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The story is set at the end of summer in 1973. The narrator reflects on this year from a more recent time at which “they’ve rolled it up like a scroll and put it away somewhere.” 1973 was a turbulent year. The Vietnam War ended with the fall of Saigon on April 30. The country was reeling from the number of soldiers killed and wounded. The Watergate hearings took place that summer. Both the war and Watergate divided the nation and dealt a heavy blow to national pride. This social instability fueled the counterculture and the use of recreational drugs as a means of escape, which Georgie and the narrator reflect.
The story’s setting includes a few primary locations: the hospital emergency room, and the fair and woods outside of town. The narrator does not specify where the hospital is located. At one point, Georgie mentions listening to trucks driving between San Francisco and Pennsylvania on the Interstate highway. That would likely be I80, but the hospital could be almost anywhere along its nearly 3000 miles. The hospital setting is important since it allows the narrator and Georgie easy access to drugs. It allows readers to witness events that unfold away from the public areas of the hospital. The hospital setting provides drama, through Georgie’s hallucinatory blood, which is an extension of real blood he must often mop up. It also contributes to the story’s dark humor by juxtaposing serious, potentially traumatic incidents with the absurdly comic words and dialogue of the characters.
Outside the hospital, Georgie and the narrator go to a county fair on a clear and peaceful day. Since they navigate the outside world in a drug-addled state, readers may be skeptical about what the narrator describes. The fair gives the narrator a sense of escape from the troubling events before and after. Random details catch his attention. At the country fair, there are poultry cages where a TV crew interviews a renowned supporter of LSD, along with the typical selection of rides. Georgie and the narrator cannot find their way back to town, and they wander the woods during an unseasonable snowstorm. In the storm, they wander into a drive-in movie theater. At first, the narrator, in his drug-addled state, mistakes the theater speakers for a military cemetery, calling to mind the shadow of the Vietnam War.
