We have to be at the Lion’s Gate at 2:30 for our assignments. It’s going to be a big night – mid-summer sellout, Tanglewood on Parade. Gershwin, Copland, all the crowd-pleasers. Fireworks at the end. Already the lawn is filling up, checkered with picnic blankets, and the concert doesn’t start for four and a half hours.
There’s probably twenty of us for the parking lots. We’re in our uniforms – slacks with white button-down shirts and black shoes. We have our vests and flashlights. The grounds crew guys roll past us on their little trolleys and sneer.
The grounds crew guys are cooler than we are because their jobs don’t involve interacting with the public and seem to require a level of competence, even though most of what they do is pick up trash and ride lawnmowers around. They get to wear green t-shirts that make them look like game wardens. We have to wear fluorescent orange vests that make us look like traffic cones. Which is basically what we are.
I get sent out to the West Street lot with a half-dozen other guys. Jody. Ian. Billy Sal? A couple of sophomores and kids we don’t know from Lee. We spend four hours standing in a field and pointing, directing an endless stream of cars into two-deep rows. If it rains, the grass will get slick and half those cars will slide down an embankment. But the sky is cloudless.
We have only the vaguest idea of what we’re doing, parking-wise. We get no training. This isn’t a big deal in the afternoons, the leisurely prelude period where the tourists and summer folks crawl up from Stockbridge in a line that might start back at the turnpike. They just want to be free of their cars and will go where you tell them. We direct them up, around, beckon them forward until the rows are tight. Sometimes a doctor will roll down his window and ask to park right by the exit instead of halfway up the hill – he’s on call, he’ll say, he needs to be able to get out quickly. Well then what the hell are you doing at Tanglewood?, we’ll ask. Not out loud. Still, up the hill with him.
It’s early August and college is in sight.
Tanglewood is the hot star around which our summers have always orbited. Most of the south county kids work there at one point or another, in the lots or the concessions, waiting tables at Highlawn, mowing the greens. The season starts in June, when they take the plywood down from the Shed and the bats freak out. The BSO Institute kids arrive first – long-fingered flautists, pale cellists bent over their bows. The finest young classical musicians in the Unites States. They never mingle with us. It’s almost like they’ve been warned. The grounds crew spruces up the lawns and paints new lines in the VIP lots, the regular orchestra arrives, and soon there’s music in the air. Things hit their stride in July, with the Fourth and the Popular Artists Series. All that stuff. Seiji. Yo-Yo Ma. Itzhak Perlman. It’s big time.
Not that we are really paying attention. We’d worked there for years, and our interests at this point are considerably less highbrow. We can spell all the names, whistle the William Tell Overture from prelude to finale. Some kids have chauffeured Jessye Norman around town. Other kids have hung out with Leonard Bernstein. None of it made an impression – at least not at the time. The real draw is social. Everybody is there. Kids who are working and kids who aren’t. The high school kids. The college kids home for the summer. Bored girls from Westchester and the Upper East Side looking for a summer tryst. Randoms from Canada or Vermont.
Years later, you might realize you know a little bit, you hear a few bars of something and can remember the rest, but back in those Berkshire summers of the late 1980s, Jesus Christ himself could have come down to conduct Beethoven’s 9th on the roof of the Shed and we’d still have been more interested in drinking and/or getting high and/or making out in the hedge maze.
It’s six o’clock and my lot’s nearly full. I tell myself that I’m trying to make money so that in the fall I’ll be able to support myself at school in Boston, but really that’s a mystifying proposition. I’m trying to avoid thinking about it for as long as I can.
A car pulls into one of the last spots in my row and I recognize the kid behind the wheel. It’s the best basketball player in the county, a kid who led his high school to the state championship as a sophomore and is headed to Williams in the fall. I applied to Williams but didn’t get in. I’m going to, like, my fifth choice. Which is fine. I remember in the Williams interview, the woman asked what my friends might say if asked to describe me and I had no idea whatsoever. The best basketball player in the county pulls his car forward. I haven’t seen him since December, when his team beat my team by thirty up at Wahconah but the local radio station doing color gave me the player of the game award because I had 24 and I got the pity vote. I motion for the best basketball player in the county to pull his car forward a little bit more, and he does, but he also motions back to me, friendly-like, like he thinks I’m waving to him, but because I don’t think he has any idea who I am I move on to the next car and don’t respond and then I feel like a dick when I think about it.
When the lot’s full, I walk through the employee parking lot and try to identify cars. Jody’s already there, doing the same thing. He’s going to North Adams State in the fall. I recognize Lily’s car – she’s working the concession stand until she goes back to Regis for sophomore year. She dumped me a couple of springs earlier, when I was a junior and she was a senior, for a guy in her high school class named Bill. He worked for a company that delivered kegs. I’d heard that some of his friends called him Bildo. We both had brown hair, looked roughly similar, but he was a senior at her school and I was a junior at another and they were going through some transitional thing together that I wasn’t. Still, I hated that guy for a while, which was dumb because he’d never done anything to me, never said a word to me. All he’d done was to become, unintentionally I assume, the object of a teenage girl’s transient affections. There was probably a lot more going on at the time. Anyway, it made for some uneasy nights at Tanglewood last summer, me humiliated, lurking in the maze, Lily going about her business, this Bildo character dropping off kegs and lingering to flirt. It wasn’t like I was going to fight him. I wasn’t a guy that got into fights. That would be humiliating. Plus, it wasn’t even his fault, so I’d be being sort of an asshole. And what if he was tougher than me – a distinct possibility – or otherwise emboldened by righteousness? The last thing I wanted to do was to pick a bad fight with a guy named Bildo and lose.
We can hear a roar from the crowd inside the gates as Seiji comes out. Jody gives me the rundown of the parking lot roster, the girls’ cars in particular. The Trombley girls are here. They’re a little older than we are and so pretty that it’s hard to look at them. Kip Wagner’s sister is here, too. She’s a stunner. Dotch comes by with Karina, whose father and grandfather are legendary pianists, but we don’t care about that as much as we care that Karina can introduce us to some of the Manhattan girls in town for the summer. Karina does that sometimes, usually with a funny little smile on her face, and only later I understand that she knows that it’s never gonna happen for us with these Manhattan girls, that the absolute best we can hope for is a few minutes of desultory petting before someone either vomits or starts to cry. Karina knows the score.
We go in. The gatekeepers nod to us but aren’t particularly friendly. They know we’re short-timers. Inside, there are fourteen thousand people. The lawn that spreads out from the Shed is covered in blankets. It looks like a quilt. Near the gate, the trash bins buzz with bees. Sticky stuff drip onto the paths. My pals Uns and his brother Unsie are hanging out by the Glass House and I go over to them.
“You see the best basketball player in the county?” I ask.
We all play basketball. Unsie’s team even won the state the previous winter.
Unsie nods and says “He sucks,” which is what you say about someone who is so much better than you that it hurts.
I steer away from the concession area where Lily is working. It’s been a year, we’re cool, but still. Jody and I head up the gravel walkway that runs from the main gate up towards the hedge maze. The hedge maze sounds more romantic than it is, it’s more of a garden than a maze, but it’s still a good place to get stoned.
I’m not much of a smoker, so after a few minutes I drift out towards the edge of the lawn. The orchestra is playing Billy the Kid. The shadows are lengthening and all the kids who’ve snuck through the fence are gathering near the back, where the hills roll away from town down towards Stockbridge Bowl. For Tanglewood on Parade, they borrow a cannon from Eastover to fire when they play the 1812.
Shiobhan is here. We dated for a really hot month back in the winter, and might date again if I play my cards right, but right now we’re on hiatus. I’ve got college starting in eight weeks or so and she’ll still be a junior in high school. I feel like I should sort of grab hold of her and not let go. I recognize this as a bad idea, but that won’t stop me from trying it in a month. A bunch of the more together girls in my class – the Jens, Heather, Deepali maybe? – sit on a blanket in the lawn and take clandestine sips from a wine cooler. They’re all heading off to solid schools. They aren’t boy-crazy, at least not overtly, and will grow up to be lovely, functional, high achievers. I sit with them for a minute, but we’re on different missions.
Here comes West Side Story, with its big strings. The crowd is starting to vibrate and we haven’t even gotten to Star Wars yet. The sun sets and nearby one of my town’s golden boys takes out a fifth of blackberry Schnapps. He’s a senior at Harvard. We pass it around. It tastes like Robitussin. The closer you get to the hedge maze, the more pot you smell. Some of the summer folks look uneasy. Their blankets are immaculate – a few have little tables with candelabras – but as the night drags the edges are getting trampled. Every summer they come, thousands of them, to clog the streets and quadruple the population. Sometimes Uns and Unsie stand by the main gate when the concerts end and ask them inane questions, like "Did you enjoy the Monte Carlo?,” which is the name of Unsie’s car. The summer folks always smile and keep walking, sometimes they respond, and we laugh to ourselves at these rubes. They don’t even know what a Monte Carlo is? Then September comes and these summer folks all leave, back to wherever, and we stay here.
Mackey is around, and Arch. We point and laugh at each other from across a sea of blankets. Blankets everywhere. I don’t know what we’re laughing at. Soon the concert will be over and it’ll be time for all the attendants to go back out to the lots. That’s where our lack of training becomes really noticeable. There’s only one real rule we follow in the lots, and that is if a line of cars is moving, let it keep moving. This infuriates drivers who are not in the moving line, drivers who are looking for the attendants to exert some measure of authority and facilitate things like merges and pauses and entrances. We don’t do that.
Sometimes it’s like Nam out there. That’s a joke. What do I know? But there’s a lot of honking and swearing and the dust rises from the lots and glows red in the taillights of the cars, and people get really mad. It can take hours for someone to get out of the Tanglewood lots. It almost doesn’t matter how long you linger at your blanket, how you try and game the system. You’re in for a long night. It’s not like it’s fun for us, either. We have to stick around the longest, longer than the grounds crew and the concession girls, suspecting the whole time that whatever progress we’d made with the latter was being exploited by the former. We spend the night dodging irate drivers, folks who’ve had a couple of glasses of wine and are looking at a two-hour drive somewhere once they free themselves from the most ass-backwards parking lot they’ve ever seen. I’ll never need to go to Pamplona. Sometimes a lot attendant gets bumped by a car, or has some projectile thrown at him, but rarely. These are, after all, classical music fans. They’re generally peaceful, and aware of liability. Popular Artists is a different story. Once I watched a car honk at Ian for so long that he eventually went and sat on its hood and dared it to move. It was a ballsy move for Ian, who was otherwise a pretty straight arrow. I wouldn’t have done it.
But there’s still a half-hour to go before the lots come calling. It’s full on night when they get to Tchaikovsky, the big finale to the Parade. There’s a lull, during which you can hear the rustles and clicks of the orchestra shifting it up a gear. Taps silence the crowd. We quiet down, but not that much. The concessions are closed and all the girls who work in them are gathered in the shadows at the back of the lawn. Kids are multiplying, grouping up. Eric Miller’s there, he’s done at Amherst and headed out west to ski. Jeff Connor? The wild McQueen boys? Whole clusters of kids from Pittsfield and Taconic. I recognize a face here and there, but the groups have their own dynamics. Things are tense. Soon, there’s a fight, one snarling kid on his back, a bigger snarling kid on his chest. Somebody’s bleeding. They’re separated quickly by friends, but not before Tanglewood security arrives with flashlights and quietly muscles them out. The crowd migrates away from the commotion.
And then, from far off, the ghost chorus starts its incantations. The 1812. The hymn of the beleaguered. Oh Lord, the ghosts say, save thy people. Napoleon’s forces are advancing towards Moscow, blasé and unstoppable. The Russians are starting to fret. Cellos and violas. There’s vomit on the lawn. I have a mild buzz and duck into the darkness of the maze. Kids run blindly along, girls, strangers. You can’t see anyone’s face, so you’re not sure if you know them until you’re right up close. It’s sort of fun and sort of scary. Some people smoke joints by the sun-dial and hide when I cut through. Others lounge on the white marble of the whispering wall like bourgeoisie.
When the season ends, those of us going somewhere will go. Tanglewood will shut down for the winter. There’ll be a big night of Beethoven and then a few perfunctory performances in late August, and then the grounds will be quiet until May. Grass will grow in the lots again and the plywood will come back out. In early June, seniors at the local high schools will march down to the stage to get their diplomas. That’s where I got mine. I threw my mortarboard in the air from tonight’s VIP section.
When I get back to the edge of the lawn, the BSO is playing La Marseillaise and somewhere in history the Russians are getting their asses kicked at Borodino. A commensurate distance into the future, we’ll all be gone. Whatever is going to happen will have happened. Violins. The Russians are scurrying into the countryside, praying to their spirits. One general rallies a force to hold Borodino, a fool’s errand against the vastly superior French. They’re taking a pounding, waiting for the divine. Seventy-five miles away, Moscow empties and shakes.
And then it starts. The strings, low at first, but they build. They keep building. They go away, fade, and come back stronger. I’m over by the Eastover cannon, which is roped off, and the crowd begins to murmur as the music picks up. Something is changing. Napoleon takes Borodino, but he’ll never be the same. The battle is long and now winter is in the wind. They live for winter, those Russians. Napoleon’s artillery freezes in the mud, his men are gray and hungry. Countless bodies stiffen on a field. Big drums and trumpets. One of the Eastover guys steps inside the cannon apron as the music reaches a pitch. Those of us who know what’s up are looking south, away from the Shed. The French retreat. It’s too hard. Too much has been lost. The Russian peasants wheel the abandoned cannons around, aim them at the departing invaders. The time comes and from the stage Seiji throws an arm out to us. His fingers reach across the crowd, across ages. It’s our signal. The Eastover guy pulls a rope and the cannon booms and everyone facing north jumps. Someone, I think it’s Hans but I’m not sure because it’s so dark, shouts “Take that, you fuckers!” at the top of his lungs. I can’t tell if he means the tourists or the infantry, or just generally all the fuckers. The world’s full of ‘em.
