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Bonnaroo
Part 1: Border Fuzz
Matt ran his fingers through his hair, rocking back and forth and shaking his headslowly 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 oncewe cross the border.”He continued his finger-combing. “How much do we have? No, wait, I don’t want toknow.”All together we were carrying less than an ounce of weed in the minivan, keeping uson the safer side of the line between partially fucked and totally fucked. It was the 25MDMA 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 cannabisicing (served on a stick for convenience), prepared by a friend back in Toronto. They werewell-made; you could barely taste the weed. Perhaps I could offer some to the borderguards if they hassled us.And the guards were going to hassle us a little. I was sure of that. There’s somethingabout a borrowed minivan filled with bags and boxes driven by four people under 25heading to a music festival that just screams “random search!” and if the border guardsfound anything, that was it — our trip would be over before it began. All we could do wasplay 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 youneed at Bonnaroo, but we still took the risk bringing some from home. Sure, our Canadianweed 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 wascurious; I wanted to see if we could get away with it. So much of what we do is influencedand regulated by threat of punishment if we cross some arbitrary line, be it a law or aborder. 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-counterAdderall he had on him. The border guards might wonder why he was carrying prescriptionamphetamines in a Tic-Tac container, but that was more inconvenience than illegal. Thenagain, 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 wepulled 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 upspecifically 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 whatyou 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’sLicense” were printed in bold above my photograph.The booth guard waved the license in front of the RFID scanner anyway in an attemptto 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 webringing any fruits or vegetables with us? Nothing out of the ordinary. He gave us the borderguard 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 cornerto where other cars were being dissected trunk by trunk. “You’ll get your documents backinside.”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 knowtheir 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 roomsand 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 acrossfrom the vending machines. He didn’t seem like much, and it would be easy to confuse hisworkspace with a DMV waiting area. Still, he made us sit and wait for five minutes, just tolet the tension mount. We could no longer see the minivan, so we had no way of knowingwhat 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, theCake Pops and Greg’s pills. Heather hid her pot with care, but the other stuff gave themenough of a reason to tear everything apart anyway. They had us by the balls, yet this guardwas 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 ownershipflagged 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 getbehind 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 wouldprobably lock us up for a long time. And getting caught smuggling drugs isn’t like beingconvicted of massive fraud or political corruption — we’d be sent to real prison, the typewhere 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
of 00

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cbattaglia

First part of the 2009 Bonnaroo saga... I swear the second part actually takes place at Bonnaroo.

reply08 / 13 / 2009
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