The Music Festival

Mads Hansen

It was my first holiday abroad without my parents. My friend Jessie and I drove for an entire day to go to the Roskilde festival in Denmark and party hard in the mud for a week. We joined a little camp full of very peculiar people, one of whom we called Action Man because of his fondness for camouflage clothing.

On one of the first days of the festival, I went to see a band on my own because no one could be bothered to get up before noon. Before the band started playing, I spotted a boy a few rows in front of me. He had long blond curls and bore a startling resemblance to a young Robert Plant from Led Zeppelin. I kept glancing over to him during the gig, and afterwards I decided I had the choice between saying something to him or never seeing him again in my life. I saw him lighting a cigarette, and, pretending that I had lost my lighter, asked if I could please use his.

He lit my cigarette and smiled. It turned out he was from California and a guitarist in a rock band. He couldn’t have been more my type if he’d tried. Then, without thinking, I lit another cigarette with my own lighter. He just smiled, and gave me his phone number.

By some miracle I ran into him again that afternoon. We were inseparable from then on. We went to see Queens of the Stone Age together and he protected me when I was almost crushed against the barrier. After the gig, I brought him back to our camp, where everyone was still sitting in the same beach chairs drinking beer.

I was sharing my tent with Jessie, but she was willing to share with Action Man instead so I that could have my way with my American rock God. I didn’t even care that the actual sex was far from spectacular, or that the next morning it turned out he had a girlfriend — I had pulled the hottest guy I’d ever met while wearing rubber rain boots and sloppy festival clothes and I was going to take advantage of it every way I could. Three more days of mud-parties and two more nights of slightly-awkward-but-improving sex followed.

Because I only had eyes for him I was completely oblivious to the fact that Jessie and Action Man had also been getting it on for the previous three nights. They had figured they might as well have sex if they had to sleep together anyway.

On the last night of the festival, I said goodbye to my Cali boy. There were fireworks — I mean literally, there just happened to be fireworks as a part of the closing ceremony of the festival. He gave me an old bracelet he had been wearing. I gave him my pair of aviator sunglasses. We promised each other we would both come to the festival again next year, and that we would keep in touch through Myspace. I never saw him again.

Jessie and Action Man are engaged now. — Beatriz