Crossing a wide commercial road, carrying things, to get to the parking lot of a gas station. From there I (we?) drove an SUV to an underground lair in the mountains where men drank and gambled. It was supposed to be some kind of event.

I was at a high school reunion, an event outdoors. Things had proceeded normally. Innocuous chats with long-ago friends and acquaintances. Then a group of men gathered at the far end. They were singing a song in honor of a friend who had died, a fraternity brother in college, not from our school, and weeping. The emotions were raw, as though this had only happened recently. The rest of us observed respectfully, at a remove. I felt clueless and out of it for not being aware of this tragedy. Everyone else seemed to be in the know. Apparently the man had died at a party, maybe similar to this one. And yet that party had continued after. This fact accentuated the sorrow somehow. Still they sang, and they wept, evoking his life, his personality. We were indoors now, a large living space. I was opening a fridge to get a beer when one of the men, P. M., passed by. I said, “How do you feel?” I thought this was appropriately sensitive. But he replied indignantly: “Well not that good, right?”

I was squeezed into the back of a small car, sitting in the middle. S’s cousin M. was driving. We were all going somewhere we’d gone before, with him driving before. The surroundings grew bizarre. People sat in the middle of the street and you had to zigzag to get by them. It was territory occupied by the politically hostile. They were clamoring, taunting. I worried we might not get through. M. understeered a slow corner and crashed into a pylon or abutment, but he was able to back out and keep going. 

We were setting up to play in a kind of cabin we’d rented on the grounds of a park. We charged people two bucks, which didn’t seem like much. I calculated we’d make about a hundred dollars. As we were about to go on I realized I needed to take a piss. I wandered out, looking for a grove of trees. J. T. had done the same. The park was crowded and I worried about getting caught. And I worried about Covid.