerie. The summer girl, Eleanor, from Southern California, who had been engaged to care for my sisters, made an art project out of tie-dying shirts, jeans, and bedsheets. Eleanor played Dylan, Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane, and dated my friend Sally’s brother Chooch, a blond stoner, would-be surfer. In a year, I would be banging Chooch on his waterbed across the hall from Sally’s room while she and her mother were out shopping. They would pull into the driveway as I jerked on my clothes. I would be discovered leafing through Sally’s collection of record albums, my shirt inside out. Chooch would give me my first dose of crabs. Sally would mistakenly ingest a dog tranquilizer and get her fingers stuck in the steering wheel of her green Triumph TR6, necessitating a trip to the emergency room. In three years, their father, Doug, a man who favored brown knee socks and madras shorts at the beach, would die of a heart attack. Chooch, mourning his dad, would sit on the roof of the garage staring off into the fields beyond their property, hash pipe in hand. Years after that, Chooch and his wife would live out on the eastern tip of Long Island. He would shoot squirrels and nail their skins to the inside of a shed. 

That summer Sally and I water-skied across Long Island Sound to Connecticut, where our Foxcroft friend, Termite lived. We stole regularly, especially from a boutique in Locust Valley, where conspicuously displayed baskets of trendy clothes made my fingers itch with want. The adrenaline thrum, pocketing a scarf or a pair of earrings—sometimes an entire outfit secreted under our street clothes. Sally might fake browse, then wrap a sweater around her waist, feign genuine surprise when she was stopped at the door. Once, she was held in a storage room until the police arrived and her mother was summoned. 

That summer, Chooch photographed rock bands that played at nearby CW Post College. One night I got loaded with the remaining members of the Doors, while Sally cooked supper before the midnight show.

The night I turned 16, Termite and her sister Checkers were bringing LSD, an arrangement I had made without telling anyone else. I was going to drop acid for the first time.

The band blew the power when it struck its first chord to cheers and jeers and pumped fists. My father hooked up the generator. People got high in the rose gardens, drank from fifths of scotch and bourbon, Tanqueray Gin, and Mt. Gay Rum. Eyes rolled back in heads from mescaline and mushrooms and stamp-sized tabs of LSD. When clothes started coming off, my sisters were sent to bed. I never saw the detective. Pungent pot smoke rose in plumes. The name of the band was The Weight. They played Grateful Dead, Tommy, Blind Faith, and Creedence Clearwater Revival. Japanese lanterns and torches flared with kerosene fumes. People sprawled on the dance floor and tripped on the stars. Couples staggered into the woods. Cars bounced up and down in the driveway.

I took the acid proffered by Checkers, four tiny drops on a piece of foil. I hoped it would be “good shit.” While the party raged, I lay in our family room with the open white brick fireplace and the fridge filled with St. Pauli Girl, clench-jawed and rigid until dawn. Kaleidoscopic colors whirled across the ceiling, the fur pillows on my mother’s couches mewled like kittens.

The next day Sally and Termite and Checkers, and I had front-row tickets to see the musical Hair. I was still hallucinating. Something about the music made me nauseous, so twitchy I had to keep my head in my lap. I could smell the actors. I knew the lyrics by heart, had longed for the nude scene —Treat Williams naked! My friends squealed, I couldn’t look. I plugged my ears. 

When we rode the train from Pennsylvania Station back to Locust Valley, I separated from the others and lay alone in the last car on the grimy, gritty floorboards. My great-grandfather had been the president of the Long Island Railroad. As a child, my mother had traveled by private train car that could be uncoupled and attached anywhere her family chose. I was newly 16, curled into a ball in the caboose, wanting it all to stop.

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Amy is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College, and is a journalist published in Good Housekeeping, Vermont Magazine, The Manchester Journal, and most recently, Grande Dame Literary Journal. She attended the Breadloaf Summer Writing Program, is a graduate of the Brattleboro retreat, studied with the poet Kate Grey and has taken many classes at the Westport Writers’ Workshop. A retired Trauma-Sensitive yoga teacher, she lives in Vermont with her (younger) husband and Bernedoodle. She is currently at work on a collection of short personal essays.