Encore
Brokedown Palace

We went to the same parking lot as the year before, but it was already full. We then proceeded to drive around for a long time looking for parking. All streets and all parking lots were full. We finally found about a half-car-length's spot in front of someone's house. The people were on their front porch just waiting for someone to try and park there. They started giving us grief from the very start because we were partially blocking their driveway.

My opinion is that Deadheads should be all about love and peace. If these people didn't want us to park there then I thought we shouldn't park there. But Toast, the guy driving the car, decided to be a total jackass about it. He basically told the people to fuck off. I kept my mouth shut, but was really uneasy about the whole thing.

We went to the arena. The plan was to congregate on and around the 3rd base line. A pretty good crowd of fraternity brothers was in attendance, including one long-distance older alum named C-Hahn whom no one expected to see. He saw one of the younger guys wearing letters, so C-Hahn hazed him anonymously for a while until he revealed that he was a fraternity member too.

Like the year before, it was cold and drizzly. Unlike the year before, the weather got worse by the time the show started, not better. Appropriately the first two songs the Dead played were "Box of Rain" and "Cold Rain and Snow." It was a good start to the show, but I wasn't enjoying myself. I was paranoid about reuniting with Toast when the show was done, and further paranoid that his car might have been towed by the time we got back anyway. Psi Phi guys moved around a lot, but I stayed glued to that 3rd base line.

Quite frankly, I was really just waiting for the show to end. By the time they were playing Drumz/Space I had totally had enough. That's never been my favorite part of the show anyway, and at this point it totally felt like a waste of time. They played a few more songs, and then finally the encore, and it was over. We walked back to the car. By the grace of God it was still there.

One of the guys, Roz, was living in Rochester doing an internship for Kodak. After we all got our cars we rendez-voused to follow Roz back to his place to crash. We all met up and got going. But after a couple blocks Roz took a Crazy Ivan left turn cutting off a taxi cab which promptly smashed into him. This was bad. To make matters worse, we'd all been drinking, and we didn't want it to turn into a mass-DWI situation when the cops got there. So we all went off to a parking lot a ways away and watched from a safe distance.

The cops showed up and filled out an accident report. Then the wreckers showed up and towed the vehicles away. Then Roz's roommate showed up to give him a ride home. We all followed. The roommate was kind of curious why he had to come all the way out in the middle of the night to get Roz when he had like 4 cars he could have ridden in. Roz explained that the cops wouldn't leave until he was safely in a car headed home, and the rest of us didn't want to risk a DWI.

The next day we went back to Kermit's cottage again. The weather was beautiful, but unlike the previous year not a lot of people showed up and it wasn't nearly the party it had been before. I wound up going back home to Syracuse. While the previous year had been one of the best weekends since college, this one was more like a train wreck.