i have never heard of it so i searched and found this: Twenty minutes east from Binghamton off Route 17, Deposit spreads out over lazy advancing and retreating hills, a quintessential upstate New York dairy town. for seven years---the festival began in 1990---Donald Rooney opened his two-hundred acre spread---always the first weekend of August---to usher in the state's misfits and riff raff for a weekend long festival of bluegrass, moonshine, mud and dynamite. the combination had proved sustenant agar for colonies of demented joys. the experience of my first Rooney Fest was like a fourteen year old catholic princess going to a fetish ball thinking it was some tribute to Italian Rennaissance poets. I got my cherry popped the first fifteen minutes, and the remaining two days skidded across my dumb ignorance like a wheel tearing across pebbled, wet sand. I remember coming home after that first weekend and seeing my mom down at the pool with reflective sunpanes under her neck talking on the phone with her eldest daughter. it was a far cry from the previous day's "pool-side" anime: a fifty-year old man swimming the backstroke in a pool of mud and puke, his fish lips puckered to catch the tickled, misty fizz of water sprayed from a fertilizer pump-tank by a guy with Robert E. Lee tattooed on his forearm. sure the images haunted me for months, but the weekend's surreal freakishness was addictive. and what were once nightmares became nothing more than dreamy, unsatiable fixes. those first two days germinated in my head and teased an unseen me, the way the swelling of a new moon might first tease the budding senses of a precocious werewolf. So of course, I went back every year, and was astounded to learn the absurdity of my annual claim: "it can't get any weirder than last year." the nitrous-circus-hairy-ass experience happened the second year. "Well it's twenty dollars a head, so that's an even hundred boys," the guy at the gate said. he had a can of Golden Anniversary beer in his left hand and a bouquet of beef jerky sticks in his shirt pocket. We each ponied up the bucks, got those awful bands cinched around our wrists, and steered the Suburban up the long dirt road to enter the cocoon of our first Rooney Festival. Now let me take a moment to eulogize about that Suburban of mine. I always said if that car could talk it'd write me a collection of bestsellers. And to cover its fabled history in a few lines just isn't possible. It'd be like trying to explain our current political system without using the words money, corruption and abuse. But I'll give a go at a terse summary: that car introduced me to more tits, ass, drugs and misdemeanors than would have a night watching the Spice channel with Hunter S. Thompson. The directions weren't difficult. From Route 17 every necessary turn was marked with a spray-painted sign: "Rooney Fest" with an arrow almost crookedly ambiguous. And the last turn was onto a dirt road with a gutted, rusted barn seemingly portentous. The barn marked the beginning of Mr. Rooney's private property. Many cars immediately angled right or left into belt-high weeds, either uninformed of the mile-long road that snaked through the wooded crest before rocketing outward into a huge expansive field of cars, tents and lunacy, or troubled by the possibility that a kaleidoscope-eyed boob with a sleeveless Anthrax shirt might find great appeal in shit-sculpting on the hood of mom or pop's luxury car. if it was the latter, I didn't question their parking philosophy. if the festival attendees had been asked to coronate an automotive administration, it would've been President LL Camino, VP Ford-150, Secretary Fire-decaled Van Conversion, and Deputy Dodge Dart. this administration's constituency didn't care so much for your white-collar carriage. Buckled up in the Suburban though---a Rooneyer's wet dream (a concept not to be taken lightly nor literally)---we gunned past the luxuries, paid our dues and followed the cautious, roaring stream of V-8's up to the big field. The road was narrow and gutted. Pine limbs craned across the path, some only inches from the luggage rack on the Suburban. The road snaked right, then left, then further left and finally back right. All the way up, the road was littered with people already brainstem-deep in a bath of alcohol and pharmaceuticals. Every guy seemed a mere reflection of the last: white tube socks rolled up out of workboots; cutoff faded jeans with a bristle of sheared fabric at the ends; shirtless with a belly that hung like a watermelon in a skin-hammock; an almost toothless grin concealed by a crosshatch of facial hair patterns; and a hat turned backwards with some cheapened quip on the lid, like "FBI: Female Body Inspector," or "I traded in my wife for this Chevy." Jesus, I thought, we're gonna die. my thoughts were rudely interrupted by one of these genetically-challenged boobs, close to my window: "Rooney till yer dog don't know ya!" His arms were spread upwards, not in exultation, but in a desperate attempt to steady himself; the tree limbs thirty feet up seemed to him attainable. With his reach being short by about twenty seven feet though, he toppled backwards into a web of tiny pine branches and caught the ground hard (at the Ronney Festival, nobody ever fell to the ground softly). As we slowly edged the car forward, the man who introduced us to Rooney-style-Confucianism ripped into a torturous, self-congratulatory laugh. nick, next to me in the front seat, snapped the cap off the jim beam bottle with a strange familial grin, as if he finally found a tribe lost long ago. but me: I wasn't so sure I was ready to handle this for the next couple days. "Get that fucking truck outta my fuckin' face." my proverbial cherry was about to get proverbially popped, skinned and stewed. the train of cars had no more rail. we were following the inordinate amount of trucks, vans, cars through the already extensive labyrinth of parked cars. the field was immense. the western half was pocked with tarps, tents, a scaffolding castle, and the occassional lout bundled in a mess trying to spit out Freebird verse. fires were already snapping up and outwards, and the smoke of grilled meat rolled like gray-white bean bags down the hill. the eastern half was the parking lot. it had about as much structure as an orgy sponsored by the Hellen Keller Foundation. and apparently, twenty or so cars ahead of us, the oasis of parking lore that held our leader bewitched smoked away and left us all motionless, trapped irretracably in a dead end. My car happened to stop right in front of an encampment of washed-up Hells Angels. "I said, get that fucking truck out of my face." I didn't want to, but I had to, so I looked. my imaginative head---always too eager to splinter my resolve---formed hybrid, cinematic thoughts of Jacob's Ladder and Deliverance. There was no way, I thought, this could be coined in any sense a win-win situation. The scarecrowish man was perched on the hulking fender, as if a chrome bench, of an old Thunderbird. He was bent over at the waist, elbows fastened to his knees, knees I'm sure that had wrought dental havoc on many a pretty faces. I lovingly swabbed my own pearls with my tongue, the way a girl might kiss a leaving soldier on the docks. hooked in his right hand was a half-full bottle of Jack Daniels; his mind breaststroked through the other half. his chest heaved under a black leather vest, and his gnarled hair, a swatch of dried, burnt weeds, rimmed his black cowboy hat with a wild disarray. his boots were sharp, like the angled, narrow face of a barracuda. it was exactly when he stood, though, that I almost shot a small toostie roll into my J.Crew boxers. I lowered the music. billy Joel's Uptown Girl, I thought, could only bring his boot faster to my face. Comments? Rooney story to share? Send it to Modoc! the weekend festival always came to a close with a ritual that grew in proportion every year: the saturday night burn-off. sunchairs, hay-bales, condiment squeeze bottles, toilet paper rolls, the uncooked head of a split pig, couches, bed springs, styrofoam coolers, clothes peeled off passed-out friends, gas tanks, scarecrow-alter-egos, walking sticks, magic sticks, car fenders and everything else even remotely flammable were tossed with incendiary angst into the campsites' bonfires. if seen from above, the Rooney Hill would've looked like the place where hell's minions decided to tunnel their way up and out of their fiery underworld. or maybe it looked like a cheese grater grating fire. this burn-off phenomenon was essential for two reasons. first, it provided a wonderful game of one-upmanship: fire-diving. nothing better than fourteen beers, a few whiffs of moroccan hash and a whiskey chest-lather to fine-tune the Carl Lewis-like ambitions in us all. sunday's gossip was often about who caught on fire and how bad. but I guess when I look back on it, the bonfires had a deeper, more profound meaning, an ablution almost. it was a desperate attempt to burn-off the rage, to commit to effigy our two-days of foolish debauchery. after acid, nitrous, mushrooms, whiskey, beer, pot and cigarettes, everyone needed to heat away the chemicals, to salvage and then galvanize the tick-tock normalcy of our sober selves. saturday night, at three in the morning, you'd watch the blaze roar with a small sense of hope, that maybe, just maybe, the misery of sunday's hangover wouldn't grip too tightly nor too long. and that in staring long enough---staring hard enough---at the quieting, burning refuse, every wrong just perpetrated would transmute to ash and smoke, and leave you sane enough and wishful enough to return to a life of decent, sober routine. "burn away Rooney," you could almost hear the dirtied, silent firewatchers hum as eyes turned inward, introspective, lonely. "burn away Rooney, and just let me be." there were two obvious and distinctly separate camping zones: the western half of the field or the forest that sprawled up and away from the field behind the grand stage. the field left you vulnerable to a penetrating morning sun. that Rooney sun could soak through the tent wall, multiply at exponential rates, and choke the air with a thickening heat. a hangover boiled hot by a seven am sun could render you useless for half of a rooney festival. we took the forest every year. and by the third year, we had staked out a parcel of land in the forest, one we'd return to every year thereafter. it was where we roasted our split pig for six hours, basting every twenty minutes, which in the end, totaled five-gallons of barbeque sauce. it was where we burned Nate Garland's alter-scarecrow-ego in effigy. it was where I pasted an uncooked egg onto the face of Nick passed out in his wife-beater van. it was where I donned a one-piece, powder blue leotard and let my friend Sean Mallon walk me around the grounds with yellow caution police tape as a leash. it was where jeff broke the poles of a friend's tent because he was practicing a vigorous style of yoga with the friend's ex-girlfriend. I remember consoling the guy late that night at the bonfire, "they're probably just talking," as the tent in front of us, just beyond the rim of the fire, rocked back and forth like a large, shadowed weeble-wobble. and of course, the music. where the field ascended to meet the foot of the forest, the pavilion-like stage welcomed an all-star line-up of banjo-picking, fiddle-licking, wash- board-spooning, hillbilly-crooning bands. from two o'clock on friday to about three pm on sunday, the music would play tirelessly, whipping the dancing pack into a boot-stomping frenzy. the two-step was footed so fast it became a three-step. and not once did a fight break out. elation was the golden rule. there was an understood tribalism to the Rooney: get fucked up and have a good time. in simpler words, "Rooney 'til you're looney!" His eye lolled back again, now less an action of predatorial guile than just simple, carnal lunacy. He dropped back from the window, tipped the bottle back in an aggressive jerk, and sucked down almost all of the remaining whiskey. I considered gunning the Suburban over the small Pinto parked to my right. Monster trucking it all the way back home. A hellish run to the diapered comfort of big screen TV, leather sofas and lime Freezer-pops. He started to chuckle, a slow insidious rumble that trumpeted my neck hairs awake. "I'll get you to move this fuckin' truck bitch." He danced clumsily and very slowly to the back of the car. I wasn't quite sure where this was going, or where I might be in two hours, or if I'd ever again be able to pee on my own, without bags and tubes. In my sideview mirror, I saw him two-stepping directly in front of my back wheel. And then WHAM!, he punted his steel toe squarely into the side panel of my truck. "Well sir, that's ummm,not really...uh...not necessary." My buddies, buried under bags, chuckled, a "holy shit" or two barely audible. And again, WHAM!, his barracuda-boots attacked the polished body of my sweet, sweet Suburban. He was having a jolly 'ol time, the world nothing but the marriage of his steel-toed, foot-grenade to my virginesque car. His band of overweight, beer-bloated friends cheered him on with cackles and dixie-like yodels. And I couldn't do a fucking thing. Not a damn thing. So I jammed Billy Joel back into the tape player, grabbed the bottle of Jim Beam Nick had deserted on the passenger floor, and sang "Allentown" shamelessly in loud gay-like swoons: "Well we're living here in Allentown---it's so hard to keep the good people down---" My six year Rooney tenure was off to a proverbial bang. in the car, the others jumped in the far back and took refuge under sleeping bags. in the endocrine ring, flight a first-round TKO victor over fight. "How's it going?" I tried with a querulous conviviality. The words came out so meek, so impish. I tried to recover, "Wish I had your smarts and came hours earlier to avoid the jam." Courtesy and flattery two sabers of the coward. His face registered no receipt of my comments. I could see he had one thing on his mind, and it involved me in rather uncomfortable contortions with barbed metal pipes up my ass. Every step closer---he took 'em real slow, an artist of calculated intimidation---his face knotted up even tighter, as if he just visioned yet another measure of torture, one never considered before, one that rendered me a grotesque collection of sinew and shit so graphically appalling that even he balked in terror. My window was open and he rested his elbow on the door, his fist so terribly close to my internal jugular. I thought of all the things I hadn't yet done in life with a resigned misery. He mouthed one more time with a whiskey-slowed slur, "Get-this-fucking-truck-outta-my-face-boy." His right eye lolled away from his nose, then ricocheted back to center: a madman's instinctive appraisal of numbers, the situation. he saw worm-like movement under the sleeping bags and I'm still not sure if he had to fight back a smile. "Well, sir--" I always use the word sir when there exists a slight chance that I may be wearing my colon as a glove "---I'd love to get the car moving, but it seems traffic hit a dead end for a second here---" keep talking quick, explain, explain dear boy "---and I'm sure any second we'll be movingis it the exhaust, I can turn off the car, that's not a problem, no---hey, um,..can I get you a beer? How 'bout a cold bud?" I lied. We had only Milwaukee's Best. Beer, though, if anything else, can plug up canyons quicker than a mudslide and link two men intimately in a fraternal hop-laden land of shared tastes. And with this guy, Budweiser seemed to be a safe bet.
