Free Who Will Run the Frog Hospital by Lorrie Moore

time be near.’ ”
    “ ‘All I ask of livin’ is to have no chains on me!’ ” We practically shouted it. We were best on that line, taking it loud but slow, with some odd intervals, though most of them thirds. We actually didn’t know any songs by the JamesGang, or we knew one, the famous one, the one that was a hit, but we didn’t know it very well.
    At Carroll’s we ordered hamburgers and vanilla milk shakes and sat inside at the Formica counter, watching each other eat, or else watching some guy sweep behind the fryer or some guy pull up outside with his car eight-track blaring “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” or LaRoue, watching us, like we were up to something.
    The parking lot at the Lake Arts Center was already full, and attendants were routing people into a spare one in the rear, usually reserved for employees. We parked there, got out, and headed for the entrance, an old blanket over our arm, a six-pack of Coca-Cola, and a pack of cigarettes. All around us were young men in beards and cutoffs, women in peasant dresses, buffalo sandals, and silver bracelets, carting thermoses, ice chests, lawn umbrellas that said “Peace.” Police were stationed just inside the entrance to inspect thermoses and ice chests for alcohol, but besides that there was something wonderful in the air: the loud, crowded, summery feeling of a rock concert, not Woodstock maybe, but we had only been twelve then. This was something festive for us now that we were fifteen; everyone older had been doing this for a while, and they did it with calm and know-how; nothing new or disorganized. Some of them carried babies. We observed them, fell in close to them in line, sat next to them on the lawn. Lawn seats were the cheapest: two-fifty apiece. We paid, got our tickets, headed in.
    Music, for us back then, evoked various exiling and confounded moods, states of hallucination, states of love. A song was the timeless truth beneath the surface of things. It was a standing-still trip to the sea! It was a blow to the chest, like a boy you liked suddenly entering the room. It filled you withexcitement and shy, deep knowledge. Two-fifty was nothing. We pushed ahead, fell in with the pace of the crowd. We prepared our hearts for something drenching and big.
    Somehow we got separated from LaRoue. Did we intend to? I remembered a stinginess of hers in the car, how she’d refused us the chewing gum she had four sticks of in her pocket, and as Sils and I moved through the gate, past the ticket takers and off at a slight diagonal, the crowd moved in between LaRoue and us. She was trudging too slowly behind. I thought I heard her voice, but I didn’t turn around.
    “Hey, you guys. Wait up!”
    We kept walking straight for a favorite place on a hill near a concrete piling, the place we usually sat at concerts, leaning up against the cement to drink our Cokes, moving in under the balcony ramp in case it began to drizzle.
    “Where’s LaRoue?” asked Sils.
    I finally turned around. I couldn’t see her anywhere. And the success of this treachery, of my having used her so completely, stunned me. Where was she? Now I scanned the curving bowl of the concert lawn full of faces and heads and blankets and jackets and ice boxes, and I thought perhaps I did see LaRoue way off to one side, on some dirt, sitting alone without a blanket, looking lost and fat.
    “I don’t know where she is,” I said. “We’ll get a ride back some other way.” I said this breezily. “We’ll hitch.”
    “Maybe,” said Sils cautiously. “I wish I’d brought a joint.” She lit a Salem instead, and offered one to me, which I took.
    Linda Ronstadt opened for the James Gang and everyone talked all the way through it, as if she were just some local girl who’d managed to crawl up there and fill time. When the James Gang finally appeared the crowd stood and cheered. The sky had darkened, and the stage shone bright as fire in a hearth. Everywhere in the air was the ropy smoke of pot.