by Lewis Shiner
When she left for work in the morning, he was asleep on the couch. By the time she got home that afternoon, he and Lenny were both gone, along with their guitars and amps. She looked at Cole’s wall calendar and saw, with relief, that they were in Eugene and Seattle that weekend and wouldn’t return until Tuesday. He would be home two nights and then leave on Thursday for New York again. He’d written the word “Woodstock” and drawn an arrow through to the following Monday.
He didn’t call from the road.
She knew Cole was having problems of his own. Reviews of the Quirq album were mostly tepid and radio stations were not playing the single. She also understood that their issues as a couple could not wait for happier times.
On Monday Baxter asked her to dinner again and she refused. Tuesday at work she rehearsed her arguments and tried to envision Cole’s responses. She nearly rear-ended a Cadillac on the drive home, and when she walked in the apartment she felt as if she’d swallowed an icicle; she shook from the cold of it.
Once she got Cole alone in the bedroom, she didn’t know where to start. She sat on the edge of the bed, elbows on her knees. “We have to talk,” she said. “We’ve been putting it off, both of us, and I can’t stand it any longer. We’re neither one of us happy. You said it yourself, a year ago. We’re growing apart, more and more. We hardly see each other anymore, and when we do, we fight. I hate the fights and I know you do too, but they keep happening…” She stopped, breathed in, breathed out again. “I think we need to take a break.”
Cole stood against the door, arms folded, shoulders hunched up toward his ears. “A break?”
“I’m thinking about getting my own place for a while. Let things cool off, see where we are.”
Cole stared at her, his face expressionless. The silence sucked more and more words out of her. “Not tonight, not this week, I’ve got finals coming up. Maybe after you get back from this next trip, before the fall semester starts…”
“So that’s it?” Cole said. “This is the end?”
“All I’m asking for is, like, a trial separation. If it doesn’t work out, we could, we could always, we could…”
Cole’s eyes were red. “Tell the truth. It’s over for you.”
Seeing Cole so vulnerable had always undone her before. This time she had sworn she would be strong. “I think,” she said, “it’s been over for a while for both of us.”
Cole walked out and closed the door.
She didn’t go after him. She took more deep breaths and sat quietly for a while, then she got out Drawing Lessons from the Great Masters. She turned to page 165, a skinless man by Vesalius, and attempted to recite the muscle groups as she sketched them, not letting herself think, pausing only when she had to dry her eyes in order to see.
*
Cole spent two nights on Gordo’s couch, numbing himself with grass and beer so he could sleep. Gordo assured him that Madelyn would change her mind. Irene acted like whatever happened had been Cole’s fault, and Cole didn’t disagree. His own emotions rattled around like the last wooden match in a box. One minute he knew that Madelyn was right, that they were only torturing each other. The next his need for her was so desperate that he wanted to throw himself at her feet.
He went to the apartment on Thursday afternoon to shower and change and pack. He’d prepared a speech. The speech said that he loved her and he would honor her request for a separation and that he would be waiting for her if she changed her mind. He sat until time to leave for the airport and she still had not come home. By then he was on the emotional roller coaster again and didn’t trust himself to write a note.
*
Friday morning, August 15, jfk airport. A guy in a beard and mirrored sunglasses met them when they got off the redeye from San Francisco, holding a sign that said quirq. When Cole asked him if he was their limo driver, the guy laughed as if it was the funniest thing he’d heard in days. He hustled them into a golf cart and drove them to a helipad at the far end of the airport.
Once they were in the air, Cole got the joke. The main freeway headed north from New York City was a parking lot, and when they banked to the left and followed a smaller road, it was also at a standstill. Soon Cole saw cars abandoned by the side of the road and a continuous stream of human beings trudging northwest on foot.
The scene was eerily familiar, and Cole flashed on a nightmare from his childhood, refugees from a nuclear war lining the roads as they fled their irradiated cities. That thought, in turn, made him realize that everything he had assumed about the festival was wrong. Even the most wild-eyed predictions of a hundred thousand people were clearly and hopelessly low. Something that had been building since the Beatles set fire to the Ed Sullivan Show in 1964 had reached critical mass, and if it wasn’t an atom bomb, it looked to be nearly as devastating.
This, Cole thought, is bigger than Madelyn. Bigger than The Quirq, bigger than a music festival.
They veered off from the traffic route and headed north to the town of Liberty. There they landed in the parking lot of the Holiday Inn, where the promoters had booked rooms for the bands. Cole was still giddy when he stepped off onto the asphalt with his guitar and his suitcase. He looked at Lenny, who rolled his eyes and shouted, “Un-fucking-believable.”
The front desk was in chaos as the staff tried to deal with Janis Joplin, her new band, and her ever-expanding entourage. A couple of straight families with kids looked on in horror and wonder at this invasion force from Planet San Francisco, fringe and denim and scraggly hair, patchouli and cigarettes and cannabis resins, feathered boas and cowboy hats, guitars and saxophones. Meanwhile hotel employees in green smocks raced around the lobby in a frenzy. When Cole and the band finally got to the head of the line they agreed to help with the housing crisis by taking only one room with two double beds and two rollaways. The clerk gave them their backstage passes, business-card sized, featuring the guitar neck and dove logo in black and white, their names and the band name scrawled by hand.
They descended a sloping corridor to their room and helped themselves to a couple of rollaways that were lined up along the wall. They were all exhausted from the overnight flight, Cole the worst, thanks to Gordo’s couch. He volunteered to take one of the rollaways, thinking he could sleep anywhere, then regretted it five hours later when he came completely awake. The room was in near darkness and his back hurt.
He lay for a while with his mind churning, unable to get comfortable. Madelyn seemed impossibly distant—emotionally, geographically, even temporally. As she burrowed deeper into the Renaissance, Cole had just flown over the future. She’d made her choice, and, Cole realized with some finality, he had made his.
He brushed his teeth and shaved and when he came out of the bathroom, Lenny was sitting up on the other rollaway. “I’m going to look around,” Cole said. “Want to come?”
Lenny groped his way toward the bathroom. “Piss,” he said. “Then more sleep.”
Cole took his guitar to the lobby, which was full of Country Joe and the Fish and the Grateful Dead. Jerry Garcia held up his right hand to Cole, calling out, “Hail, brother of the mangled finger!” Cole flashed him a crippled peace sign and Garcia laughed. A harried older woman in a green smock directed him to the lounge, down the hall to the right of the registration desk, through the double doors under the awning.
Joplin was already in residence at one of the green banquettes across from the bar, and a couple of extra tables had been stuck on to accommodate the crowd. Marty Balin and Jack Casady sat in the next booth over with two black men that Cole didn’t recognize. “Hey Jude” wound down on the jukebox, and as soon as it finished it started again.
A small parquet dance floor. A second room with a pool table and a scattering of tables set up for meal service. All of them deserted. Unsure what to do, Cole set down his guitar and perched on one of the low-backed bar stools. A brass rail ran around the edge of the bar, supported by the trunks of brass elephant heads, a touch of bizarre elegance that Cole would not have expected a
t a Holiday Inn.
Richie Havens came in, tall, orange dashiki, jutting beard, and walked over to the Airplane table. “Michael wants us to go on first. We’re supposed to be fifth! And Eric’s not here… I can’t do it, man.” The two black guys murmured something reassuring and Havens said, “Anyway, we should probably get over there.”
The three of them left to a chorus of good wishes, and Cole turned to the bar. Drinking age in New York State, he remembered from his previous trip, was 18. He asked for a Carta Blanca, the only Mexican beer they had. The festival, it seemed, was picking up the tab for all the performers. Cole dug out some change for a tip and left it on the bar.
A shrill female voice cried out, “Who’s the cute guitar player?”
Cole looked around to see who she was talking about and found Janis looking at him. Her photos had not prepared him for the hypnotic openness of her face. She had bad skin and her eyes were small, yet they shone with a light that was more than hunger and a readiness for fun. She radiated a childlike trust that was as endearing as it was sad.
He pointed at himself and mouthed the word, “Me?”
“Yes, you, you cute little devil. Come over here and introduce yourself.”
Cole picked up his beer and somebody found an extra chair and managed to squeeze it in close to Janis. Cole said his name and a few of the others reciprocated. The only one he registered was a Chicano named Luis. When it came out that he’d moved to San Francisco from Austin, Janis leaned across an intervening person to hug him, nearly knocking over the open fifth of Jack Daniel’s in the middle of the table. She asked if he ever went to Threadgill’s, her old stomping ground. He hadn’t, but she knew East Austin well and they bonded over Blues Boy Hubbard and the Jets.
Half an hour later, as Cole was feeling a distinct buzz from two beers and a couple of shots of the whiskey, somebody let out a loud whistle. Cole turned to see a paunchy middle-aged guy in slacks who looked like an off-duty cop. “I’ve got a chopper headed over to the fair and I got space for one more.”
Impulsively Cole raised his hand. “Hey Jude” had been repeating the entire time he’d been there and he didn’t think he could stand much more.
“Got any carry on?” Cole pointed to his guitar case and the pilot said, “You’ll have to put it in your lap.”
Janis grabbed his shirt and pulled him down for a kiss on the lips and a bawdy wink. Cole grinned and waved to the others and followed the pilot out to the parking lot. Unlike the copter he’d ridden in that morning, this one had a spherical glass front, like the one in the Whirlybirds tv show from Cole’s youth. The seat next to the pilot was open. Country Joe sat in back, wearing a sergeant’s green military fatigues, his dark, shoulder-length hair held by a headband.
The combination of Joe’s uniform and the sound of the idling rotors gave Cole a jolt of Vietnam terror at the base of his spine. He thought of Tupelo Joe, who could at that very moment be in a helicopter over a burning jungle with tracer bullets arcing toward him. The last time he’d talked to Alex on the phone, Joe’s mother hadn’t had any news in weeks.
Cole strapped in and set the guitar case on end in front of him. It blocked at least part of the disorienting view through the Plexiglas floor.
“Hey, Cole,” Country Joe said, and Cole reached through the gap between the seats to shake his hand, movement style. Most of the musicians that Cole knew were searching for something. Joe seemed to have found it and tired of it and given it away a long time ago. He’d been a red-diaper baby, had spent three years in the Navy, was highly literate and political and always kept a level head, even when he was tripping, which was a good deal of the time. He had the best deadpan comic delivery of anyone Cole had ever met, and as with so many truly funny people, the humor was fed by a wellspring of bitterness.
Joe gestured vaguely at their surroundings. “It’s like being in the fucking uso, isn’t it?”
“Luckily,” Cole said, “you’re already dressed for the part.”
The helicopter lurched and lifted off and Cole watched the motel and the city fall away, replaced by a landscape of rolling hills, lakes, and trees. Straight lines and pale olive colors where the land was cultivated, a darker, textured green for the woods. Narrow roads cut the abstract canvas into interlocking pieces. These were working farms with tractors that needed to be moved around and produce that needed to get to market. Even from hundreds of feet in the air, Cole sensed something peaceful that emanated from the countryside itself.
The helicopter banked downward and Cole felt a rush of excitement. In a matter of seconds they began to see barns and fences and abandoned cars and then, all at once, throngs of people. In the distance a half-finished stage, a giant framework of raw white pine and a flapping sail of white canvas strung above it. Everywhere else it was a pointillist painting in daubs of pink and white and tan that Cole understood to be a continuous sea of human flesh.
“Incredible,” Country Joe said. “They’re saying three hundred thousand by tonight.”
The number was meaningless to Cole. What he saw was an area the size of a small town that consisted of nothing but one person sitting or standing next to another, and another, and another, in all directions. When he thought there couldn’t be any more, thousands more rolled into view, and thousands after that.
The helicopter circled the site. Pale green canvas tents clustered at the far end of the field, next to a board fence that extended from both sides of the stage. Half a dozen towers of metal scaffolding held spotlights and speakers. A row of portable toilets, not nearly enough. Behind the stage, trailers and a giant tepee. Mostly he saw kids, mostly male, mostly white, mostly teenaged.
Cole remembered the crowds at the Haight two years before. At least three times that many kids had come for the fair, all at once instead of over a period of months. His earlier vision of refugees was wrong. They were here as an affirmation, not a denial. He thought of the way Dylan’s songs, more than anyone else’s, had created an “us” and a “them,” and that he was looking at the culmination of all the songs like them. Hundreds of thousands of kids who saw themselves as part of that “us” had answered the call that they read between the lines of the festival posters. The revolution had happened, invisibly and bloodlessly, in the endlessly repeated acts of packing a knapsack or grabbing a sleeping bag and hitting the road.
“Joe?” Cole said. “I think we just won.”
“You think? That would be nice. We’ve still got a war to end and a few details like that.”
“Look at all those people,” Cole said. “They can’t ignore us now.”
*
Dave understood that whenever Bill Graham was involved, multiple layers of reality would come into play. His best guess was that Bill had gotten involved with Woodstock because of territorial issues. A lot of the big names he’d booked for the summer at the Fillmore East were also playing at the fair, and he didn’t want his New York audience to skip his shows and go to Woodstock instead. Being Bill, he then inflated this not unreasonable complaint into a towering, screaming fit of rage and drastic threats, to make sure he got everything possible out of it.
Mike Lang, the curly-haired kid who had taken charge of the festival, was smart enough to not back down or go to war. He gave Bill a few concessions and flattered him by asking for his help in picking bands and then convincing them to sign on. Bill helped, but he kept upping the price. First he wanted Santana in the lineup. When he got away with that, he asked for The Quirq. He demanded helicopter transport to the festival and back, for himself and then for Dave too.
Thus Dave, who had both Sallie Rachel and The Quirq on the schedule, had answered Bill’s summons and arrived at the festival site early on Friday afternoon as things were coming apart.
The helicopter landed in an empty field, fenced off from the overflowing crowd. The pilot pointed to a trailer and said, “Command center,” and then to a wooden ramp and said, “stage.” He smiled. “Don’t lose your backstage pass, or you’re fucked.�
�� Dave thanked him, carefully stepped down onto the grass, and watched the copter take off again. What in God’s name had he gotten himself into? And why was he wearing dress shoes?
The ramp consisted of half-sheets of plywood and a wooden railing, running up and over the road behind the stage and then down again to the stage itself. Dave didn’t see anyone checking credentials, so he climbed the ramp and crossed the bridge. And froze.
Eventually a voice behind him said, “Excuse me.” Dave apologized and got out of the way of a skinny, long-haired guy in a straw cowboy hat and mustache and no shirt who was carrying a load of lumber on his shoulders. Dave wondered how long he’d been standing there in shock, staring out across the vast, bare plywood stage at the mass of humanity that stretched from the foot of the stage to the horizon and beyond.
He heard a familiar voice and turned to see a man in a dirty white coverall and a torn and battered ten-gallon hat. The man’s eyes were little more than slits and the front teeth were missing from his wide grin. He was talking to a good-looking guy with big sideburns and brown hair to his shoulders, and it took Dave several seconds to recognize that the last place he’d seen this demented-looking cowboy was in a San Francisco coffee shop.
“Hugh?” Dave said.
“Dave!” Romney excused himself from his conversation and came over to give Dave a hug that lifted him off his feet. “What are you doing here?”
“I was going to ask you the same thing.”
“I’m head of security!” Romney laughed so hard it flirted with hysteria. “No kidding. The Police Commissioner of New York City pulled the plug on the off-duty cops they’d arranged for. So we’re going to have a Please Force instead.” He pulled a strip of yellow cloth from his pocket that featured a crude version of the dove from the concert poster in red ink. “We made these ourselves with a potato stamp. Ken Babbs had the idea. If we’re walking around and we see somebody doing a good deed, we give him ten armbands and tell him to hand ’em out. If we work it right, we’ll deputize the whole crowd before it’s over. Want one?”
